Daily Affirmations: Week 1

If you were like me, when I first heard of “daily affirmations” I thought it was pointless and honestly, downright cheesy. Let me step back a moment and first give you the definition: daily affirmations are simple, specific and positive statements that we repeat to ourselves to help us shift our mind to a more encouraging, hopeful and positive mindset. Okay, sure it sounds like a good approach but then when you see lists of all the affirmations floating around the internet, they can just seem so silly. For example, how is repeating to myself “I’m worth it” is really going to make me feel better.

Hey, I get it. I was skeptical at first but let me help you come at it from a different approach. We have all had negative thoughts floating around in our heads. Not feeling good enough, thinking we are ugly or unloveable. We repeat these things in our head and we just feel worse and worse. So if we keep repeating negative thoughts in our head and we just feel more down and negative, why wouldn’t doing the opposite of this work? If negative thoughts bring a negative response, why can’t positive thoughts bring a positive response?

As I said, I was a skeptic and thought it was cheesy and don’t get me wrong, it is kind of cheesy but cheesy doesn’t mean it can’t work. So I decided to say positive thoughts to myself everyday because I figured, what couldn’t it hurt? I was already feeling down about things so how could it make me any worse. I didn’t go off a list, I just thought of something positive that was the opposite of how I was feeling. If I didn’t feel enough, I would say to myself every morning – I’m enough. If I didn’t feel good about others actions in my life, I would say – I can only control my reactions to others.

I’ll be honest, at first it was kind of silly feeling but the more I did it each day, the more I felt better. I was being my own cheerleader. It helped the negative thoughts have less of a voice because the positive words were becoming more powerful and louder.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have bad days and negative thoughts but now I have the ability to turn the volume down on them. So I challenge you to give daily affirmations a chance. Try it out for a week or two and see if it has any impact. I’m going to start posting every Monday a weekly list of affirmations. Feel free to come back each week and use them as inspiration or make some up on your own, but either way, give them a chance for a week or two and see if it has a positive shift on your mindset.