Why Your Affirmations Aren't Working

Maybe you’re new to affirmations, law of attraction, that visualization thingie, and it all sounds a little woo-woo. Simply put, an affirmation is a statement that voices your intention or desire. This practice comes from the understanding that our internal dialogue affects our behavior and outcomes in every area of life. I want to share with you what works and what doesn’t when it comes to affirmations, especially if you’ve consistently employed your affirmations every day and aren’t seeing any progress toward what you’re calling in. It can be mega frustrating to not be able to figure out how to make the damn things work already.

At a young age, we’re taught to “use your words”, which is great for communicating with someone who can’t read your mind when you’re pre-verbal and desperately want a snack or that toy that bratty little turd just took from you, but doesn’t work on the subconscious mind very well. We can’t trick our subconscious mind into getting on board with our wildest dreams by talking to it.

When we say things like,

Money loves me. I will make a bajillion dollars.

My business is growing, thriving, and successful.

My partner understands me more every day and we’re super connected.

My confidence is soaring.

I love my body/myself

I deserve love and happiness.

but if we don’t actually feel those things in our bodies, we’re screwed—doomed to babble things we don’t truly believe possible for us.

Our conscious brains communicate with words, but if you’re trying to convince your subconscious using verbal language, your subconscious is going to sniff out in a hot second your incongruence between what you want and what you really believe is possible.

Time to become fluent in the language of the subconscious mind and the power of the body’s language to make it stick:

images and emotions.

A couple of years ago I was introduced to a visualization tool at a retreat. I was not into meditation and had never done any kind of guided visualization, so I felt a little awkward closing my eyes and putting my imagination to work. I resisted the temptation to peek around at the other women to see if they were into it. It felt kinda woo-ey and weird, but I figured I’d give it a go.

Eyes closed, breathing slowed.

We were instructed to imagine ourselves in nature somewhere familiar. The beach near my house. Check.

Have a seat. Sat. Check.

You sense someone approaching from behind. A little apprehensive, tbh.

It’s your inner leader. Hmm…okay.

Your inner leader sits next to you. They tell you their name. Then they give you a gift.

This took probably 10 minutes and was more fleshed out than the skeleton outline above, but you get the general idea. As the exercise came to a close, I sat there with tears streaming down my face. We took turns sharing our experiences and the visualizations varied wildly. For one, her inner leader was an amorphous being of light, for another, it was a family member.

For me, it was myself, but like, a much, much cooler version of me. She/I radiated confidence, joy, and beauty. I was completely dazzled by her.

Over 2 years later, remembering that experience still moves me (I’ll tell you why in a minute).

Since then, I have geeked out over the science behind meditation and visualization, and received training in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), and integrated these practices into my daily routines.

Here’s what the gist of the work is: true change happens on the level beneath our thoughts and immediate awareness, down in the depths of our programming. When we’re kiddos, our brains take EH-VER-EE-THING literally. Everything is fact. Everything is true. The things that have the most emotional impact are the stickiest. When we’re little, we can hear an offhanded comment about our bodies and beep-boo-boop—code is written. That book you read about a kid getting kidnapped by a creep in a white van? Click-clickety-bing—give the side-eye to anyone who drives a white van without windows for the rest of your life.

This shit runs DEEP and most people go through life largely unaware that the systems they’re running on desperately need an upgrade. All the things you learned by accident about money, what you can expect in life, what your body should/shouldn’t be like, God, being a good person, how to interact with others, what giving and receiving love looks like…it’s all written as a kid and is now running in the background. When we say things consciously that don’t line up with our subconscious programming, there’s no contest. Subconscious programming wins every time. Your subconscious is like the Serena Williams of behavioral tennis, or the Tiger Woods of emotional golf.

If you want to partner with your subconscious to change your thoughts and effectively change your life, you gotta speak the language of images and make it stick with emotion.

Here’s what that looks like:

Instead of saying, “Money loves me. I will make a bajillion dollars” imagine a day in your life when you have all your financial needs met. What does that day feel like? What do you do in the morning? What kind of work are you doing? What car are you driving to your job or company? What are you doing right before you go to sleep? What thread count are your sheets? What does your house look like? What kind of food are you eating? It may seem silly to get so specific, but our brain loooooves specificity. It loves a job that it’s clear about. It loves clear direction for what to focus on.

Now, how are you feeling throughout that perfect day? Calm? Excited? Satisfied? Electrified? Joyful? Make your brain go to work for you to produce those feelings in your body right now. You know what calm, excitement, satisfaction, and joy feel like in your physical body, so stir those up. Shift your internal state. If you think you can’t do this, you can try a simple exercise in the opposite direction to prove to yourself that this is possible: think of someone you are pissed at. Do you feel that heat in your chest, your face start to scrunch up, your body tense? Good. Now that you know that you can drum up negative feelings, put your brain to work for you to feel the good feels.

Our plans for the future live in the same part of our brain as our memory, so when we plan, we are actually remembering the future. Trippy, right? Our brains create our future from what it knows of the past if we’re not paying attention and giving it brand spankin’ new intentional direction. And to give it new direction, we have to communicate in imagery and emotion. Kids are so good at this because they don’t have layers of shoulds attached to their imaginations. They daydream, create worlds, and visualize all the time.

Keep ignoring the programming you’re running, communicate with your subconscious with your words, and you’ll see that you perpetuate more of what you already have. When you detach the shoulds and realize that you have everything available to you, what do you want? That is how to put affirmations to work for you to truly change your life.

Two years later, the memory of that first visualization moves me because I look more like my inner leader now than the original me. When my inner leader gave me a gift—a long white box with a key in it—I asked her what it was for and she told me, “When you need it, you’ll know.” Whoa.

I have an inkling that the key is me.

If I want to unlock the future that I want, I have to trust myself, be honest and intentional, and accept that the responsibility to create the reality that I want is mine alone. We can’t abdicate this work to anyone else. It’s our right and privilege.

So, what do you want?