How Affirmations Work For Confidence

Believe it or not, thinking positive thoughts can make you feel better. Positive thinking is a classic way to improve your mental health by reducing stress and helping you get rid of depression.

It sounds simple enough, but some theories about how this works go deeper than that. According to researchers, changing what you think about — something we all do frequently — is only part of the process.

The other part is altering the story you tell yourself about the things in your life. Changing the stories you tell yourself helps you develop more confident feelings about yourself and your abilities. In fact, research shows that it’s just as effective as using traditional self–esteem strategies like telling yourself “I am good at _________.”

There are several reasons why replacing negative with positive thoughts is an excellent confidence booster. Here are five important reasons why.

Create affirmations

A powerful way to use positive thinking is through what are called affirmative statements or positive self-talk. These are thoughts that you make about yourself, typically focused on your strengths and talent.

Affirmation can be done either out loud or in your mind only. When doing the latter, you can write down your affirmation and then say it out loud or repeat it silently as part of your daily routine.

Your subconscious will eventually pick up on those messages and apply them to real life situations.

They work!

A few years back, I read about how we get nervous nerves or stress in our bodies is a byproduct of something going wrong inside the body.

We’re stressed out because there’s an infection or disease present. A similar thing happens with confidence.

When we don’t feel confident in ourselves or our lives, it can cause us to do things that make us uncomfortable or even hurt us.

That’s why using affirmations to improve your self-confidence is so powerful. It may be more effective than trying to think all day about what you didn’t do or say during a conversation.

Affirmations are shorter, simpler messages that focus only on yourself. They could be statements like “I am intelligent,” “I have talent,” or “My life is wonderful today.”

Using this article as inspiration, write your own affirmation now. Try saying them aloud and see how they affect you.

See how it changes you

A confidence booster is to tell yourself all of the good things that you do every day. You can make your own little speech-out loud or just think about what you have done well, and why these things matter.

This will create a positive mental attitude (PMA) that helps you enjoy your daily life and motivate you to keep doing your best. The more you use this technique, the easier it will be to develop PMA’s and affirmations work by simple repetition.

Your subconscious mind does not care whether the thing you are affirming is true or false. It simply registers the message and then uses that information to form thoughts and feelings.

Take control

A confidence booster is to take control of your mind. Rather than telling yourself you’re not good enough, or that someone else has more talent than you, tell yourself something different.

Tell yourself you are talented, intelligent, hardworking and determined. Tell yourself that you know what you’re doing and you’ll get the job done!

Your own inner voice can be just as powerful as anyone else’s. When we listen to this voice within us, it can motivate us to do things and achieve goals. It also helps keep us level-headed in times of challenge.

Affirming qualities such as these takes practice, but will eventually stick. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

Tell yourself you can

A recent study conducted by psychologist Maia Stacey confirms that changing how you talk to yourself is an effective way to boost your confidence.
Stacy studied participants’ perceptions of their own abilities before and after they repeated an affirmation about their ability 20 times in a row.

The researchers found that people who practiced their affirmations were more likely to believe they could succeed, and then to actually try to succeed.

They also noticed improved moods and levels of motivation when they did not feel like giving up. This helped them pursue goals they thought were impossible.

It works because our brains associate positive experiences with past events so we repeat behaviors that have worked before. By repeating messages that say I am capable of doing things, you are creating new associations in your brain.

These new associations shift what you think you can do and how motivated you become to achieve these dreams.

Use them

A few years back, I read about a very interesting concept in confidence-building. They call it “affirmation training.” It sounds weird at first, but trust me, it works!

This technique is simple to understand. You pick an affirmation you want to use (your affirmation can be a statement or a question), then repeat it out loud slowly several times.

After that, try saying the affirmation as quickly as possible without losing meaning of the words. This will take some practice, so do this only if you have done the work to develop your self-confidence before.

I recommend doing this exercise for twenty minutes every day, twice a week. And don’t just say your affirmation once; make sure to say it repeatedly.

Practice making these repetitions longer and more meaningful until you get perfect timing and tone. After that, you’ll be replaying your affirmations in your head all the time, which creates more internal positivity.

That’s why this technique works: you’re giving yourself positive messages every day. Over time, those positives begin to outweigh the negatives that made you feel less confident in the past.”

The authors of this article coined the term “positive thinking” as we know it today.

Make a plan

A powerful way to use affirmations is making them a part of your daily routine. When you do this, you should make a habit out of saying each affirmation at least once a day.

This can be done in the morning before you get out of bed, in the middle of the night when you wake up, or anywhere in between!

You can also repeat the same affirmation every few days or even weekly to keep it fresh.

Take baby steps

Even if you feel like you’ve tried every confidence trick under the sun, that won’t work unless you actually do something to believe it.

Conceit is a sneaky little demon, so don’t worry about being in stealth mode or anything like that! Simply saying positive things to yourself isn’t going to help — at least not very much.

It takes doing something to believe what you are saying to yourself. You have to take some kind of action to strengthen your self-confidence.

That could be speaking out loud or writing down those good thoughts, but most importantly it’s gotta be physical.

You have to put into practice what you know works otherwise nothing will.

So go ahead and make a habit of telling yourself all those nice things even if you don’t feel like it. Just don’t expect too much of a result until you have done this for a while.