Why Your Affirmations Don’t Work and What To Do Instead

Everything that you see surrounding you right now is a direct result of everything you have ever thought. Thoughts create our reality.

“I am thinking the positive thoughts. I’m repeating them every day. I’m saying things like, my life is amazing. I have lots of money and my body is perfect and nothing’s changing. – Why?”

“Nothing’s working. Why don’t they work?”

Sound familiar? When we send out a thought, we actually send out two thoughts. There’s the thought that we are telling ourselves we think and then there is the resistance to the thought. So if I’m coming from a place of having somebody shame, whether it’s either I’m overweight, I’m out of shape, or maybe there is an illness that I’m dealing with and I’m really struggling to love my body. I’m not friends with my body right now. I’m coming from a place of “I hate my body” and I want to move to a place of “My body is amazing and perfect.”

You can’t jump from hate to love in one thought and just repeat it over and over again. That’s not going to work. And the reason it doesn’t work is you’re jumping too far up the ladder.

Think of thoughts as a ladder that you go up. So when I’m at the bottom of the ladder with this very negative thought of my body is awful, I hate it. I can’t stand to look in the mirror. So what I want you to do instead of jump to the most positive thought that you want to end up at, pick something on the ladder in between. So what’s the next most positive thought that you could think about your body?

I’m using body consciousness in this example because that’s something that resonates with a lot of people. You could use this in anything, finances, your relationships, anything. Identify your negative thought that you keep circling in your head. What is that negative thought? Then identify your most positive thought where we want to move to because that’s your destination over time.

But we have to pick something on the ladder that resonates for us so that we’re not sending that resistance with the thought.

If I have body shame, I hate my body, and then I say “I love my body.” Well, what goes with that thought is my negativity level that I feel to it because I don’t believe that. So when you don’t believe what you’re saying, if you don’t feel what you’re saying, it doesn’t work. Your positive thought is canceled out by your resistance to it. So I want you to think about the belief in the thought as well as the affirmation. So you might go from, “I hate my body”, just one rung up on the ladder would be something like, “I have a body.”

That’s something I don’t have resistance to. I clearly have a body that I move around the earth in, and instead of saying I hate it, I can just say I have one. I just dropped the negative hate connotation. And then from there maybe I come up with something like “I have a body that I care about.” Try that on for a few days. And then once that resonates with you, then you can go up a little farther. Maybe you have a new affirmation that says something like, “I care about how I treat my body” or “I am strong and healthy in my body”, or “I enjoy treating my body with love.” So that’s something there. You’re setting your intention for your day. Because if I enjoy treating my body with love, then I’m going to make good, healthy choices throughout my day.

And that’s moving me out of that negative space of I hate my body and I don’t know how to fix it, to I care about my body and today I’m making choices to show that love to my body. So just reframe some of your affirmations instead of trying to jump too far up the ladder and you create that disingenuous feeling in your heart that just cancels it out. You have to pick something that resonates for you as true, but as maybe a little bit of a more positive spin than what you are currently trying on every day.

And remember that our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our actions. Think about any action that you want to change. For example, I want to go to the gym more often. I haven’t been working out, I want to go to the gym every single day. One way that people approach that is just sheer willpower. I’m going to hate every minute of it, but I’m going to get myself there. That’s not going to last that long because we only have so much willpower. It’s like a fuel tank and it eventually depletes and you have to use your willpower for other things too, like how you show up at your job and how you communicate with other people that you have relationships with. So willpower doesn’t work.

If you want to really change your actions for the longterm, you have to back the truck all the way up.

And how do we change actions?

We change our feeling about the action.

So instead of hating going to the gym and willpower through it, what if I could change how I feel about going to the gym? And the way to change how you feel about it is to change the thoughts that you hold in your head. So we try on different thoughts. I start from a place of “I hate going to the gym”, I’m just going to work my way up that ladder just a little bit and say “I see my friends at the gym.” Choose something not too negative, but yet not so positive that it doesn’t resonate as true. When you go too positive into the space you don’t believe it, then you’re canceling out your positive thought with your resistance to it.

Remember, all your thoughts become things. If you just look around the room that you’re sitting in right now, there is nothing that you are touching or sitting on or using that exists right now in physical form. That was not first a thought. Nothing. Not your phone, not your chair. Now your computer, not your shirt. Nothing that is physical in your existence right now, did not first start as just a thought. So it is all started with our thoughts. That creates our life, creates our reality.

I would encourage you to work on your thoughts, create a life you love because when you create a life that you love, that light shines and then it encourages other people around you to do the same. And then that’s how we all get better.  I hope you take some time today to just BE Where You Are. You have to have some quiet time, some reflection time to hear that inner voice, that higher power that is coaching you and teaching you. It’s not going to yell, it’s not going to scream at you. That’s why you have to get quiet.  Take some time for yourself today for that and then just find one thing today that you feel positive about. It could be the smallest thing, but find one thing you feel good about today.

If you enjoyed this, just let me know below in the comments.

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