Affirmations For Meditation And Reflection (Week One)
1. TAKE 100% RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR FUTURE
We don’t naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren’t good.—DONALD MILLER Author of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story
Let’s start with some really good news: You have total control over the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take. How you use these three things determines everything you experience in life. On your journey to a life of happiness, abundance, and success, taking 100% responsibility for your future is the starting line.
Here is where you are today, and there is where you want to be—it is the fulfilment of your hopes and dreams. It is the realization of your life purpose and your ultimate goals, and I am going to show you the way to get there. Together, we are going to embark on an exciting journey that is based upon using daily affirmations—positive statements that affirm who you are, what you believe, and the fact that you already have everything you need at your disposal to succeed in reaching your goals. You may not think that you do, but I am going to show you how to change your thinking and build a blueprint for success.
- I am easily improving my life—moving with ease from where I am now to where I want to be.
Positive energy will get your day off to a great start. Set a few minutes aside every morning and repeat your affirmation aloud with conviction and intention. Do this again at night and let your subconscious mind apply that positive energy as you sleep. When you let it empower your thoughts and dreams during the night, you are training it to think differently—to automatically lean toward positive opportunity and action while you are awake.
Repeating affirmations will help you consciously improve as long as you take full responsibility for your life—that means every success, every failure, and every indecisive thought or action you have experienced. Regardless of the circumstance, placing the blame on the event or outcome won’t make a difference because it’s your response to it that is the game-changer—and your response, whether it’s your thoughts, images, or behaviours, is totally up to you. The truth is, you don’t have to settle for anything in life because you can keep changing your response to the circumstance you may face until you get the result you want. If you don’t like your current results, simply begin to do something different.
- I am confidently creating better circumstances and expanding opportunity for myself—responding with intelligence to events as they occur.
It’s easy sometimes to think things “just happen” to you—that you were an innocent bystander or an unwitting participant. Don’t let yourself be tricked into playing that game. You are the one creating or allowing it to happen. Start paying attention to what I call “yellow alerts.” There are always signals that tell you something is off or something is about to happen. If you don’t pay attention to the internal and external yellow alerts, you will needlessly suffer. External yellow alerts are things like news trends that your industry is fading or the smell of alcohol on your teenager’s breath. Internal alerts are things like gut feelings, intuitive messages, and feelings of stress, tension, or pain. Paying closer attention to your internal and external yellow alerts will enable you to change your actions or responses once you become aware of them.
Let this thought encourage you: Life becomes much easier when you take control of your own destiny. Don’t accept that things “just happen” to you—choose to create the life you really want!
- I am choosing to change my thoughts, images, and behaviours to respond differently and produce better outcomes.
2. BE CLEAR WHY YOU’RE HERE
Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around
it.—BRIAN TRACY Author of Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
Everyone has a unique calling in their life—something only you can do, something only you have the unique skills and wisdom to accomplish. Identifying, acknowledging, and honouring this life purpose may be the most important thing that you do on your way to creating a successful life. It’s
certainly one of the most fulfilling. But, without a clear understanding of what you’re here on this Earth to do, and pursuing that purpose with passion and enthusiasm, you will almost certainly fall short of any goal you set.
Most people haven’t a clue why they are on this Earth. Maybe they think knowing isn’t really important, or they are waiting for a personal awakening, or they’re hoping that the answer mysteriously appears on their daily to-do list. The problem with not knowing isn’t just that you lose time making U-turns, getting stuck, and backtracking to the fork in the road—but that you get lost, side-tracked, or become stagnant. When you lose your sense of direction, it can cause untold emotional setbacks and turmoil, leaving you feeling hopeless, useless, or frustrated.
- I am joyful and fulfilled, living in perfect alignment with my life purpose.
Below is an exercise that will help you identify your life’s purpose and find meaning and direction.
The life purpose exercise
1) List two of your unique personal qualities, such as leadership and innovation.
2) List one or two ways you enjoy expressing those qualities when interacting with others, such as to support and to inspire.
3) Assume the world is perfect and that each of us is living our unique calling. What does the world look and feel like? Example: Everyone is working in their ideal field, in harmony with each other and without conflict or damage to the Earth.
4) Combine your answers above into a single statement that defines your life purpose and tells how it contributes to an ideal world. Example: To use my leadership qualities to inspire and support innovative entrepreneurs who are building sustainable businesses.
I am visualizing a perfect world where everyone is living in harmony and experiencing their life purpose to the fullest.
These short exercises should help you discover that your inner guidance system is fuelled by your
greatest joys when they are in alignment with your purpose. But let’s take it one step further: Write down the common elements of your most joyful experiences from the first exercise so you remember them. Next, write your life purpose statement from the second exercise and hang it where you will see it every day. Read your statement aloud every morning and at bedtime—the words should make you feel inspired.
When you are doing what you love to do, you are also accomplishing what you’re good at and what is important to you. Your life will become more balanced and open to opportunities, people, and resources that will benefit you. As you begin living your life purpose, there’s a synergy and universal magnetism that begins working within you and toward you. The things you do will automatically serve others and people will feel your positive energy.
Make a commitment to determine your life purpose at all costs—you simply can’t achieve abundance and success without knowing why you are here on this Earth.
- I am passionately and joyfully pursuing the unique calling in my life—every day moving closer and closer to achieving my goals.
3. DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO BE, DO, AND HAVE
The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.—BEN STEIN Actor and author
If you were to describe “success,” what would it look like? No doubt it would include all the things you want to experience, accomplish, and acquire—including those things on your “bucket list.” Unfortunately, many people have the whole scenario backward—they start with what they want to have first, then, later on in life, they find themselves at a point where they realize they don’t know either why they are here or what their life purpose is. They don’t have the inner success they expected—and the deep sense of joy that should come from living their life purpose is completely missing.
Let this thought encourage you: No matter what your age or circumstance, you can always decide to do things differently. You can start the process of deciding what you want.
- I am defining in clear and compelling detail what I want to be, what I want to do, and what I want to have.
Do you know that you were born with the seed of who you were meant to become already inside you? You were also born without inhibitions or fears—you cried when you were hungry, you crawled all over the place, you laughed at silly noises and faces. As you got older, you were told to stop crying, to grow up, to stop being selfish. You learned to ignore the things you really wanted and to fit in with what your parents, teachers, or society told you was best. Now it’s time to un-learn and replace these childhood decisions.
Michelangelo, the renaissance sculptor and painter who spent four years lying on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, said, “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” Wow!
When we allow others to dictate our “wants” or determine what we should do with our lives, we end up settling for whatever is handed to us, or worse, pursuing a life we simply don’t enjoy. This can lead to depression, anxiety, stress, and a whole list of negative outcomes. Your life is exactly that—yours. No one can determine what your life experience should be—other than you.
- I am letting go of childhood programming that holds me back and replacing it with positive thoughts and images about my compelling future.
To help you decide what you really want, try these two exercises.
1) Make an “I want” list:
Write down 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to have, and 30 things you want to be before you die. The big things—cars and houses—will probably be at the top of the list, but as you work your way down, you’ll rediscover your core values like making a difference.
2) Make a “20 things I love to do” list:
Think you can’t make a living doing the things you love? When you write them down and really think through what it would be like to pursue those activities every day—and how others pursue them already—you’ll discover you can make a career out of doing what you love!
Find a place with a comfortable, quiet environment, and then clarify your vision of the ideal life being clear and specific. Include these seven areas in your ideal life: work and career, finances, fun and recreation, health and fitness, personal goals, relationships, and your contribution to the larger community.
- I am focused on what I truly want for my life based on my own values and life experience.
4. BELIEVE IT’S POSSIBLE
When anyone tells me I can’t do anything . . . I’m just not listening anymore.—FLORENCE “FLO JO” GRIFFITH JOYNER Considered the fastest woman of all time based on the world records she set in track and field in 1988
Practically every psychology class in the world teaches a concept called expectancy theory: the idea that we respond to events in life based on what the brain expects to happen, which it’s learned from our prior life experience. In other words, people usually decide to behave in a certain way based on expected results.
Where we run into trouble, though, is when we let negative prior experiences and a lack of self-confidence control our decisions; when that happens, we act a certain way and get a negative outcome. But what if, instead, you intentionally held positive expectations in your mind? You could achieve exactly what you want much more easily.
Whenever a difficult situation or negative thought enters your mind, write it down. Write down what you are thinking, why it’s a problem, and what has caused it. Then, break these thoughts down into smaller parts and re-imagine them as positives. Now, put the pieces back together and create a new, positive statement that helps you believe what you want is possible.
- I am releasing beliefs and negative statements that limit me and creating new, positive statements that tell me my ideal future is possible.
The second roadblock is what you think you know that just isn’t true. Think about that. Could a lot of what you think you know actually be wrong? Relying too much on your own knowledge and experiences without questioning your assumptions is a slippery slope. You need to learn the real facts and use this information to become a possibility thinker.
Your mind is an amazing instrument—you can let it absorb bad or damaging information, or you can train it to produce positive thoughts (by using affirmations, for instance). You know that taking responsibility and being in control of your life is integral to achieving your goals, and you also know that you have the power to learn and un-learn thought patterns and responses at will. Only you can decide what you will accept and what you will block from your mind, so it’s up to you to avoid negative and incorrect data.
- I choose to believe things are possible, even when I don’t know how they will happen.
Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich once said, “You can be anything you want to be, if only you believe with sufficient conviction and act according to your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
That’s truly a profound statement.
You see, it’s all well and good to practice positive thinking and self-motivation, but without truly believing anything is possible, you won’t get very far. Let’s say you’ve been working toward a promotion for the last year or two, and you muster up the confidence to speak to the interview panel. You are confident in your ability and expect a positive outcome, only you don’t get one, and you become discouraged. Remember that, although you believed in yourself and expected a different outcome, you are no worse off than the day before. You haven’t really lost anything.
Being confident and expecting a positive outcome is not the same as instant gratification—if you’re expecting an unequivocal yes for every question you ask, you’re off target. What it is actually about is changing negative attitudes and thoughts and accepting the present. When youbelieve in yourself and believe anything is possible, opportunities will come from places and people you’d never expect, and the world will respond in astonishing ways.
- I am working toward fulfilling my goals every day and I easily move past those times when my expectations are not met.
5. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF
You weren’t an accident. You weren’t mass-produced. You aren’t an assembly-line product. You were deliberately planned, specifically gifted, and lovingly positioned on the Earth by the Master Craftsman.—MAX LUCADO Bestselling author
Because you are going to be successful and create the life of your dreams, you have to believe you can do it—even if you can’t see the whole picture of exactly how it will happen.
Developing a confident attitude and believing in yourself is a choice, regardless of the limiting beliefs and negative conditioning you may have grown up with. You must choose to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to—because you can. There are hundreds of studies and volumes of research on the human brain that show how positive self-talk, visualization, training, coaching, and practice can help retrain the brain so that we can accomplish almost anything,
If you don’t develop an attitude of success and belief in yourself, you won’t do what’s needed. Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, your thoughts become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s your choice to believe or not.
- I am facing each day with a positive attitude, which empowers me to truly believe that anything is possible.
Your brain is designed to solve problems and reach goals, and that means you have to give up phrases like “I can’t,” “I wish I were able to,” and “if only I could.” Those negative words disempower you and actually make you weaker.
When you were a toddler, you climbed up on anything that stood in your way. But little by little, your sense of invincibility was eroded by the negative reactions you received from your family, teachers, and friends. Eventually, you no longer believed you could conquer everything in your way.
Too often we feel the need to have others believe in us and in our dreams in order to be successful, but your decisions need to be based on your own goals and desires, not those of your parents, friends, spouse, children, and co-workers. How can you possibly follow your heart if you’re sitting around worrying what other people think about you?
Dr. Daniel Amen has an 18/40/60 Rule: When you’re 18, you worry about what everyone is thinking about you; when you’re 40 you don’t give a darn what anybody thinks of you; whenyou’re 60, you realize that nobody is thinking about you at all. Stop wasting time worrying about
what other people think and spend that time focusing on doing the things that will achieve your
goals.
- I am living positively at all times and have given up using negative phrases like “I can’t” because I know I can!
Did you know that many millionaires never set foot in college? Even American billionaire Bill Gates dropped out of college! Plus, there are countless other examples of people who became successful in their field or who started a new path in life without “prerequisites” such as schooling, age, or finances—simply because they believed they could accomplish what they wanted.
Take six-year-old Ryan Hreljac for instance: Shocked to learn that children in Africa had to walk many miles every day just to fetch clean water, little Ryan raised enough money to build a well in northern Uganda by the time he was eight. Today, Ryan’s Well Foundation has completed 878 water projects and 1,120 latrines in 16 countries.
- The famous chef Julia Child didn’t even learn to cook until she was 40. She was 51 years old when she launched her show The French Chef, which made her a household name.
- 48-year-old Susan Boyle skyrocketed onto the international stage when she sang on Britain’s Got Talent. Since then, she has recorded five albums that have sold over 19 million copies and received two Grammy nominations.
- I am choosing every day to believe that I am worthy and deserving of success, no matter my age or my circumstances.