The Habit of Affirmations
Between the ages of eight and eleven, I was in pretty bad shape as a kid. I was not doing well in school, undiagnosed dyslexia might have played a part in it. I was beating up other kids and disrupting classes. And getting into trouble for drawing.
Somewhere in that period, my dad thought me to say this affirmation;
“Every day and in every way, I’m getting better and better”. No my dad is not Zig Ziglar, but that might have been where he got it from.
3 years ago I left my start-up, and it was a challenging time for me. During that time I read another daily affirmation that Zig Ziglar prescribed. It caused me to act in better and better ways. Subconsciously.
Scott Adam’s the cartoonist, is a famous proponent of affirmations. He writes about it in his book; “How to fail at almost anything and still win big”.
“He used to write, I Scott Adams am a world-famous cartoonist”. 15 times a day while he worked at a telephone company. I have a similar career-related affirmation that I write, though I do need to make the writing of that particular affirmation more consistent. If you want a discussion about whether affirmations work or not, you can find a good one in the book.
I have been reading a different kind of affirmation, almost daily for the past 10 months. And I’ve started again from the top. Each affirmation is based on a topic and these are the topic that I will be writing about for the next 10 months.
These are the topics:
Habit
Love
Persistence
Uniqueness
Urgency
Emotion
Humor
Multiplication
Action
Faith.
I think affirmations work like software. There is no interface in humans to download new software. So there are many ways we are programmed. Affirmations seem to be a hack to the programming. I’m not here to prescribe or argue for the thing.
I’m just here to tell you that I think affirmations hack your brain and focus you towards certain outcomes and directions. And I have been using them habitually as a software update that wears off every day, leaving only the slightest residue. But over time, I think the residue builds up.
We run on a kind of software all the time anyway, it’s just nice to be able to affect it a little.