How to Write Self-Affirmations

Have you ever been told: Affirm Yourself? You probably have read to use self-affirmation when you want to lose weight, increase your self-esteem or control your temptations to fall into your addictive behaviors with drinking, food, sex, gambling or drugs. Currently we all are hearing about the Power of Attraction. It posits that the more you are positive about what you want to achieve, gain or accomplish in life the more likely you will attract it to you. The power of attraction is successful however only if you use self-affirmations stating how you will be when you achieve what you wanted to attract. Sounds good-doesn’t it! So these self-affirmations how do you write them? Read on!

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Your journal to record your self-affirmations
• Your creativity and immagination to visualize them
• Your commitment to use them

1. Identify what you need to affirm yourself for: Do a self-assessment to determine what you want to affirm yourself for. Check out the TIPS below to help you identify one thing at this point in your life you most want to attain.

2. Make your affirmations positive: Once you have figured out the one thing you want to achieve in your life you are now ready to write your self-affirmations. You want to write the affirmations in positive language. You want to keep them short one sentence statements. You want to keep them on the topic that you are working on.

3. Make your affirmations visual: You want to make sure that you can visualize the affirmation statements. You want to be able to picture in your mind what it would look like in reality once the affirmations are achieved.

4. Write no more than 15 affirmations per item you are working on: You want to write 5 affirmations in these three formats: I can…, I will…, I can…!

5. Write I can … affirmations: The first set of affirmations are statements of your potential. They begin with I can… You need to state that you have the potential to achieve what you want in your life. These statements are intended to give you hope that you will trust in your ability to achieve that which you are affirming.

6. Write I will… affirmations: The second set of affirmations are statements of your commitment. They begin with I will… These affirmations commit you to working hard on achieving that which you want to gain in your life. These statements are intended to give you a sense of purpose and direction so that you have your goal in sight all of the time!

7. Write I am… affirmations: The third set of affirmations are statements of your being what you want to achieve. They begin with I am… These affirmations affirm that you are that state of being which you are working on achieving. These statements are intended to give you a behavioral rehearsal of thinking, feeling, and acting as if you have already achieved that which you are aspiring to gain in your life.

8. Record your affirmations: Once you have completed the I can…, I will… and I am… affirmations write them down in in your journal to be used in your self-affirmation work which follows for the next 30 days after you have completed all of the above steps.

Tips & Warnings

• Self-Affirmation Assessment Here is a list of some items around which you might need self-affirmations. See if any of these things are what you might want to work on affirming so that you can attain or realize them. If there is nothing on this list that you want to work on, then come up with what is happening in your life right now that you want to change or correct to make your life better. 1. Improving your self-esteem 2. Getting your anger under control 3. Accepting change in your life due to losses you have experienced 4. Letting go of the need to be a perfectionist 5. Allowing yourself to be who you are rather than who you think you should be 6. Getting into the undergraduate or graduate school of your dreams 7. Maintaining an A average in school 8. Getting a job for which you have the right education, experience and passion 9. Getting the right someone special in your life 10. Getting engaged or attached to your someone special 11. Maintaining a life-long harmonious married or committed relationship with your someone special 12. Having a healthy baby or two or three or more 13. Raising a successful family of responsible and healthy children 14. Maintaining your health 15. Overcoming an illness and regaining good health 16. A new body after you lose weight 17. Maintaining your weight loss over time after you reach your goal weight 18. Maintaining a healthy exercise program in your life 19. Overcoming your addiction to alcohol, drugs, food, smoking, sex, gambling, shopping, computer roaming or any other thing which intoxicates you 20. Living debt free

Resources

• www.coping.org: Tools for Coping with Life's Stressors
• Self-Affirmations from Tools for Personal Growth
• Self-Affirmations from Growing Down: Tools for Inner Healing
• Visualizations and Mental Imagery in Recovery