Realize Your Success Using Daily Affirmations and Visualizations

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” ~ Albert Einstein

We Are Who We Think We Are

Negative messages are all around us and within us. We are raised in such a way, right from infancy, that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of behaving, of dressing, and of thinking. Sure, there are laws that help to control our behaviours and we need those laws, but, I am talking about how social acceptance, pop culture, corporate culture, heck, the school yard - shapes us. Other peoples’ judgements become the judgements we make of ourselves and we carry this with us. As a result, we are constantly self-assessing, “Do I measure up?”, or we are seeking external acceptance to value our worth. Most of this we do unknowingly. Sadly, some of us are no longer trying to fit-the-mold, because, we’ve decided that we don’t make the cut and never will - we’ve given up trying. We’re all at different places with this. We are a product of our experiences. These experiences have shaped our beliefs.

When I was 4 years old, there was a boy I liked in my kindergarten class who brushed me off somehow on the way out for recess to the schoolyard. I plopped down in the classroom on one of those tiny 4-year-old-sized chairs in the classroom and sulked. Now, I recall being really hurt by the circumstances with the boy but the details are fuzzy, did he leave me for someone else? My gaze was to the floor and I remember these shoes showing up in front of me in the empty space that was the floor. I looked all the way up and gazing down at me was my teacher. With her arms crossed, and a stern face she looked down at me and hissed, “You’re a suck!”. Not sure what I did after that, what was said after that, I have no memory of anything else. All I remember are those words coming from her, into me, and they stung. Now, I don’t have a lot of vivid memories from my youth, just a handful and this is one of them. I think I’ve heard these described as ‘defining moments’. This is how it happens to all of us. We experience something from someone else and it starts to define us. Often, we’re so young, we can’t correct for the other person’s part in it all. We take it all on like a tattoo. What I took on was likely some form of, it’s not safe for me to share my feelings and I am not deserving of love and compassion.

When we go about our lives carrying around all of this judgement that we picked up from other people, we work against ourselves. With every effort we make trying to function at our highest capacity, there is counter-effort in how we contaminate, confuse and distort our reality, making progress difficult, sometimes impossible. We become confused, we second-guess ourselves and making major life-decisions becomes down-right daunting. Why? Because we essentially pollute and muddy our perception of ourselves and the things that we experience with our thoughts. It really is such a shame isn’t it, when you think about it? We’ve all known, or worse dated, someone who sabotages the relationship with - whatever - jealousy, infidelity or just an unwillingness to commit, because of their ‘issues’. Usually the actions and outcomes are totally unrelated to you and entirely related to the other’s issues, right? Then, if we’re not iron-clad and bullet-proof in our self-awareness, the whole thing just goes and muddies up our heads and then we either pass it on to the next person we date or have to work extra hard not to, and navigate those waters. I remember once dating a real head-case who repeatedly tried to make me feel like I was the one with the problem. Isn’t that called gas-lighting? I mean, the scenarios are endless and this is what we call the human condition.

When we think we are at risk of being a certain way, let’s say ‘boring’, then we place our attention there and it acts like a filter. With this filter we can mistakenly perceive an experience as either in favour of us being boring or against it. So, when your three besties plan a night out without you, you better believe you’re going to be convinced they didn’t

want you there because you’re boring, not because you already told them you don’t like Karaoke and you won’t Karaoke. This is because you have convinced yourself, based on your beliefs, that you are boring. Our brains don’t know the difference between a real or an imagined event.

The Law of Replacement

There is something known as the Law of Replacement. It is a psychological term that essentially states that if we want to remove something from our lives, or our thoughts, we need to replace it with something else, otherwise the vacancy acts as a vacuum. So, if someone who is down on themselves about being ‘boring’, and thinking about this all the time, suddenly decides they will no longer think that thought, they’re very likely going to find it creeps it’s way back in unless they have learned to replace that thought with something else. This is why there was such a trend of self-helpery around ‘positive thinking’. If we can replace our negative thoughts with thoughts about what we want to be, feel, and do, we make space for new beliefs, and therefore, new perceptions to take root. This is where intention comes in, coupled with awareness. If we can become aware of how we are self-sabotaging, then we can choose to swap-out a limiting-belief using sheer will, determination (#intention) and the Law of Replacement. Let us now look at how we can learn to replace these negative thoughts so we can take control of our ship and start steering already!

Your Brain is Goal-Seeking

Our human brains are teleological - meaning, they are goal-seeking. This means, your brain wants to solve your problems and accomplish your goals. Awesome, right?! Perfect! I know! But it needs specifics. It can only look for ways to help you if it knows exactly what you want to do (or have), but, just thinking about it, just wanting something is not enough. Recall from my last blog (Use Intention-Setting to Ignite Your Reticular Activating System and Get What You Want), your Reticular Activating System (RAS)?? Your RAS needs detailed pictures, and often, to start working towards your goals for you. Your creative subconscious (created by your RAS) doesn’t respond to words, it responds to pictures (this includes real experiences), even better with sound and emotions. When you give your brain specific, vivid and compelling pictures, it will seek out and capture all the information necessary to bring that picture into reality for you. We can do this by implementing what I like to call DAVS - Daily Affirmation and Visualization Stimulus. There, I said it, Affirmations and Visualizations! Now….stop your eye-rolling and stop that squirming in your seat. You stop that! Somewhere along the way affirmations and visualizations (OK mostly it was affirmations) got a bad rap - and I get it - I do. I was there once too, major eye-rolling fest, until it was properly taught and explained to me by my mentor, Jack Canfield, during my training to be one of his Success Principles Trainers.

SIDE NOTE: Those who know me well, know that I’ve had a 20-year career in Laboratory Medicine as a Pathologist’s Assistant and a Medical Laboratory Technologist, and while I consider myself spiritual and forever trying to get in touch with the magical and the metaphysical in life, I am very much left-brain about things too - I have a science mind. So you can always count on me to look into this stuff I talk about and do my best to explain to you ‘WHY’ it works. You can also count on me to NEVER recommend anything that I haven’t already tried and that has worked for me and for others that I have worked with. Promise!

People feel like they are lying to themselves when they do affirmations and practice visualization because essentially the approach is to tell yourself you already have what you want….and this feels (a) ridiculous and (b) like a scam. I hear you. Here’s the thing - you are lying to yourself...kinda. Let me explain...

The Two Most Under-Utilized Tools for Success

Recall how I mentioned your brain is a 'teleological mechanism' aka "goal-seeking"? If you set a goal and you visualize it clearly, your brain (like an inner GPS) will do everything it can to figure out how to bring that into manifestation and reality - this is your RAS hard at work. But as I said before, it needs specifics and pictures to do this. Emotions and sound make the experience really come alive. Jack Canfield, the worlds #1 Success Coach, tells us that visualizations and affirmations are the two most under utilized tools for success and he teaches, “When you visualize your goals as already complete each and every day, it creates a conflict known as structural tension in your subconscious mind between what you are visualizing and what you currently have. Your subconscious mind works to resolve that conflict by turning your current reality into the new, more exciting vision.

This conflict, when intensified over time through constant visualization, actually causes three things to happen:

1. It programs your brain’s RAS to start letting into your awareness anything that will help you achieve your goals.

2. It activates your subconscious mind to create solutions for getting the goals you want. You’ll start waking up in the morning with new ideas. You’ll find yourself having ideas in the shower, while you are taking long walks, and while you are driving to work.

3. It creates new levels of motivation. You’ll start to notice you are unexpectedly doing things that take you to your goal. All of a sudden, you are raising your hand in class, volunteering to take on new assignments at work, speaking out at staff meetings, asking more directly for what you want, saving money for the things that you want, paying down a credit card debt, or taking more risks in your personal life.”1

Visualization

During a visualization exercise, if I asked you to place yourself at the very top out-door deck of a skyscraper and to walk the path before you to the edge of the building…....then ask you to look all the way down to the ground when you get to the edge of the building and feel the cool wind lift your hair….If I suddenly tell you there is no barrier or railing separating you from the 80-floor drop, you’re going to experience something visceral. This is because your mind can’t tell the difference between a real or a perceived event. Your brain uses exactly the same pathways to perform a task visually as it does to actually do it. In fact, what's even more astounding - I love this - is that researchers at Harvard University found that “students who visualized in advance performed tasks with nearly 100% accuracy, whereas students who didn’t visualize achieved only 55% accuracy.”2 Visualization simply makes you more successful!!! This is why, for the past several decades, peak performance coaches and sports psychologists have had their clients/athletes using visualization to train and prepare to compete.

Much like downing a Red-Bull, or for more health conscious people, like downing a greens smoothie, visualizations of the desired outcome provide a major boost to affirmations. These two really need to go hand-in-hand; they need to be linked together.

There are two important tips for correctly practicing visualizations. First, you need to create them like a dream not like a movie. In a dream, you are there but you experience the dream as the observer - things are happening to you - you experience the outcome - first person. In a movie, you see yourself and are removed as you witness yourself experiencing the outcome - 3rd party. As an example, the correct way to visualize yourself speaking up at meetings is to start with feeling your body as calm, then see your colleagues sitting around the boardroom table, see their eyes looking at you, see their heads nodding, and hear yourself speaking calmly and concisely. Second, feel how you would feel in that moment. Feeling the feelings helps to really internalize and embody the goal you are targeting and align yourself with it. These feelings intensify the response of the RAS and get it working harder for you. To continue with the example above, feel the confidence in you as you speak in the meeting. Notice your heart rate is even and controlled. You feel heard in your workplace and this brings you satisfaction and feelings of belonging. You are proud and you feel valued.

Affirmations

If you want to try using affirmations, you need to know that your affirmations should be structured in a very specific way to make them effective. But first, let’s define what an affirmation really is: Affirmations are positive statements, made in the present tense, that declare your desired goal as already achieved. Affirmations, beyond being in the present-tense and being positive (meaning don’t say things like,”I am no longer smoking cigarettes” since this is a negative context. Say instead, “I only breathe fresh and clean air into my lungs) they also need to include a feeling word ending in ‘ly’, and an action word ending in ‘ing’.

For example, here is an affirmation for quitting smoking:

“I am peacefully and comfortably breathing fresh and clean air into my lungs each and

every day.”

An example for speaking up more at work could be:

“I am comfortably and concisely sharing my thoughts and opinions during meetings at

work.”

Affirmations that include deadlines are very powerful. So, when you can, include a deadline in your affirmation. Your RAS loves these and it’s a great way to create some urgency and motivation for yourself. Here’s one example:

“I am proudly unveiling my new book, ‘Focus Fox’, at my book launch party on

Feb 18th, 2022, at 6 pm.” (But you keep the visualization in the present tense

- you visualize yourself hosting the event and unveiling the book).

Intention and Daily Practice

When you choose to use the daily practice of affirmations and visualizations, remember, you create structural tension in your mind as your RAS tries to close the gap between where

you are and where you want to go. Done twice daily, in the morning and before bed, and until the desired outcome is reached, this practice can single-handedly keep you pointed in the direction you need to go, keep you open to receive intuitive hits and environmental queues and literally lead you along your path towards success. By committing to this practice with intention, not only will you have replaced a negative mindset with an empowered and positive one, you'll have also begun to walk the path that leads to your success. Even without knowing the ‘How’, you’ll find your way....Just watch the magic happen.

1Canfield Train the Trainer Curriculum - Trainer’s Handbook. Used with permission.

2The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. HarperCollins. New York (2005).

Share this with someone in your life that you want to see succeed.