Affirmations have been around for years, since Coue's "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better!"
Unfortunately, affirmations don't work unless you change. And that's difficult. Steve Pavlina's item "Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals", describes his efforts to change his identity from a game publisher to a writer/ speaker.
When he first tried to make the change, he says:
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But what happened when I tried to make this shift initially? I started out my day as usual and got caught up in the mindset of game publishing. I worked in the same office, communicated with the same people, visited the same forums, had to deal with the same kinds of emails, and so on, and after several weeks I was still on the old track. My environment was reinforcing my old identity, my old thoughts, and my old behaviors. For a few hours here and there I'd work on the new path, but very quickly I'd get sucked back into game publishing work.
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He made incremental changes:
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Some of these may seem like drastic steps; most are minor adjustments. But the net result has been that I've been able to flow through this transition to where I now think of myself 90% as a speaker/writer and only 10% as a game publisher. My environment is now reinforcing my new role instead of my old one. The momentum is building in a new direction to the point where it would be hard for me to go back.
All of these adjustments create new thought affirmations. By removing most of the links to my old identity, I remove those triggers that would cause me to think in the old ways. And on top of that I've added new triggers to affirm my new career path. And these new thoughts affect my actions; my daily routine is now very different than it used to be. A year from now things will be even more different as the results begin to accumulate.
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Read the whole item, it's excellent. If you're currently using affirmations, and they're not working for you, create some tasks to reinforce your affirmations. Action is the key.
