Creating EMPOWERING Stories

 Start with one positive thought.

If you repeat that thought over and over again and focus on it enough, the mind will latch onto it and do its smart work of looking around the physical world for other thoughts to match it. It creates a thread of thought that becomes a story as more thoughts corroborate the first.

Many teachers have written about this technique over many years – it is called affirmation. An affirmation is a made-up, empowering thought. Repeat out loud to yourself as you get ready in the morning.  Write it on post-it notes and stick these wherever you will come across them in your daily life – on your fridge, your desk, your bathroom mirror. In a few days, weeks or months your mind will take the sentence and create a story out of it with other thoughts that it finds in the world. You will find you are living in a new story and have thus created a new reality of the mind, which in turn creates a new reality in the physical world.

Affirmations should be constructed and repeated in the present tense. Here are some examples of affirmations:
•    I deserve to be wealthy.
•    I am a being of light and whoever I touch feels inspired.
•    I attract loving, caring men into my life.
•    I take excellent care of my body and crave only healthy food and beverages.
•    I am young and successful earning at least R30 000 a month.

When you begin the first tentative mumblings of affirmations, you may feel silly, and some of these affirmations may conflict with existing stories suspended somewhere in the sky of your mind. When you say an affirmation, it may conflict with a ‘bigger, stronger story’ (i.e. one that has more thoughts attached to it). The bigger, stronger story doesn’t like this pesky new-thought-on-the-block and will try to quickly punch it out of existence as it fights to maintain its place in the mind. This is because the mind does not like to encounter contradictory thoughts; it wants to be ‘right’, and how can it be right if two contradictory stories are both true?

As you repeat the words, ‘I am now and always will be responsible with my money,’ the contradictory story may chatter in your mind. The bigger, disempowering story will try to squash this new thought by bringing up evidence, examples and thoughts about why this new thought is not the truth.  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You, responsible with money? Why do you have R40 000 worth of credit card debt if you are so responsible, huh?’

The trick at this stage of the affirmation game is twofold:

1.    Become the observer of your thoughts and realise both thoughts are stories and neither is the truth. The disempowering story is in a fight for its survival.

2.    Keep repeating the new affirmation – as often as possible. Have it around you as much as possible. Write it often. Repeating the affirmation or thought will create the sticky glue that it needs to attach itself to other thoughts and thus form the chain that creates a new story.

If you continue to do this, at some stage you will notice the old story simply disappears because the new story has enough corroborating thoughts to make it grow bigger and become ‘the truth’.   And that beautiful thing about creating empowering ‘truths’ is that your reality will begin to match whatever your mind believes to be true.

Create an affirmation now.

Get out those post-it notes, write it down.  Repeat it out loud while driving, in the shower or before you go to sleep at night and watch as your life magically transforms in that area.

Yes – the magic is that simple!