Yesterday I talked about the subliminal affirmation method of changing belief.
Let’s say you want to feel and act more confident in social situations.
Using this method, you’d listen to affirmations to install the thinking patterns of someone who is confident, relaxed and open at social gatherings.
And you’d listen…
And listen…
And listen some more.
Every waking hour of your life, you’d keep bombarding your subconscious mind with these verbal affirmations.
And, eventually, the affirmations would cause you to start feeling confident.
Until, finally, the new feeling of confidence overpowers the old emotional habits of anxiety or insecurity, thereby changing your actions.
And, of course, you’d have many relapses along the way.
The first time you notice yourself feeling insecure or anxious, those feelings will act as affirmations that cancel out your affirmative thoughts…
…and you’re right back at square one.
My method skips all of that.
Since emotions and actions always override verbal affirmations, we can just jump to the emotional part.
When you listen to one of my subliminal CDs, instead of getting hit over the head with verbal affirmations, you’re simply instructed to recall the feeling you want to experience.
Everybody can think of a situation where they feel calm, relaxed, confident, and absolutely certain of their belief in themselves.
And any feeling you’ve ever experienced and want to experience again can be easily recalled, in a state of deep relaxation, by simply thinking of a time when you felt that way.
Then, once you’ve recalled this feeling, you are instructed to strengthen that feeling – make it intense and pure – and then keep it locked and loaded and ready to fire the second you need it.
After that, there’s no need to listen to affirmations all day.
The whole point of verbal affirmations is to generate the feeling you want.
But you can skip all that by preparing the emotional affirmation ahead of time.
So now, when you enter a social situation where you would previously be triggered to experience your old, habitual, negative thought loops and negative feelings, none of that happens.
This new feeling will fire off instead.
And your new experience of the situation will immediately affirm your new reality as a person who is confident in social situations – not only with your verbal thoughts, but with your feelings and actions as well.
The belief change is almost instantaneous and effortless in this case.
After all, it’s easy to believe that you are a confident person when you see yourself acting confidently.
And it’s easy to act confidently when you can automatically call up that feeling of confidence at a moment’s notice.
In summary: We affirm our deepest, reality-creating beliefs with our thoughts, feelings and actions. Changing our thinking with verbal affirmations is a slow and sloppy process. So it’s much easier to use emotional affirmations to change our actions, which changes our experience, which changes our beliefs, which feeds back into our automatic thoughts, feelings and actions as the new reality becomes the norm.
Tomorrow, we’ll dive into the second method for changing your beliefs: directly changing your experiences.