Your Self Improvement Blog

Do positive self affirmations really work? The short answer is ‘No’ – unless you’ve got a few years to spare and a heavy-duty supply of perseverance. The problem is that self-affirmation is directed at your conscious mind and, sadly, your conscious mind has got nothing to do with how you behave, how you react to others and events, how you see life in general or, most importantly, the view that you take of yourself. However, as I said, if you throw enough mud at your conscious mind, sooner or later – in fact, definitely later – some of that muck will eventually stick and make some kind of positive impression on your subconscious mind. However, you’d have to stick with it religiously and, even then, you’d be facing an uphill war of attrition because your subconscious mind simply won’t believe what it’s being told if its view of reality is different. Why? Your subconscious mind controls your beliefs, behaviours and reactions and actually creates your very own version of reality. Self-affirmation is like trying to having a snowball fight in hell’s fiery furnace!!

That said, if you really do want to change your life, some area of your life, or change yourself, your own self image or some distasteful behaviour or bad habit, it’s your subconscious mind that you’re going to have to impress. It holds all the keys, has its hand on all the levers and its feet on all the pedals that either get your life moving forward or, more often than not, grind to an absolute and shuddering full stop.

In order to impress your subconscious mind, you will have to become like a little child all over again – not childish but childlike. When you were young you paid full attention to the reality of the moment, using each of your five senses – that is how you took onboard your current set of beliefs about the world and who you think you are. Consequently, you now pay almost no attention to reality today – your subconscious mind pretty much makes your reality up for you as it goes along! – with all the usual results. You need to get real, to relearn how to pay full attention to what’s actually going on in front of you, instead of paying attention to your subconscious baggage that’s weighing you down.

The normal subconscious mind is buried in the past. And the key to your future is to be found in the present. After all, the present moment is the only place and time where life is actually lived. In other words, you have to re-learn how to pay attention to what is really going on, not what your subconscious mind, looking through its dirty lens of past events, thinks is going on. This re-learning process means training yourself how to pay attention to what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste. This training must be done in a quiet place so that, when the going gets tough in the so-called real world, you’re primed and ready to perform in a manner that will lead you onwards and upwards towards the life that heart desires.

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