How to make affirmations work for you

Show Notes

If you're like me, and it took you a while to grasp affirmations on a deeper level — especially how they can work for you and your business — this episode is for you.

 

I'm going to walk you through the extra steps I took to create powerful affirmations that addressed things that kept me from being successful and putting myself out there. And of course, I'll share three of the affirmations I use today.

 

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Let's get visible - 3 tips for showing out
• Black Girl Business Bar community Facebook group
• Book a clarity call with Khalida

More on Khalida

 

Khalida DuBose is a business mentor specializing in sales strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color who are early-stage online business owners as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com.

 

Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at [e-mail].

 

The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.

Creators & Guests

Host

Khalida DuBose

Business + Mindset Coach

Producer

Zuri Berry

Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

Welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. I'm your host Khalida DuBose. This podcast is all about helping you as a woman of color, increase your sales, overcome your mindset blocks and giving you the practical information that you need to thrive in your business in life.

Today, I'm going to talk to you about affirmations, what they are, how to practically use them, and how I've incorporated them in my mindset practices.

So I have been trying to figure out a way to have a conversation about affirmations for a while, because for a long time, I really didn't buy into them. If I'm being honest, I would try to force myself to use them, but I didn't really grasp on a deep level why affirmations were powerful and how they could change my reality.

So basically as a business coach in this world, do you always hear words like affirmation being thrown around and it can kind of sound like spiritual woo woo. For me, it doesn't really sound like spiritual woo, if you will. When I really stopped to think about it, I, I grasped it on a topical level, if you will. But it did feel like to me, an exercise in tricking myself into doing something or tricking myself into believing something. And so that really didn't feel in integrity to me. So it was very hard.

I would start affirmations and they would last anywhere from two weeks to two months. And I finally figured out that it's because I wasn't saying the right affirmation. And in order to figure out the right affirmation, I needed to take a couple extra steps. So if you're listening to this and you don't feel this way and you totally get affirmations and they've always been your jam, I say, awesome.

Keep going with it. But for anybody else who is like me, I'm going to share some of the steps that I took to understand affirmations, and I'll share some examples along the way, just to help illustrate it and make this subject a little bit more digestible for you. You'll be able to see how it started to make sense to me and why it's part of my mental health maintenance now.

So anytime I really am having a hard time understanding a word, what I do is I go look for similar words or synonyms. So I looked up the synonyms for affirmations. Because I wanted to add a little bit more depth to the word and a little bit more context to understand it. And I found confirmation, declaration, assertion, oath, testimony. Okay. Coming together a little bit more.

And I also like to look up the opposite of the word because I can also add another layer of understanding. So the opposite of affirmation, I found denial, nullification, veto, negotiation. So just keep those things in mind. For me, that was really important because I was just thinking, okay, well, if I'm making the affirmation, what's the opposite of doing affirmation? I think actually looking up antonyms helped me a lot more to realize that denial was a big one.

Like, am I in denial about something? Am I negotiating something? Am I nullifying something?

So when people talk about affirmations, what might be happening is, is you're listening to people, as I was, talking about affirmations in the standalone manner. And so it just, it didn't click with me. So I'm supposed to say these words, and then all of a sudden, my world's going to open up and things are going to start happening. A lot of times, personally, that is how I heard it explained, and it just wasn't sitting with me.

So in my opinion, I think that you need to go through a few more steps before you arrive at creating an affirmation. And you don't want to just create any affirmation. You want to create powerful affirmations that are going to start to change an inner belief. That's really the key there.

You don't want to say, I want a million dollars. I want a million dollars. I want a million dollars over and over and think that somewhere down the line, a million dollars is just going to pop out of thin air, which I don't think that's what people think. But I just want to throw that out there for anybody who is just stumbling upon this subject or it's been, you know, they've been struggling with it.

So what I do to create a powerful affirmation and the steps that I had to go through -- and these steps are actually part of a release method that I do with my clients and with myself when I'm having really deep blocks and really trying to figure things out. I'm going to call them in this podcast, asking, understand, identify, and create.

So the first step is to ask. So you're going to ask a question, but you're not just going to ask a question and then the first thing that pops into your head, you, you run with it. You want to actually slow down a little bit. For me it's very important that I don't just listen to the answer that's coming to my head, but that I tap into feeling what my body feels like and see what comes up intuitively. I know that can be hard if you're not in the practice of doing this, and this is why I like to go through this with clients so that I can prompt them in a certain way. But I think that everybody can do this.

So ask yourself questions and listen for the response, you know, start to ask questions that are powerful. So, we're not just asking, but we're asking powerful questions and a powerful question is not a yes or no. A powerful question oftentimes leads to another question.

So you ask yourself one question and then it leads to what's the next best question to ask yourself to kind of dig a little bit deeper into what's going on. Let's use the example of having a problem in your business around selling.

You might ask yourself the question, why am I not selling in my business? That might be the first question that you have. And, you know, just as a caveat here, when I'm talking about selling, I'm talking about actually inviting people to the calls, being consistent, being consistently visible, I should say, owning your expertise, having a proper offer or just getting started.

Some people have a brilliant genius idea or they have a service or they have like a method that they want to use, or they're really good at something. And they never get started. Because they're all in their head and there's something holding them back. So when I talk about selling, that's what I mean, you might have something unique that you're thinking about as you listen to this podcast, but I want you to think of selling in more, like more, layered way rather than just the actual transaction, okay.

So you're asking yourself the first question again, might be, why am I not selling my business? Okay. Then the next question could be, is there a block. The next question could be after that, do I have a belief that selling is bad or unsafe and the way to know which one of these really resonates with you is to really feel your body, wait for a feeling to come in your body.

Don't wait so much for the head, but wait for that feeling to come into your body. I know a lot of times when something's true for me or when or something, I don't want to face, I get like this, gut feeling, you know, like somebody punched you in the stomach, like, ooh, you know, there it goes. You know, or I just, I feel resistance in my body. Like, oh, I don't want to have this conversation. So that's usually the thing that I need to focus on.

Are you afraid of something? That could be the question that you ask yourself. So you want to, you want to go through this stage where you ask yourself questions and trust me, I believe that this gets faster and faster as you do this, because it's like any muscle, the more you exercise it, the faster it starts to respond.

And then you also get accustomed to what this feels like. So you know what signals your body's sending, what messages your body is sending.

All right. So the next step would be to understand. So this step is understanding why you may have developed a belief. So let's say in the first step you realize, okay, so I'm not selling my business because I have a belief that selling is unsafe or it's bad, or I need to arrive at a specific place before I can sell, or I need to look a certain way to be an entrepreneur.

I know these, they seem kind of wild when you hear it, but you'd be surprised at what's buried beneath. So you want to understand, so you kind of arrived at this place. Let's use the example that you need to look a certain way.

Or an entrepreneur looks a certain way or she acts a certain way, or she sounds a certain way.

So you have this belief and it's really holding you back. And so on a conscious level, you're like, this is so silly, but on a subconscious level, this is something that's really kind of got its hooks in you. And it's holding you back from taking your business to the next step, getting started, you know, whatever it is, wherever you're stuck.

I think the key here is to be very curious about what's going on because there's, there's definitely more beneath the surface then I just think that I need to look a certain way or sound a certain way before I can be, you know, this entrepreneur before I can be this type of coach, or before I can serve this type of client.

So here you want to be very curious about what's going on. You want to leave all assumptions of what you're going to find at the door. You don't want to be judgmental. You don't want to shame yourself. You don't want to blame yourself or anybody else, but just being curious about what comes up, understanding why you might have developed this belief. This is really important.

So we go on to step number three and we identify the belief that we want to release. You now know that you think that you need to look a certain way before you can start selling in your business or be really successful. And to be successful you would need to start selling.

And then you identify like, okay, I think I have this belief because everybody around me looked a certain way, or in some past time I was told that I was not allowed to be the face of my organization until I looked this way or they wanted a different look than what I had, because they thought that this is what salespeople look like.

So now you've identified, like this is a belief that you actually took on that you needed to look the part before you could actually start doing the thing that you wanted to do, doing the thing that you love, making money at it. So you've identified that this is a belief that's not rooted in your reality today.

You don't need to look a certain way before you start making money. And so you identify that this is a belief that you want to release and I'm using the word release on purpose, because I think people with trauma, especially sometimes have a hard time with words like you have to let go, or you have to lose this mindset, losing, letting go.

It just kind of triggers this thought of just like having less or losing or something being unstable. And that can send you back into like another trigger, fear cycle. So I like to use the word release because it's just a little bit easier and you're releasing something that doesn't serve you anymore.

You don't want something that's, that's going to harm you and sabotage all of your efforts.

So you've now identified what belief you want to release, and that's at the point where you can then hit step number four and create an affirmation to replace it.

So this is definitely, something that I've gone through and I'm actually using my own example of feeling like I needed to look a certain way before I made money.

It, strangely enough, a lot of people would think maybe it would be me thinking that with the hijab I can't make money because I know some women go through that, but it wasn't that. For me, a lot of it was, I don't feel as, as athletic as I was. And so now I feel like business women look a certain way or they need to look a certain way, or I need to be this certain look or feel this way before I can feel successful and start making money, et cetera.

Now it's time to create a powerful affirmation. To replace the belief that I have to look a certain way.

And this makes more sense to me that all of a sudden I'm, I'm, I'm kind of blown away like, wow. And I'm still in my curious stage, I'm still in my curious, I should say mind where I'm not blaming myself or shaming myself for saying, oh, I can't believe you thought like that.

And from a place of curiosity and quite honestly happiness that I finally figured out what might be going on with me, then I'm able to create affirmations.

Okay. So I want you to think about affirmations like if you have children or you have nieces and nephews like me, or you're, maybe you're a grandparent or you've been around children for any amount of time, then you know that they play their cartoons.

Like you'll play a cartoon or a movie for them that they really love. And they watch it over and over and over. I know my nieces and nephews, it was things like the Backyardagains, Finding Nemo, Dora the Explorer, you know, cartoons like that. And they will watch these episodes over and over and over to the point where we adults could sing these with them and they loved it and we would sing it and sing it. And we would hear these songs.

And over time I noticed for myself that I would start to hear little nuance things in those songs, or little parts or little jingles or little sounds that I hadn't heard when I first started hearing it. But all of a sudden over time, you start to hear the subtle things and you start to become a little bit more attuned to that song.

And so I think the same thing happens with affirmations. At first, when you say them, they might feel a little bit foreign and you really start to notice that your behaviors are changing towards the affirmation.

So ladies, in a nutshell, the reason why you want to create an affirmation, the reason why this is so important is if you're really struggling with just any kind of belief, whether that's imposter syndrome, if you're really struggling with like, I can't be it. Instead of trying to fake it, first come to the realization that if you have a belief that belief will show up in the world. If you want to change what's happening in your world, you first have to change the beliefs.

If you see the world as a place, that's always been hard. Everything seems hard for you. There's always been so much resistance in your life, whether you were looking at it from your parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles or people in your community. And you really believe that life has to be hard, that you have to work hard to get through school, that you have to work hard to be promoted, that you have to work hard to have anything in life, then that is exactly how the world will show up to you. You will always work hard.

The funny thing is, is what's really happening is that you will just throw obstacles in your way for the world to be hard. It's not like there's like, you know, some invisible men in the world who say, okay, this is her belief, let me throw these obstacles in her way. No. What happens is you think things have to be hard. And so you take the hard path.

And I'm not saying-- I want to make this very clear-- I'm not saying that we don't have to show up and do work. But there's a difference between putting in effort, and things being hard. Working hard for a promotion and putting in effort and time to learn and show up, and then get promoted. Two differences.

So I hope this really helps you to understand affirmations a little bit better to understand a framework that you might want to go through. If you are noticing that you're having blocks or limiting beliefs, where things just seem like there is so much resistance in your life and you don't want that to be your reality anymore.

I think that affirmations creating powerful affirmations can be a really, really, really helpful route to go. I have certainly done it. It's wonderful. And I'm going to just share with you guys before we head out. I'm going to share with you just a few of my affirmations that I use.

Just so that, you know, like I am definitely walking my talk because like I said, at the top of this, I really, really didn't know, what to make of it. And it felt like I was just tricking myself. And now I'm really on board with affirmations because it's an exercise in empowerment. It's like an exercise in autonomy, I should say. I get to go inside of myself, figure out the things that I believe that somebody else probably placed there; somebody else's voice probably placed there; or my critical voice is repeating to me. And then I get to say, you know what, I don't want to believe that anymore. I want to believe this new belief that's also rooted in reality, but it's much more healthy for me.

So I was having problems, as I said, with feeling like, and I, I would have never guessed this. If I hadn't gone through this exercise that I had to look a certain way. I completely understand where the origin of that came from. That I had to look a certain way before I was successful, which was stopping me from even approaching new clients. So, this is how deep it can go. And so one of my affirmations is I am wealthy and I make money at all sizes and in any physical shape. Because specifically I was thinking I don't look the part, I don't look the part. So that's one of my affirmations.

Another one is I am worthy of money, success, respect, and love at any weight or size.

And so this was a good affirmation for me to come up with and it really, really resonates me. I'm really telling myself, hey, Khalida, you are worthy of making money. You are worthy of having success because I know I'm going to work hard that I put in the hours that I put in the time not work hard. I just now said we don't think it has to be hard, but I know I work in integrity and I know that I believe that I deserve to give myself respect. And I give other people respect. And we all deserve to be loved. You know, there's no such thing as if you're a certain size or shape or you look a certain way, you don't deserve love. And so you deserve that at any weight or size. Those are not, you know, as qualifiers or whether or not you deserve something.

All right. And then another one that I came up with, I'll give you guys one more, just so you can kind of get a well-rounded picture of how I do this is, I am brave and I can be highly visible just how I am today.

Right. And I say highly visible. I think I talked about high visibility in another podcast. How I identify high visibility, because if any of you guys have been following me for a while, then you know that I have been visible, but highly visible means something different to me. And so I love this affirmation. I am brave and I can be highly visible just how I am today.

All right guys. So what I want you to do is try this out for yourself and create at least one powerful affirmation around something that you think that you're getting stuck in. And then I want you to send me an email at [e-mail].

And let me know, and if you want me to, if you allow me to, I would be more than happy to read your affirmation out on air, or if you just want to talk about it in the email, we can do that as well. I would really love to celebrate with you guys. You stepping into your leadership and empowering yourself to change a belief. That's no longer serving you. So I would love to hear from you. So send me an email. Or you can DM me on Instagram as well. I also just started a Facebook community called the Black Girl Business Bar community for women of color business owners.

And so we're all hanging out in there each week, celebrating wins with each other, helping each other, sharing wisdom, engaging with one another and just building a beautiful community. If you are a woman of color business owner, you are welcome to join us. We'll have the links in the show notes, and we can't wait to see you there.

Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. If you haven't already hit that follow or subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. And if you found today's episode helpful or had any aha moments, we would love it if you would let us know by giving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, your rating and reviews really, really help the show to grow and help it to expand to other women of color who need this information.

Ladies in this episode, we went over very briefly part of my release method and how I work with clients. If you are interested in this, if you were having blocks in your business around sales, visibility, consistency, or anything else, I invite you to reach out to me and hop on a clarity call with me so that we can see how we can get you moving in the right direction.

I would love to meet you. Love to talk to you. And love to see how I can help. All right, friends, we're dropping episodes every Tuesday and we can't wait to see you back then.