Whether it’s through different personal development books, interviews of people I admire, YouTube videos or from talking to people, affirmations are something I keep hearing a lot about. At some point I listened to affirmation audios from YouTube. I’d never really considered coming up with my own affirmations. Here I’m going to share some of my affirmations and show you how I crafted them.
So what exactly are affirmations? They are positive statements that you read or say to affirm something you want to be true about you. I see them as daily reminders of what you desire and how you choose to live your life. A way of reprogramming your mind to align with the new beliefs you’re choosing for yourself. For example if you lack confidence and want to be confident, you might affirm “I am confident” or “I am a confident person.” There are many affirmations that you can find online written by other people that you can use. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s important to come up with your own affirmations because you know yourself and what it is you need to affirm in your life.
I came up with a list of mine after watching an interview of Dr John Demartini by Omar Elattar on The Passionate Few Podcast. In it Dr Demartini mentioned how he had been saying his affirmations daily for over 47 years and he now embodies the things he affirmed. It’s a little over 4 months for me and I intend to do it for life. I have 25 affirmations and it takes a couple of minutes to say them. What I’ve also done is straight after I say them, I think of things I’m grateful for, usually about 5 things. I included this because gratitude is something I want to do more of. In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear suggests how attaching certain habits together makes it easier to follow them because it becomes automatic.
I’m now going to share 10 of my affirmations as an example. For each I’ll explain why I chose it. To come up with them, I looked at me and my life and what I struggle with or need to believe or what thoughts I need to change and then wrote down my list.
Examples of my affirmations and how I came up with them
1. I express myself freely.
I saw a list of the top 5 regrets of the dying, compiled by Bronnie Ware, and one of the regrets was “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” That’s the one that immediately stuck out to me because it’s something I’ve realised I need to work on. For long I’ve been afraid to express myself because I don’t want to lose the love of people around me or I want to be liked. The more I get to know myself and put boundaries around me I see how important expressing myself is.
2. Things happen for me, not to me.
This helps me when I’m experiencing things that I don’t like. I remind myself that it’s happening for me. Even though I don’t know why that is, I can trust it to be true and allow whatever is happening to not take me down.
3. I am free to live my life however I choose and do whatever I want, whenever I want.
This is a big one for me because in considering what I desire more than anything in life, freedom was number one. I realised that I want agency in my own life. I need to know that I can say no to things because I choose that and say yes and mean it, not say yes because I have no choice.
4. I am able to live a life where I am authentically me.
This ties in with being able to express myself freely. I’m choosing to live as my most authentic self. I choose not to people please anymore. I’ve chosen to allow myself to not be afraid of losing friends and love because of being myself. It’s happened already in some cases and I’m still breathing. Dr Gabor Maté made this even more important to me because he explains how living your life authentically is vital for your mental and physical health. (You can find numerous of his interviews on YouTube.)
5. I allow things to unfold as they are meant to.
I’ve found that a great deal of my suffering is caused by my resistance of those things. Wanting things to be a certain way and pushing for it and ending up disappointed. Coming to the realisation that I can’t control everything is helping. I breathe easier this way. It’s not easy but in moments of stress I keep reminding myself to allow things to happen and be ok with that.
6. I allow people to experience life as they choose.
With freedom being my greatest desire, I intend to give the same to other people, no matter what that looks like. Each person gets to decide how they choose to live and I choose to allow them that, without judgment or fear because it’s not up to me to decide how people live their lives. It’s easy to think you’re “helping” people but I have to trust that each person can make their own decisions regarding their lives. Even if it looks like it might hurt them. That’s how we learn and grow in any case.
7. I love myself.
Although I’m learning to love myself now, for a long time I didn’t so I need this reminder daily to guide how I live my life, what I think of myself and how I treat myself.
8. I am financially free and financially independent.
I chose this one because to live a life where I am free to choose how I live my life, I came to the conclusion that money is a big part of that. So I included financial independence because I don’t only desire to have money, I choose financial independence too. I say that because you might have money and not have control of it.
9. I live in God’s purpose for my life.
My relationship with God is a big part of my life and it matters to me what I believe God has called me to do or how to live my life. A daily reminder is important to me because I want what I do to matter not just for me but for God’s purpose.
10. I am a spiritual being.
This is a reminder to me that what I see with my eyes is not all there is. This world I live in is not all there is. The spiritual world exists and has an impact on my world and the world as a whole. This keeps me aware of the great power that I possess as a spiritual being that might not seem attainable as a mere human being.
I hope these assist you in coming up with your own affirmations. Reprogramming your mind is a process that may take time. You might not see results now but I bet you future you will thank you. Some things take years to bear fruit. A majority of the things we do now, the results will only be evident years from now. It’s up to you to decide, do you want to consider future you? Are you willing to do things that your future self will benefit from?
