Utilizing Positive Affirmations in Your Everyday Life

If we focus on the thoughts we have during the day, we will be surprised to find out that 90% of them are negative. Every thought we have, any judgment we pass or any word we say is affirmation. Affirmations are directly linked to our subconsciousness. Affirmations are a 'reprogramming software' which implants any thought, either positive or negative, onto our minds in the form of a pattern when repeated many times. Our subconscious then implements these pattern into our daily lives either leading to a positive or negative change.

There are two types of affirmations: negative and positive. Negative affirmations are the ones where we think negatively and thus leading our mind to belief that these negative thoughts are true. One example of the effects of negative affirmations can be having a sense of failure before doing anything. On the other hand positive affirmation is linked to positive thinking such as having a feeling 'I am sure I can do this project'.

Adopt a positive affirmation for a happier and healthier life. The first step is to get rid of negative thoughts, inner-belief and behaviors which lead to unhappiness or depression such as 'I am so fat' or 'I cannot do this piece of work'. These thoughts hold you back from having an ideal life. Your mind is led to believe that these negative thoughts are true. Thus, adopting a positive attitude and giving positive affirmations to yourself is nothing but helpful, and can help you in many more ways than you may, at first, imagine.

The second step to adopting positive affirmations is to stay in present and let go of the past. Don't think of what you lost yesterday but what you can gain today. It is also important to think not to think of the future. For example, instead of thinking to yourself and saying 'I will be happy' try saying 'I am so happy now'. The positive affirmation should always start with 'I' so that your mind can feel that these thoughts are only about you.

The final step to utilizing positive affirmations is to remember that positive affirmations should be repeated over a period of time so that our mind completely accept the thought and start acting accordingly. One factor in this step is patience. We need patience in order to bring about a change in our lives. It might take a month or more depending on our will power for positive affirmation to become effective.

Positive affirmations can be used to change any part of our lives. From our mood to our business, positive affirmation is effective anywhere. One example of positive affirmation can be getting over our anger. Try to think positively first thing in the morning or whenever you feel angry such as 'I am happy today' or 'I have a peace mind right now'. Positive affirmations can be used for getting rid of anger, boosting self-esteem or can even help in weight loss. Some examples of positive affirmation are:

"Every day I am getting stronger and stronger."

"I love my job"

"I am ready and willing to release the past, now"

"My life is a joy filled with love"

You can choose to consciously think these positive affirmations, or you can take it upon yourself to repeat the positive affirmations to yourself out loud. Saying a positive affirmation with feeling leads our mind to a whole new dimension. Any thought with an emotion attached to it is more effective. Visualizing also helps achieving a better result. But remember basis of any type of affirmation is having positive affirmation. So keep a positive attitude to gain a better life.

Using Positive Affirmations as an Aid to Self Improvement

One of the terms you may have come across in your reading or listening about positive thinking is "positive affirmations"; but what is a positive affirmation?

An affirmation, according to a dictionary definition, is a statement asserting the existence or the truth of something. In self improvement, affirmations can be used in silent, verbal, or written communication with yourself. This is normally done in the form of a positive affirmation, a communication to your subconscious that a certain truth already exists; a truth that relates to you personally, and whose realization is beneficial to your personal well being.

You could say that the use of positive affirmations is a form of autosuggestion, or even self hypnosis. However, if you want to make practical use of affirmations in improving any aspect of your life, then none of that really matters. The fact is that using positive affirmations is simple to do, and the technique can be applied in different ways and at different times to suit your life style. While it helps to have some understanding of the mental processes that might take place, and of expert interpretations of what affirmations actually are in the spectrum of self development, it is not essential.

What Aspects of Self Improvement Can Positive Affirmations Be Applied To?

The answer to the question raised in the heading could be answered in one word: "any". Positive affirmations can be applied to any aspect of your personal life you wish to improve, so if you are considering self improvement in any form, whether to career success, business success, improved health, or the removal of bad habits, then positive affirmations should be considered part of your armoury.

When Should You Use Positive Affirmations?

With positive affirmations, you are making positive statements to your subconscious, with the expectation that your subconscious mind will absorb those affirmations and treat them as reality. Repeated often and firmly enough, those statements should become the reality of your conscious mind and the physical work around you.

As with any form of communicating with your inner self, such as with meditation, the ideal time to make use of positive affirmations is when you can set aside a period and a place where you can get peace and quiet, sufficient to relax totally without interruption. Those who are already experienced in meditation will find it easy to achieve the ideal conditions for using positive affirmations. In fact, integrating your affirmations into your meditation sessions is a practical option worth considering, especially if you are pressed for time.

However, as with meditation, the ideal is not always easy to fit into your busy life, so you may need to compromise. Here are some suggestions on how to build in positive affirmations into your:

1. I find positive affirmations effective at night time, just before sleep. Once you have mastered the skill of not falling asleep too quickly, when you have gone to bed for the night is a good time to fit in some positive affirmations. As you relax and unwind, start mentally going through the positive affirmations you want to feed to your subconscious mind.

If you sleep alone, or have an understanding partner, then you can say the affirmations out loud also. If not, instead of just thinking of each affirmation as you say it, hear yourself saying it so you get the benefit of the sound without having to make any noise to disturb your partner.

You can repeat your affirmations any time you want. It is a mental process, so as long as you are conscious, it can be done. Any spare minute alone can be utilized for positive affirmations, or you can even repeat them mentally when you are in the company of others, such as on the bus or train to work. What is important is that you repeat the affirmations regularly.

Other Tips For Self Improvement Through Positive Affirmations

You can increase the likelihood of positive affirmations working for you by adopting some or all of the following tips:

1. At the same time as you are repeating your affirmations, incorporate visualisation to accompany each affirmation. For example, if your affirmation is "I am a successful manager with my current employer", then visualize yourself actually performing that role in your work environment.

2. Write down your affirmations, and leave them in places where they act as a reminder, such as pinning them up by the mirror in the bathroom, or on a Post-It on your work desk.

3. Repeat your positive affirmations daily.

4. Make the affirmations as detailed as possible, so that your subconscious is left in no doubt what you mean. For your example, if your affirmation is "I am living in a new house" it is very vague. A new house could be in an undesirable neighbourhood in a part of the country, or world, you would no want to live. Be more precise, and add details of the type of house, key features, and location.

5. Make use of the present tense, as the example I give in 4. above. "I am" is far more convincing that "I will be", "I will" or "I might".

Those are just five additional suggestions to help you get the most out of using positive affirmations as a route to self improvement. There are many more tips that may help you, but in time and with practice, you will find what suits you best, and come up with your own "tips".

Changing Negatives to Positives

Occasionally people will ask me how I keep a positive attitude, or remain optimistic. I used to find it funny that I would get asked such things. It was as though they assumed that somehow I'd figured a way to avoid allowing any negatives into my life at all. I can assure you I have not :-)

After all, I am only human and the reality is that no matter how positive one strives to be, negative feelings can still make their way into our life.

With that said, there are things I believe we can do to minimize the effects that our negative experiences have on us and our over all outlook on things. Just as there are things to help combat tendencies of procrastination, so I believe there are steps we can take to increase our level of positivity. I'd like to share some of the ideas that work for me.

However, before I continue I'd like to say that I believe that personal development is a hands on project. What I mean is that what might work for you, might not be as effective for me and vice versa. I also mean that you can read idea after idea, but until you get into a frame where you make the ideas your own, you're going to have just that... someone else's ideas and techniques.

Simply put, you're encouraged to adjust the ideas I share to fit your own needs, and should you find them silly or something that doesn't work, simply discard them. You're the most important ingredient in your own self-improvement.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way here are the ideas I promised you.

First, lets look at negative and positive experiences. An interesting thing is that you could take several different people, put them in the same situation and one may view it as negative and the other as positive, and yet another may see it somewhere in the middle. Basically, experiences are just that -- experiences. It's the way we frame them that makes them either positive or negative.

It's also worth noting that negative events tend to be more dense then positive ones. Which I believe explains why you can start your day out and have it going along perfectly, then one negative event happens and before you know it it's as though your entire day spiraled out of control into the dreaded "bad day".

In fact, in many cases if we could recount the particular days events objectively and without bias we'd likely see that an equal, or at least a fair number of things occurred that were of a positive nature as well. Because negatives are more dense, or heavier in weight if you will, we notice them more, say then positive occurrences.

So now that brings us to what I do to combat the normal day to day feelings of failure, discouragement, or negativity. Let me first say that if you're expecting some miracle idea here you may be disappointed. What you will find are some ideas that I know work in my own life and that I believe with enough practice will work in yours as well.

* Increase the amount of positive content you take in during the day - Very simply, make it a point to read or listen to books or tapes or what have you that carry a positive tone to them. This might sound trite, but they can do wonders to off set the negatives that bombard us all on a daily basis.

* Schedule or make an effort to expose yourself to positive people - Being around others that have a positive attitude, or achieve at a level of success you wish to is contagious. If you don't believe me, take the simple example of smiling. It's almost impossible not to smile back at a person that shares with you a genuine smile. Even if you're able to forgo smiling back, it still effects us on a positive level in some way.

The same is true by being around people that are overly optimistic and positive. Over time you're going to be likely to take on those traits yourself. There is one factor where this might not be the case though. If you enter into the conversation with such a person and you're not willing to, or looking to adopt such an attitude then you're likely going to give fuel to your negative feelings. Remember, negativity is dense.

When Is Positive Thinking Actually Negative?

And what are the steps you can take to practice healthy, balanced, positive thinking?

If you're a positive thinker, what does that mean, exactly? Does being positive suggest that you will only entertain positive thoughts? How could you possibly do that? Some people try, unsuccessfully, to do so. The reason for their difficulty in maintaining a so-called positive outlook is obvious.

Each day, an endless number of problems occur, and those problems demand solutions. But to find solutions, you have to consider the problems, and that seems to bring up a conflict in people whose goal is to be entirely positive. After all, you can't be aware of the need for a solution unless you're also aware of the problem. So unless you are avoiding all problems of any kind, you'll realistically have to think about problems quite often.

If it's common sense that to find a solution you have to look at the problem, then where did the idea come from that you should only notice the positive? It may come from a uniquely American idealistic tendency. It's worth exploring how this attitude -- that anything is possible if you're positive enough -- became both an asset and a liability that affects would-be positive thinkers everywhere.

This can-do spirit, when utilized appropriately, is associated with the confidence that lets you move forward, in spite of all apparent limitations. This can be a wonderful asset, at least when it gives you the strength to move forward amidst apparently challenging circumstances. Such positive attitudes have helped creative thinkers attempt bold projects that had never been attempted before, and have yielded great inventions, new styles of art, new businesses, and innovations of all kinds.

It's a shame that this bright side of positive thinking has become so tempting to so many people -- they fail to see the limitations that often surface when you're exclusively seeing only the good aspects of everything.

It's sobering to consider the shadow side of the can-do spirit. Consider the case of a company like Enron that refused to consider problems that their whistle-blowers were warning about. This can-do spirit, when combined with self-delusion, put the company in serious trouble, because they were so full of their own positive hot air that they considered themselves as beyond the need to listen to the warnings. Instead, they tried to escape into their own positive cloud of arrogant illusory assumptions about reality.

How a cheerful pop song encourages you to be in denial

The willingness to deny problems is strongly expressed in the popular Johnny Mercer lyrics of the Harold Arlen song, Accentuate The Positive. It was written after Johnny Mercer attended a sermon by Father Divine, who focused on the idea of eliminating the negative in your thinking, and focusing on the positive instead. In the context of a sermon, such ideas can be helpful and inspiring.

You go to a sermon to be lifted up, inspired, and given hope to face the upcoming week. And to those who were mired in the dark cloud of their own negativity, that message was probably perfect for helping to blow those heavy clouds away. Sermons have a useful purpose, and they also have their limitations when their emotionally charged enthusiasm is substituted for clear thinking.

Suppose that you do become entirely positive? Once you become inspired enough to get out of your own dark cloud, what happens when you shift to only letting yourself think happy and hopeful thoughts? There is a serious limitation with trying to cover over problems with exclusively positive thoughts. The happy talk makes you feel better for a moment, but it won't fix your problems -- they're still there. Unless you start looking at the situation and examining possible solutions, nothing will change.

When you look at the lyrics of the Accentuate The Positive song, the urge towards Denial is made plain, because you are urged to eliminate the negative. Now that seems, at first, to be a suggestion to avoid hopelessness. And ideally, maybe that is what the song is supposed to mean. If the song were suggesting that you can learn to be positive enough to consider creative solutions to your problems, this would be helpful.

Unfortunately, you can take the lyrics another way -- as a suggestion to avoid mentioning or thinking about problems. Many people take the meaning in just this way. Notice that immediately after the suggestion that you accentuate the positive, you are advised to eliminate the negative. Well, how will you interpret that suggestion? Ideally, you would eliminate the tendency to give up -- you would rise above hopeless attitudes. Properly understood, you would change your negative habit of thinking, and start looking for reasonable solutions to your situation.

However, many people take this line of the song, about eliminating the negative, as a suggestion to not bother thinking about issues, or dealing with problems at all. Such people tend to say that they are trying to stay positive. That often means that they don't want to look at problems at all -- also known as avoidance and denial. Such unwillingness to actively find solutions through honest assessment, while putting a gloss of positive spin on everything, actually leads to a downward spiral of disempowerment.

What Is Positive Awareness and Why Do You Need to Have It?

When most folks hear the term positive awareness, they'll call it positive thinking or they'll think of some specific topic to raise more awareness for, such as AIDS or diabetes or even subjects like the environment. Positive Awareness is becoming a new stand-alone term which suggests that we are aware of the effects that our positive energy has on our own world, as well as on all of life.

Most people create positive energy sporadically rather than continuously, so its effects are very short-term. The energy that's created can be very strong at its introduction, but as soon as it goes out into the world, it may dissipate or be diluted by all of the negative energy that exists in that space.

If you were to create a constant stream of positive energy, not only in every moment of your day, but even when you dream, you would eventually become a very positive force in your space. Your space would also expand as the energy within it expands, making your world grow larger with it. In time, your field of positive energy will become so huge that it won't allow any negative energy to enter.

Negative energy is created in different forms by negative people and also perpetuated by them. Examples of this are the things you think, the things you say, what you believe in or put your faith or trust in, and your emotional state. As this negative energy grows in a person's space, it attracts more of the same energy to it. No amount of positive affirmations will destroy that negative energy, because the positive energy that's created is immediately eliminated by the negative energy that already exists in you.

Most people are constantly going from one end of the energy scale to the other, creating a random mix of positive and negative energies that cancel each other out, leaving only a small dividend behind, either positive or negative, but certainly not enough of either one to make much difference.

The most potent positive energy that you can create is by having only positive thoughts, by speaking in only positive terms, by putting your trust in only the things that serve you well and by maintaining a happy emotional state. While that's great in theory, let's be honest. How many people can say that they think only positive thoughts, speak only in positive terms, put their faith in only positive things and maintain a happy emotional state 99.9% of the time? Probably not very many, but the great thing about the technique I use is that it allows room for mistakes and gives you the opportunity to fix them.

So, in other words, if you have a negative thought or make a negative statement, you have the opportunity to change it by rethinking it and restating it in a positive way, using only positive words. Any and all words which are negative on their own should be avoided. This ensures that all negativity is eliminated and you only create positive energy. Putting your faith, trust and beliefs into only positive things may be more of a challenge for you and maintaining a happy emotional state may also. But as long as you are consciously changing as much negativity to positive as you can, you will make a positive difference in your energy field.

Now that you know how to make it happen, why should it matter anyway? If you are sharp, you already found the answer to that question. When you are negative, then you attract negativity. It's really that simple. Like-energies attract each other and unlike energies cancel out.

Everything is made of energy, vibrating at different rates and those different rates determine positive or negative, especially with thoughts. Your thoughts are where your creative process begins to develop. A tree vibrates a great deal more slowly than our thoughts do, but that doesn't mean that the tree is negative. Everything is relative to something else. It would be much the same as comparing apples to baseballs. While they are both a sphere, that's about the only thing they have in common, other than that they are also both made of energy.

When it comes to getting the things you want from life, having only positive energy means you get only positive things coming to you. It means that negative things in life are no longer attracted to you. It also means that this process of eliminating negativity is eventually going to cause your brain to rewire itself because of the reprogramming you will have taken it through. You will be amazed at what happens if you perceive a negative outcome to a coming situation. Your brain now knows that negativity is to be avoided, so IT changes the situation to something positive for you. This is what has been happening for me and it makes me smile every time.

There is one more part to this that I would like to suggest to you. Weather systems are either positive or negative energy, for example, high pressure or low pressure. A bright sunny day with low humidity is high pressure or positive energy. A line of severe thunderstorms with tornadoes is a very strong negative energy field. Your own negativity can attract these storms right to your front door OR your own positivity can dissolve them or make them go elsewhere. I have experienced this again and again and continue to find it to be true.

Of course there are lots of little tips that can be of tremendous help while you are on this path to get you seeing real results. And the process isn't going to happen overnight, because every negative thought and every negative statement that you have had or said has become a habit with you and your brain is wired that way. The only way that you are going to change it is by constantly creating only positive energy. And as that positive energy grows larger and larger, it will rewire your brain to create only positive energy for you automatically by changing any perceived negative outcome to something positive.