Affirmations said with meaning and confidence can work wonders to change your beliefs and mindset and bring about beneficial changes in your life, but interestingly, they don’t work for everyone. Why is that?

When I first started trying affirmations I loved the idea of them, I loved the thought of shifting my mindset to think of and state the beneficial outcome that I wanted, but I found I got bored really quickly of having to say these positive statements constantly. As someone with an ADHD brain, this didn’t work quick enough and it took too much time and effort! I decided there had to be an easier way and went in search of it.

What I found was Psych-K®. Psych-K is a way of changing your limiting beliefs so that you can fully accept a new, more positive, belief at the subconscious level. I loved my early experiences with this and undertook training to become an Advanced Practitioner.

“Psych-K is a user-friendly way to rewrite the software of your mind in order to change the printout of your life.”
Robert M Williams, Originator of Psych-K

Your reality is created by your beliefs. These beliefs, usually subconscious, are often the result of lifelong ‘programming’, and represent a powerful influence of human behaviour. Studies in neuroscience indicate that as much as 95% of our consciousness is actually subconscious. It’s the subconscious mind that is the storehouse for our attitudes, values and beliefs. It is from our beliefs that we form perceptions about the world and ourselves and from these perceptions we develop behaviours. And if we want to change our self-defeating behaviours that we need to change the subconscious belief(s) that support them. Using Brain Dominance Theory, Psych-K provides lots of different ways to identify and then transform beliefs that ‘limit’ you into beliefs that ‘support’ you, in any area of your life. We can all have self-limiting subconscious beliefs around self-esteem, body issues, financial abundance, relationships, career etc.

With Psych-K you use balances to create a whole-brain state to re-programme the mind with your new self-enhancing beliefs and access your full potential to meet life’s challenges. When your subconscious takes on the new belief it looks for validation of that in the outside world and in doing so, brings the thing(s) you want into being. You starting looking for that validation and take action to make it happen.

How can we do this?

The wording of the affirmation or belief statement is important. It needs to meet five criteria:

• Be in the first person
• Be in the present tense
• Be positively stated
• Be short and memorable
• Be emotionally meaningful

A well-formed belief statement focuses on where you want to get to and how you will know you have arrived, for example: “My body heals itself, naturally and quickly” or “I deserve to have all the money I need”.

Once you have an affirmation or statement that feels/sounds right, you need a way to get into the whole-brain state. When you work with a practitioner there are a variety of different balances that you can use to embed the new belief(s) into your subconscious and your practitioner will muscle-test to check your subconscious belief around the statement, both at the start of the balance and at the end, once completed. (If we don’t believe the statement we will test weak, and when we do believe it at the subconscious level we will test strong). If you can self-muscle test or use dowsing rods or a pendulum, then you can test out your subconscious beliefs for yourself.

In the absence of a practitioner to work with however, there are still simple techniques that you can do to start accessing a whole brain state as you repeat your affirmation. Follow the steps below whenever you say your statement aloud (or in your head) to help embed it more quickly:

1 Create your positive affirmation or belief statement using the criteria outlined above and write it down

2 Take a few deep breaths and release whatever you might be holding in the moment

3 Repeat the affirmation. Start by saying the statement 4-5 times out loud and then 4-5 times in your head.

4 As you say the statement, do cross-crawls. (Cross-crawls are where you raise your knee and touch it with the opposite hand, e.g. raise your right knee and touch with the left hand, then raise your left knee and touch with your right hand and repeat. You can do this standing or seated.)

5 Keep saying the statement and doing cross-crawls until you feel that you have done enough (you’ll know when to stop – you’ll either be bored of doing it or you’ll feel a shift or it will just feel like the right time to stop. There are no rules here, go with your gut).

6 Repeat this practice over a few days, as necessary, until you can say the statement with conviction and without experiencing any inner resistance.

7 Celebrate and look for validation in your life that the belief is now aligned to your subconscious mind!