Truth Bomb Tuesday: Affirmations are powerful, but only if you do them right…
Ok, provocative subject line, I know, but hear me out. I think I’ve got something here.
Men, as a generalisation, aren’t that great at affirmations.
Not all men obviously, and it’s definitely not to say that women are always on to it either, but in my experience, men struggle with affirmations more than women.
Why?
This is where it gets interesting.
Think about what affirmations are doing. I don’t know if affirmations are part of your tool kit or not. No dramas if not. There are plenty of ways to hack a back-door into your mind.
But affirmations are about as effective as it gets.
So what are we doing with affirmations?
We are training ourselves in a new story. That’s the short version.
So maybe you’ve always believed that you were destined to be poor. “I am good with money and always have more than I need” is an affirmation that can rewrite that script.
Or maybe you have never felt worthy, and have always created a financial reality that was consistent with a conception of self that had a big “REJECTED” stamped across it.
You might rewire that with an affirmation like “I am loved and everyone thinks I’m simply fabulous.”
Whatever works for you. Whatever language and imagery is going to shift the narrative for you.
Now, let me ask you this: Where do our scripts live? These stories that well tell ourselves – where are they housed?
You’re probably going to say ‘the mind’.
But I don’t think that’s right.
We experience them in the mind. When our inner-monologue is telling us that we’re a piece of crap and we don’t deserve nice things, that seems to be coming out of our mind.
But our narrative scripts live in the body. Specifically, they live in the emotional body.
I don’t have space here to prove that to you, but it’s why vivid, emotionally rich affirmations work better than cold and literal affirmations. We need to engage the emotional body if affirmations are to work.
And since our narratives live in our emotional bodies, the act of rewiring them, through affirmations or otherwise, must be an emotional act.
And this is why I say women are generally better at men than affirmations.
Women are generally better-versed in the nuances of the emotional body.
But it’s also because men just get bored!
They don’t get why they’re having to repeat things. “I live in a world of limitless abundance.” Yeah yeah, I’ve got it. Why do I need t repeat it over and over?
But you ‘get’ things with your head – with your mind. And this isn’t about training the mind. It’s about training the body.
And the body is more dense. It takes longer to shift. You can just overturn decades of programming with a single logical twist. It takes sustained effort.
And so maybe it’s misleading to say we’re rewriting our scripts. That makes it sound quick and easy. The truth is we are re-sculpting our emotional bodies. That gets closer to the truth of it.
So yeah. This isn’t (just) to rag on men. I think everyone will do well to remember that with affirmations we are working with the dense and slow emotional body, and success can only come through sustained effort.
It’s not hard. It’s one of the easiest hacks there is. But it still takes time.
Just no way around that.
DB