Affirmations

Welcome to the final day of week 2 of the theme of Self Loyalty.

Today is all about affirmations.

After entering the keywords "Love yourself quotes" into my Google search bar, I landed on 9,960,000 results.".

"Love yourself for what you are instead of hating yourself for what you are not."

"When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are."

"Love yourself first, and everything will fall into line."

"No one will love you if you don't love yourself."

"Don't forget to love yourself."

Studies have shown that repeating these quotes doesn't help. Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse.[i] Repeating positive mantras may benefit people who already feel good about themselves but backfire for those who "need" them the most. For those people, trying to feel "good enough" by repeating mantras doesn't help.

Apparently, the SNL character Stuart Smalley had it wrong. Telling yourself, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and doggone it, people like me," won't make you feel better about yourself.

I have always been opposed to affirmations—Harshly opposed. Positive affirmations are the opposite of self-loyalty. They are asking me to believe something that I know isn't true.

Let me start by defining what I mean by affirmation. This isn't a generally positive statement; this is a specific statement for you based on what you need. These are statements that you can say to yourself to unhook common Monger beliefs, build self-loyalty and remind yourself you are human and that is ok.

So here are my keys to affirmations.

1. It has to be believable—you need to believe it.

You can't tell yourself you are strong and beautiful if you believe you are weak and ugly. It won't work. So you need to find something you believe. It is truly all about the language here—for me, I often say, "I am safe." Because growing up, I often felt unsafe, so when I tell myself I feel safe, I immediately relax. I shared that with a coach in your pocket client, and she said, I don't feel safe but what I need to hear is it isn't wrong to feel your feelings because she was struggling to allow herself to feel. And when she said those words to herself, she felt herself relax.

2. It has to resonate in your body. Yes, this is the same as it has to be believable, but I am repeating it in another form because it needs to resonate for it to work. Many years ago, I was working on not justifying my decisions because I justified them to everyone. My therapist gave me the mantra you don't have to justify. Prove. Or defend anything. And my mind was blown. WOW. Every day when I would see myself justifying a decision, I would say, "you don't have to justify. Prove. Or defend anything", and I would feel a deep resonance in my body

3. It needs to be an I statement. Because you need to believe it and resonate with it, it might be obvious that it needs to be an I statement—a message from you to you. Here is an example of one of mine.

4. You need to bring in your whole body. -- some way to connect the words you are saying with your body. For me, this looks like putting my hands over my heart or touching my face. For you, it could look like feeling your feet on the floor or doing a power pose.

This is why I LOVE A.S.K. So much because basically, it walks you through how to make an affirmation. A. Acknowledge what you are feeling—knowing what you are feeling allows you to start connecting with yourself and crafting a believable message to you.

S. Slow Down and Get Into Your body—bringing in the whole body, which helps you integrate the affirmation.

K. Kindly Pull back to see the big picture, and this is where you can start crafting affirmations that work for you. This is how I realized safety was so important. And how not being wrong is important, so I have an affirmation that says it is ok to be wrong. As a reminder to myself, as we talked about yesterday, yes, from time to time, I will be wrong.

Ok, that is the end of our 5th theme body, And that is the end of the Spiral One lessons! Congrats! We did it, first spiral down–2 more to go!

Next week, we wrap up with the implementation week for self-loyalty. It is a week off for you to catch up on recordings and implement what we have learned.

I will be back in your ears in 2 days to give you some tips on implementing this concept in your day-to-day life.

And then, we start Spiral 2. In Spiral 2, we will be re-visiting our themes of beliefs, feelings, body, and self loyalty again, going a little deeper into each of the topics so that you can continue to see these topics in new ways.

AND if you have ANY questions about the content—send me an email at questions@selfloyaltyschool.com or head over to the website, sign in to the student portal and fill out the Q&A form. Ask Nancy Jane, and I will answer them in the next Q&A session. Q&A sessions will be recorded and appear on the Ask Nancy Jane podcast feed and in the member area on the last Tuesday of every month.

Ok, see you in 2 days!