Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Today we're gonna talk about how affirmations work. Before we get into that, we need to discover why affirmations in the first place, why do we need them? I will also talk about some tips in order to make affirmations work. Even if you don't believe it yet, you will see how powerful they are.
Sagi Shrieber interviews mega-successful creative entrepreneurs about the strategies, tactics, and mindset needed in order to flourish in all areas in life.
The deep and diverse interviews here offer practical tips and strategies, from entrepreneurship to health and wellness, personal development, and spirituality.
Hey everybody! What's up? Sagi here and today we're gonna talk about how affirmations work. Before we get into that, we need to discover why affirmations in the first place, why do we need them? And so let's begin.
Everybody, Sagi Shrieber here from Commit First, and as you know, recently we've launched our app, Affirmations and Co. It's the app where you can basically create your affirmations, follow other people's affirmations as well. Basically, you can go there, download the app, search for me, find me, follow me, and then you'll be notified whenever I post any new affirmations.
And you can follow other people. You can bring friends and actually support each other. So it's kind of like a social network for affirmations. Make sense? Well, it's an amazing app that I'm actually using and the people that are using it, use it in order to break limiting beliefs and change the inner chatter.
So let's talk about affirmations for a second. I wanna give you some tips and if you stay until the end, I will also talk about some tips in order to make affirmations work. Even if you tried to make them work before and they haven't, right. So let's begin.
Right, so let's talk about why we need affirmations in the first place. Because in order to understand how affirmations work, we need to understand why we need them. And so when we were kids up until the age of seven, according to some studies, some studies claim, you know, to be like age 10, whatever. But until a very specific young age our whole belief system was formed, not only our old belief system, but also our inner chatter.
Let's talk about both of those belief systems. The belief system is basically comprised out of neural networks that are in our brain, in order to create some kind of purpose for anything that comes out of the external world. Let's talk about how the brain works for a second. So whenever we have some kind of external stimulus, for instance, we see something or we hear something, something that comes through our senses or just sparks in our neocortex in like thoughts, memories, you know, in our brain.
And so what happens is we automatically process those thoughts or information and give them meaning. Meaning is sometimes “emotions”. So how does it happen? Well, first of all, the thoughts or the external stimulus gets into our brain and gets processed by what's called neural networks. Those neural networks are kind of like a lot of light bulbs with information in them connected by bridges, and those networks are what gives meaning to anything that we see. That's our belief system. Any beliefs that we have that we think that can give meaning to, is in that meaning.
If we were to see someone approaching us with a big knife, we would probably run because the meaning that we have for someone, you know, coming to us is like, you know, not a good idea, right? Like to stay around. This means like we've seen a lot of movies, right? Our belief system around seeing someone with a knife coming at us is already formed. This is not good, let's get out. Probably by then, also another part of the brain, which is the fight or flight mechanism will kick into action and will run. But anyhow, seeing different things in a world gives us meaning, even if someone cuts us off on the road, right?
So if someone cuts us off on the road, we give meaning to it, and each of us has a different meaning. Some people might find it completely disruptive to their whole day and some people wouldn't even mind. How do we explain it that these two are like completely separate lives, but for the same external stimuli?
Well, here it goes. So that neural networks are formed by thoughts that we have, and that we now automatically, the brain tries to give meaning to it and find evidence to it in our lives. And when we are born, our mind is so fresh and so clean and we can do whatever we want and we can study whatever we want.
Our mind is clean. No neural networks are formed, and until a specific age, we can't even form so many neural networks inside our brain. It mostly comprised of, don't stick your hand in a socket. Socket means bad, danger, because our parents said so. So neural network, okay, don't stick your finger inside the socket. Not good. Not a good idea, right?
But once we get into the school system, and once we get into really thinking for ourselves and expressing ourselves out there, we try to understand what people are telling us. And usually our caretakers, you know, our parents really tried hard, probably, I mean, most of us grew up in houses with no problem.
If you're watching this, we want to improve yourself. You probably haven't come from a really bad place. All of us have our traumas. Most of us came from a pretty okay home, right? But even if we came from an okay home, our parents probably did not do the best job ever in making sure that we have very positive neural networks in our brain because they haven't thought about it.
So they're usually around like, Hey, don't watch this. Don't do that. Watch this. No, this is bad. No, don't do this. And you know, our parents also carry some unhealed traumas from their parents and their parents and their parents. They basically go down in generations and all those generational belief systems are formed in us exactly as our parents grew up. Same thing, nothing changes.
Our parents taught us how to think about money, how to feel about money. It's not even about how our parents talk to us about money. It's how they acted about money. Their side commentary that we heard across the years and how we sell them, behave around money.
Same thing about relationships, same thing about anything in life. Political views, religious views. And so once we form these neural networks, they start looking for evidence in everything that we have going on. Do you remember the last time you wanted to buy something and then you automatically saw that product anywhere out there?
For instance, you wanted to buy a car, a specific type of car, a model that you haven't thought of before, all of a sudden, you see it all over the road, right? Same thing here with this example. Same thing here with neural networks. That's what happens. Think about something .And then the brain finds evidence.
Now think about it this way, a neural network that was formed when you were five years old starts gaining evidence from that day onward until you're about 35, 38, whatever age you are right now, and all these years of collecting evidence just make you really, really sure of that knowledge, thought, wisdom that you think you have might not be the truth. It's just a neural network, sometimes we're not even aware of those neural networks.
Think about the last time you saw two people with different religious views having a debate, and each one was trying to convince the other of their views, which was supported by evidence for years, maybe decades, but no one actually convinced the other, the other way, right?
It almost never happens, why? Because we all have our own evidence in life. Same thing when we drive somewhere, take a right here, we take a left by the palm tree, and then we take another right and we take a U-turn by the gas station.These are evidence that now we need to take a U-turn or a right turn or a left, and that we know where to go.
Same thing here. Our brain looks for the evidence and builds its case with neural networks. And these neurons that are firing and wiring are those beliefs that we have in very small micro doses. Ba, ba, bam, bam, bam, lighting up, as soon as some external stimulus comes in our system. And then with the fraction of the fraction of the fraction of the second we give it, meaning what happens is those neural networks, fire and wire, and then send that message to the Amygdala, where feelings are formed, actual chemicals are dropped. Imagine this kind of small device that now drips small drops of chemicals inside our brain. This is actually what happens, and that's how feelings are made. When those feelings, chemicals are dropped. Actual chemicals are dropped in our brain, that's when feelings happen.
That's what moves us to action in almost everything that we do in life. Now, here's the thing. We don't control our feelings. We don't control the external stimulus. What do we control in life then? How can we not move about just like robots, you know, determine how we were kind of wired and programmed when we were kids?
The only thing that we can control are our thoughts and starting to change neural networks. Actually, it's starting to build new neural networks on top of the existing ones that we want to change. Now, some of us have definitely not come from a house that grew us to take care of money properly or to think about money properly, or to think about relationships properly, or whatever it is we want to fix in life.
All of us have what to fix in life. I bet that you can think about a couple things that you probably want to fix or optimize in your life. Think about what those are for a second. Is it finances? Is it relationships? Is it spirituality? Is it wellbeing? Is it your health? Your mental health or your mental fitness as I like to call it, or is it your physical health?Whatever it is you want to level up in.
And by the way, I have another video for how to level up your physical fitness. You can watch it. I'll just link to it somewhere around here. So whatever you want to fix, whatever belief system you have that you want to rewrite, you can do that. So that's the good part about it.
So the good news about limiting beliefs in our belief system is that we can change, but it will take massive action and you need to do it properly. So this is one aspect of how affirmations work, why we need them, is we want to change and we want to rewire or rewrite some of those beliefs that we have.We wanna optimize our belief system to believe that we can achieve greatness, to believe that we can achieve our true potential.
So that's one aspect, the second aspect is our inner chatter. Surround the same age that our belief system is formed, also our inner chatter. Think about it.
Think about how many conversations you have in every single day and what is the percentage that you have them with other people, and what is the percentage that you have them with yourself? You probably have way more with yourself, right. And who is that person talking to you? Well, turns out the person that's talking to you, probably in most cases, according to studies, is the voice of your caregivers when you were a child.
Most people never change it in their lifetime. So if you took something out of this video, this is one of them. If this hits you, please comment yes or some kind of emoji in the comment that would mean the world to me. Just don't know that you are here and actually watching this. And if you're listening to it, please stop for a second, send me a message to share on social media and say yes, because it's important for me to understand that you are getting something from this as well.
So our inner chatter was formed when we were a child, when we were by our caregivers and you can read more about it in the book Chatter, which is a great book, and I really recommend I link it in the description here. So that inner chatter, in most cases, it might be okay, but it has a lot of optimization for most of us.
Some of us are too hard on ourselves. Some of us are just really mean to ourselves. Some of us yell at ourselves. It turns out we have different kinds of inner chats. Every one of us came up differently. For me specifically, I was a bit hard on myself. That was for me, like I'm still a bit hard on myself and that's not because anybody was hard on me.
It's actually because the way some of my caregivers were hard on themselves, and it took me a long process to understand that. But I came to understand that, oh my God, this is for me. This is what I have to optimize. So one tip for that, besides affirmations by the way, is to talk to yourself in third person.
And a lot of professional athletes and people who got great achievements, claim to be talking to themselves in third person, including I think Muhammad Ali and all the big stars. That's in order to achieve greatness, you kinda have to coach yourself. So that's the inner chatter piece. So those are the two things we want to make sure we change with affirmation. Now let's get to how affirmations actually work, that we put this behind us, alright.
Affirmations work by you, repeating thoughts or something you wanna instill in your subconscious multiple times. Hopefully you are reading it out loud. The reason you wanna read it out loud is because we as humans, we tend to learn and understand that we understand better by the ears. Like whatever we hear coming through our ears into our brain.
That's why in many relationship coaches say that when you talk to your spouse, you should say, okay, I hear and understand what you say, and then you repeat what they said to them so they would understand that you understood them. So that's kind of like how we do that. We understand by listening, and so when we speak it out loud, we hear it better. It gets into our thoughts better.
Now, at the first, when you start reading, your affirmation is like you usually wanna work on a belief system that you want to break, write on some kind of belief, limiting belief or anything that you wanna work on. So you write the proper positive belief.
And if you want to, again, Affirmations & Co, download the app, get in there. You'll get a lot of ideas for how to write your affirmations, including like from real people. You'll see my affirmations as well. You can just go to my profile and see what affirmations I have there so you can just basically copy it with one tap and so if you get to a point where you are reading it out loud, the first process is not to believe it.
Your neural network that has been developed over years and years and years, that is actually not agreeing with that belief that you wanna instill would say, oh, nevermind not, no, not you. No, no, no. That's not real. We have evidence to prove that this is not real, that this is not you. We have evidence . And so the way for you to get over that hurdle, , and by the way, this is a tip for anyone who tried affirmations and it didn't work for you. Think about it like that. You tried, it didn't work for you.
So what are you doing now? Now you have to get over that hurdle, okay? You have to understand that this is what your body, your mind, your thought process is trying to, is basically fighting against this new belief because it doesn't believe it, why? Because, well, your neural networks are like, that's not true. We have evidence against that, we have evidence Sagi. Again, no, no, no, you're not good with money. No way.
And so it can eat at you. What you have to do is go through that process where you repeat it over and over and over, and you instill it in your new neural network on top of the old neural network. So it says it takes about 21 days, and I'm sorry for not really being accurate, super accurate, I'm not a scientist, but as far as I learned, it takes about 21 days in order for new neural pathways to be formed to be the same as the old neural pathways. And for a new neural network to actually take over, it's like 64 days.
And so this is what I have for you. You have to get over that hurdle, where you repeat it over and over, and at the beginning, you won't believe it. Slowly but surely, you'll not even need to believe it because now that new neural pathway is just starting out, and now it's starting to collect evidence without you even recognizing it. It's gonna just start automatically. It's gonna start collecting evidence. So what you wanna do is just let it do its thing.
Let your brain work for you. Just show up every day and repeat the affirmation. Be sure to repeat it every day. Don't work on too many affirmations at once. By the way, I use Affirmations & Co also for gratitude lists. It's not only for affirmation, I have gratitude lists. I have prayers and specific affirmations before sales calls for mornings, for evenings, it can create like different lists.
But work on a few beliefs at a time, just like very small few, if not even one at a time. And then what happens is it starts getting to your subconscious mind, and that belief system is starting to actually work out. And you start finding evidence, which goes to a subconscious mind, where then you can actually, by reading out loud something that you wanna read out loud in one take, you change your inner chatter on how you tackle yourself because that's how you wrote the affirmation in the first place.
And then you also create a new belief that is going to show up for you and collect evidence over the years. So that's the way for me to explain how it works, and that's what people are not saying affirmations don't work. You won't believe them, of course, you won't believe them at first. You have to do that inner work. It takes a very large amount of effort to change a belief system that was formed over years and years and years. But if you do the work, it'll basically pay off. It'll pay off big time in your life and it will pay off with every single belief that you want to change.
So it goes for all aspects of life and it's across the board life changing. So if you have any questions, post them in the comments. I would love to hear it. Post them on social media. Send me a dm. I wanna know that you're here and getting value, and I want to help you build the information in a way that I can basically make sure that I actually help change lives.
That's why I created this app in the first place. So go to Affirmations & Co. You can go to affirmations.co. Just search the app store for Affirmations and ampersand, Co. Get the app, follow me, or you don't have to follow me, but you can just basically tap on my affirmations and make them your own.
Whatever affirmations you put out there in the app is now public for people to also tap and create their own. Or you can make it private as well. You have an option when you post your affirmation. So thank you so much for watching this. I hope you got value. If you did, please subscribe, follow, like, give a review.
If you're listening to this on Apple podcast or where not, it means the world to me. So thank you so much and hope you change your life with affirmations. I have definitely, and I'm keeping and changing my belief system in life. Hope you do too. All right,cheers!
Hey guys, what's up? Sagi here. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, please rate us on Apple Podcast and on Spotify. It only takes a second. And remember, this podcast is brought to you by Affirmations & Co, the app for affirmations.
If you want to change your life, if you wanna crush the meeting beliefs, if you wanna change your inner chatter, you need affirmations. I use affirmations on a daily basis, and that's why I created this app. In the app, you can set reminders to have your affirmations sent to you via push notifications. In the app you can set widgets on your iPhone or on your device. In the app, you can follow me and other creators and entrepreneurs, and basically you can see my affirmations and with one tap, you make them your own. Let's build with each other. Let's build on top of each other and help each other grow together. So get Affirmations & Co.
You go to affirmations.co. You'll have the download links, or just go to your favorite app store and search Affirmations & Co. All right guys, thank you so much and see you next.