Self Help – Do Self Affirmations Actually Work?

Do positive self affirmations actually work? The short answer is ‘No’ – unless you have a few years to spare and a serious supply of perseverance. The problem is that self-affirmations are address at your conscious mind and, unfortunately, your conscious mind has absolutely nothing to do with how you behave, how you react to others and situations, how you view life in general or, most importantly, the way in which you view yourself. However, as I said, if you throw enough muck at your conscious mind, sooner or later – in fact, definitely later – some of that mud will eventually stick and make some kind of positive impression on your subconscious mind. However, you’d have to stick with it religiously and, even then, you’d be faced with an uphill battle because your subconscious mind simply won’t believe what it’s being told if its view of reality is the opposite. How come? Your subconscious mind controls your beliefs, behaviours and reactions and actually creates your own personal version of reality. Self-affirmation is like trying to having a snowball fight in hell’s fiery furnace!!

That said, if you’re really determined to change your life, some area of your life, or change yourself, your own self confidence or some unsavoury behaviour or bad habit, it’s your subconscious mind that you will have to impress. It holds all the keys, has its hand on all the levers and its feet on all the pedals that either get your life moving forward or, more often than not, grind to a complete and shuddering full stop.

In order to impress your subconscious mind, you’re going to have to become like a little child again – not childish but childlike. When you were a child you paid full attention to the reality of the here and now, using each of your five senses – that is how you learned your current set of beliefs about the world and who you believe yourself to be. Consequently, you now pay little or no attention to reality today – your subconscious mind pretty much makes your reality up for you as it goes along! – with all the usual consequences. You need to come back to your senses, to relearn how to pay more attention to what’s actually happening around you, instead of paying attention to the subconscious baggage that’s weighing you down.

The normal subconscious is living in the past. And the key to your future is to be found in the present. After all, the present moment is the only place and time where life is actually lived. As such, you’ve got to re-learn how to pay attention to what is actually going on, not what your subconscious mind, peering out through its dirty lens of past events, thinks is going on. This re-learning process means training yourself how to pay attention to what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste. This training has to be practiced in peace and quiet so that, when the wheels starting coming off in the so-called real world, you’re equipped and ready to perform in a way that will lead you onwards and upwards to the life that heart desires.