By Royane Real

Do you use affirmations?  Perhaps I should ask instead, “Do you use positive affirmations?”

The reason I ask the question this way is because I believe that everybody already uses affirmations.  Some people do it consciously, and some do it unconsciously.  Some people use mostly positive affirmations and other people use mostly negative affirmations when they are thinking to themselves.

Positive affirmations are designed to encourage us, but negative affirmations will have the opposite effect.  Negative affirmations keep us hopeless and depressed.  Negative affirmations tell us we are worthless and that we will never get anywhere.

What is the voice like that is running through your head?  Are the messages you give yourself mostly positive or mostly negative?

A lot of people don’t believe in using positive affirmations.  They are convinced that affirmations never work and that affirmations are a waste of time.

I’m a strong believer in affirmations for the following reason.  If you don’t fill your mind up with positive affirmations, you are probably going to let your mind fill up with negative affirmations.  Unless you already have a very strong sense of self esteem, you’re likely to be churning out negative affirmations in your mind.

These negative affirmations will be there to constantly undermine your confidence in your abilities, and undermine your belief that you can move in a new direction.  Most of us have a steady stream of negative criticism and fear that fills our mind constantly.

Positive affirmations can be one of the tools that can help us move out of a state of negativity and fear.

One of the reasons we should use affirmations consciously is because if we don’t, we are probably letting negative affirmations run our lives unconsciously.  When we don’t choose the specific affirmations we want to use, we may start to simply repeat the affirmations that are always there in our minds anyway.

Chances are that the negative affirmations that are our default settings are not very good for us.  We may hear a constant inner voice giving us running criticism about everything we do.  For example, when you decide you want to try some new behaviour, your inner voice may be affirming, “You’re no good at this.  Why are you even trying?  You never do anything right.  Everybody’s going to laugh at you.  This is embarrassing.”

There is an art to using positive affirmations, and the reason that some people claim that affirmations don’t work is probably because everyone is different.

An affirmation that works well for one particular person may not work at all for someone else.

A person who has very low self esteem will probably have a hard time believing any positive affirmations because they have already said negative things to themselves hundreds of times a day for many years.  Trying to say positive affirmations a few times a day will not be enough to overcome the negative thinking habits of a lifetime.

There are many ways to word affirmations to make them more likely to work for you.  Before you start to use positive affirmations, you may have to spend some time noticing exactly what sorts of negative things you are saying to yourself, and then you may have to challenge how valid all those negative opinions are.

You may need to experiment for quite a while to find a way of using affirmations that gets you results.  You may also need to keep using positive affirmations a very long time, and you may even need to include other therapeutic techniques to help you change to a new direction.

Positive affirmations have their place as a very effective tool to change our lives.

This article was written by Royane Real, author of the popular special report "How to Overcome Your Shyness and Your Fear of Rejection and Have the Friends and Lovers You've Always Wanted”   Do you need help in getting over shyness?  This special report can help you - it's already helped many others!   Download it at  at http://www.lulu.com/real

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