About Affirmations

Over the course of my life, I have been two kinds of people: a person who loves wonder, and magic, and personal growth and ambition and all things woo (you know, basically like the heart-eyes emoji in human form) … and a person who makes fun of those people, detests all forms of personal growth, and rolls her eyes at ambition and at woo.

And while both of these sides have served me at different times in my life, for different reasons, I now know that for me personally, the latter was merely a form of self-protection, and not the real me. The real me has a decidedly sunshine-y disposition and view and a heart that’s prone to embarrassing outbursts of affection and vulnerability.

The reason I share this with you is to say I once was the sort of person who equated “affirmations” with jokes about Stuart Smalley and Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy on SNL. 

I was that person from about the age of 16 to the age of 30, and it was helpful to me then to laugh at self-help because I was definitely not ready for any then. It made me feel better about feeling like shit, which I did, a lot of the time back then. Not because life was unkind to me, but because I was unkind to myself.

I was anorexic/bulimic and was numbing out in numerous other ways during that time because I was sitting on a lot of repressed pain I didn’t understand and had no other way of dealing with then. 

In hindsight, I can see I was a very intuitive and emotional soul who had no clue how to manage or even recognize all that she was feeling. So I tuned it out, and turned it down, by becoming cynical and analytical, because it would be too painful to feel my whole heart. It felt easier to not risk attachment to hope, not TOO much anyway.

So making fun of people who wanted to feel better and live a more joyful life helped me to have a kind of temporary amnesia that I WAS one of those people, and always would be. I should mention that it was never making fun of anyone personally or directly, but just rather at a generic faceless group of people in the privacy of my own mind: shiny people, happy people, self-help and woo-people.

But as my heart and soul healing has progressed, so too have my levels of woo. And one of those woo-ways is affirmations.

Affirmations are basically statements that you don’t currently FEEL are true, and you don’t know if they even COULD feel true, but that you want to MAKE true in your experience, so you commit to repeating them on a regular basis. The idea being, that what you tell your mind, your mind believes, and goes to work making true for you. And likewise what you tell yourself is true, will reflect back as true in your experience.

The really empowering thing is – it doesn’t matter if what you’re trying to tell it is a flat out lie that you don’t believe just yet – you can just start saying it and repeating it and slowly over time it begins to take root and BECOME real.

I have a whole SLEW of affirmations in notes on my laptop and in reminders that I program into my calendar and phone that pop up multiple times a day. Some of them are easier than others to believe, and some I don’t believe at all currently, but want to MAKE TRUE, so I just repeat them every time I see them, whether I feel that can be true for me or not.

I approach it as a game, as just a fun experiment, and I just come at it with an open mind and curiosity at what can happen when I do. And I have had great success with this over the years, in many ways, and in many areas of my life.

Two of the newer ones I had in rotation lately were: “I have so much money my money makes me money.” and “I don’t work for money, money works for me.” WHOA, hold the phone! I am guessing most of you just had a strong negative physical reaction to those statements because I certainly did when I first wrote them down!

ALL of my judgments and resistance to those statements came up big time, I literally cringed every time I saw them for a long time. And I would have been MORTIFIED if anyone saw them. Pictures of Scrooge McDuck flashed in my mind along with all the “evil money-hungry bitches” I’d seen portrayed in movies and tv my whole life. All the “there are more important things than money” messages came up and told me I was a bad person for even ENTERTAINING such thoughts and having them as affirmations. Which brings me right to the real point of this article.

The real point of this article is that it is not the affirmations ALONE that will do any magic on your life… it is what the affirmations BRING UP IN YOU, that you are willing to face, deal with, move through and HEAL FROM that is where the real magic happens… and that part is WAY harder.

This is why affirmations don’t work for most people…because they hit the hard part, the part where the affirmation challenges all of their deeply held beliefs, and all that that brings up inside them, and they just give up and go back to their old mindsets which feel more familiar and comforting, even if they are painful. Our minds want to stay with what’s familiar.

And yet, for some people, those above affirmations are like water off a duck’s back, they have zero reaction to it, they just think “yah, um duh, that’s what investments are, that’s what stocks and interest and other financial investments do, hello McFly?!”

And for OTHER people (like me) who were used to living mainly in survival mode, it was an entirely new paradigm for me, one I never really imagined I could have for myself. One that only lucky people, or rich people, or people born into wealth had access to, but not me. At first those affirmations werehugely triggering, and felt like something only a greedy guy in a cold cement tower would say, not a small business owner with a big heart and mission to help people.

In reality, all those affirmations really mean, is that you intend or hope to one day transition from a model of purely time and labor for money, to a model of not having to trade time more money anymore, and a model of having your money making you money through investing. In reality, they are simply affirmations with an intention towards financial freedom.

That can look and work in all kinds of ways. From just being paid for your most natural gifts (so it doesn’t feel like work ever again) to creating passive or recurring revenue income streams and/or other investments so that your money can multiply itself, and potentially serve far more people, through intention or just circulation.

For me, the affirmation “I don’t work for money, money works for me” was simply a turning around of the view of power, where I see me having the power, not money. And instead of me being enslaved to money, now money would be a supportive nurturing friend to me, wanting to help serve me in my quest and hearts calling.

But none of that will seem REMOTELY possible when you believe that only the lucky or the rich can ever have that. You CAN have that too, but it starts with telling yourself a different story about that, and wiring that story in with repetition, and most importantly of all — by DEALING with the really uncomfortable shit storm of emotions that is going to come up when you first start trying to tell yourself something like this, that you don’t believe yet, and then moving through that until it starts to feel less triggering, and you start to see a different reality emerge.

When I started using those affirmations I had no idea how that was going to be true for me, or how it could, I never made any real money I didn’t directly work for, and since that time I have made many thousands of dollars for doing nothing more than following my intuition, and I am just getting started, that is only going to grow now that my belief has changed.

When my belief changed, I started to have new experiences—just tiny ones at first—that matched that new belief. And having those experiences further solidified that maybe this could be true for me, which allowed me to trust it even more, which in turn led to bigger results. That’s how changing beliefs works, and before you know it you’re standing in an entirely new reality with something you once thought completely impossible for you.

That reality would have sounded like a complete pipe dream to that version of me who thought she would work hard trading time for money her entire life. But I stuck with it, even when I didn’t believe it, even when it sounded like sacrilege for me to say it, and now it is literally happening before my eyes… so imperceivably at first that I didn’t even see it, and then all of a sudden there it was. It is the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible, but I am well on my way.

All this to say, REACH FOR YOUR DREAMS! Don’t be afraid to reach for what feels impossible, and claim it. Start telling your mind to believe different things, even when you don’t believe it at all, and when the resistance and shit comes up (which WILL happen when you move towards something new), get support and help for that so you can move through to the other side, where your dreams are waiting for you.

Don’t be like me and spend years on the sidelines secretly snickering, when you know you want to be in the game. This beautiful game and journey of life that you came here to live and to play in, and see what you could do! You deserve nothing less and can have it.

And if you need support for those rough spots, and don’t even know where to start with your mindset but DO want to dream bigger dreams and make them come true, then I invite you to my Feast or Famine No More Course, where we do exactly that »