Here is how to make self-talk a game-changer in your life.

When I first heard about the self-talk concept or using positive affirmations, it sounded bizarre to me. Like why would you talk out loud to yourself? Aren’t those only crazy and mad people who do that?

Ever since, using affirmations has become one of the key habits of almost every success habits or morning routine habits list. And a keystone habit in my life too.

And, for sure, neuroplasticity confirms how changing our thoughts makes new neural pathways form in our brain. When we don’t think anymore, the old thoughts — those neural pathways dissolve.

And the stronger are our new thoughts — positive thoughts, the stronger those new neural pathways form. All that brings changes into our emotions, feelings, actions, behavior, habits and eventually brings different results.

So self-talk plays a crucial role in this.

But if you have been already trying to use self-talk or positive affirmations for a while, you might have encountered yourself thinking, “But do they really work?”, “When will I see the result of them?”, “Maybe they are not working for me…”

Yes, I have been there — starting my morning every day with my two pages of affirmations and wondering why they are not working for me. And I discovered several essential things why is that so.5

Here are three things you need to keep in mind to make affirmations work for you.

#1 — Change Your Limiting Beliefs Into Positive Affirmations

Often, when people are starting to use affirmations, they take nice and fancy phrases they hear other successful people say. They think, “If I only use these phrases, I also will achieve that!”

In reality, every person is different from different backgrounds, with different emotional baggage, perceptions, and, yes, limiting beliefs.

Taking some nice self-talk phrases without assessing and changing the specific limiting beliefs you have, is not going to work so well.

For example, you starting to say, “I am confident,” but deep inside, you have subconscious beliefs, such as, “I am not good enough,” “What are people going to think if I do this…?”, “I always make mistakes,” “I never seem to measure up,” etc.

You are what you are, you are where you are, and you are who you are because of what you believe about yourself. — Dr. Joe Dispenza

First, you need to become aware of these limiting beliefs that sabotage your mental, emotional and physical world. You need to be bold enough to face them and understand what negative past experiences they are attached to.

Emotional traumas are not only terrible events such as abuse, but they also can be seemingly small things, such as a demanding parent being upset about your grades when you were in school, embarrassing public speech, etc.

Emotional trauma is anything after which you have formed some distorted views about yourself. For example, “I can never measure up; I need to strive harder to prove my worth.”

Without changing this limiting belief first, your positive affirmation, “I am confident,” will bring only limited results or come out fake.

#2 — Align Your Feelings With the Positive Affirmations

Dr. Joe Dispenza emphasizes many times in his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself that thoughts need to be aligned with feelings. The mind needs to be aligned with the body for the manifestation to bring results.

It’s pretty straightforward — if you say to yourself, “I am rich,” but in reality, you feel poor, your self-talk will not bring results.

The problem with emotions and feelings is that we have those memorized emotional states that take time to shift — to unmemorize the negative emotional state and memorize the new, positive one.

Emotions are electrochemical signals. And emotions are the end products of an experience.

Whatever experience you have had, you have felt a certain way, and if next time something similar triggers you, you are going to feel the same way. After a while, the body has formed the habit of sending these electrochemical signals, and, boom, you have become addicted to this electrochemical state of being.

Life seems to organize itself equal to how or who we are being. — Dr. Joe Dispenza

To break these limitations of the past experience, you need to start feeling differently. You need to replace your self-talk with “I am joyful” and then also make all your body feel the emotion of joy.

Or if you say to yourself, “I am wealthy,” you need to feel with your body that you are a wealthy person. Visualization is a powerful tool to master this.

Here is an example from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book about a man who successfully broke addiction to feeling bitter, angry, and triggered.

#3 — Align Your Conversations with Positive Affirmations

This a significant point where many people fail who are just starting to use affirmations.

They make a list of positive affirmations, and they use them in the morning or evening. But then, during the day, in conversations with others, they affirm entirely opposite things.

That comes out of habit and past limiting beliefs that are still in the subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind runs our show most of the time.

For instance, you might be saying in the morning, “I am beautiful.” Then in a conversation with a friend who tells a compliment about your hair, you might say, “Oh, I haven’t even wash them today!”.

Or you say to yourself, “I always make the best decisions,” but then complain to a friend during the day that you always make stupid mistakes.

This is clear self-sabotage.

Never say about yourself anything you wouldn't say about someone you truly love.

Remember, your self-talk is not only a bunch of positive affirmations you say to yourself in the morning but also everything you affirm about yourself and the world in conversations with others.

Basically, affirming the same old negative thoughts in conversations with others neutralizes your effort of positive affirmations in the morning. So watch what you speak!

Here again, the importance of becoming aware of your limiting beliefs and changing them appears so that these beliefs don’t continue sabotaging your effort to rewire your brain with positive thoughts.

Final Thoughts

While using positive affirmations or self-talk out loud is one of the key habits of successful people, there are certain things you need to keep in mind that people don’t usually emphasize when they suggest you speak positive words to yourself in front of the mirror.

First of all, you need to bring into the light the subconscious negative beliefs you hold about yourself or the area of your life you desire to get the breakthrough. Unless you do this, they will continue to sabotage your effort of using self-talk.

Once you do this, it will become easier to control what you speak in conversations with others. Because otherwise, people block the power of their positive affirmations by affirming the utterly opposite thing when in conversations with others.

Last but not least, you need to align the way you feel with your affirmations for them to bring an effect.

The best way how to do this is to visualize. Do not only say to yourself, “I am confident,” but create the feeling of confidence in your brain and body by imagining how you act confidently in situations you previously might not have been as confident in.

Originally published on https://www.lainekaleja.com/.