Most people drive through life with their psychological emergency brake on. They hold on to negative images about themselves or suffer the effects of powerful experiences they haven’t yet released. They stay in a comfort zone entirely of their own making. They maintain inaccurate beliefs about reality or harbor guilt and self-doubt. And when they try to achieve their goals, these negative images and preprogrammed comfort zones always cancel out their good intentions–no matter how hard they try.
Successful people, on the other hand, have discovered that instead of using increased willpower as the engine to power their success, it’s simply easier to “release the brakes” by letting go of and replacing their limiting beliefs and changing their self-images.
Get out of your comfort zone
All three of these approaches will shift you out of your old comfort zone.
- You can use affirmations and positive self-talk to affirm already having what you want, doing what you want, and being the way you want.
- You can create powerful and compelling new internal images of having, doing, and being what you want.
- You can simply change your behavior.
Change your self-talk with affirmations
One way to stretch your comfort zone is to bombard your subconscious mind with new thoughts and images of all your goals as already complete. The technique you use to do this is called affirmations. An affirmation is a statement that describes a goal in its already completed state.
To be effective, your affirmations should be constructed using the following nine guidelines:
- Start with the words I am.
- Use the present tense.
- State it in the positive. Affirm what you want, not what you don’t want.
- Keep it brief.
- Make it specific.
- Include an action word ending with -ing.
- Include at least one dynamic emotion or feeling word.
- Make affirmations for yourself, not others.
- Add or something better.
A simple way to create affirmations
- Visualize what you would like to create. See things just as you would like them to be. Place yourself inside the picture and see things through your eyes. If you want a car, see the world from inside the car as you are driving it.
- Hear the sounds you would be hearing if you had already achieved your vision.
- Feel the feeling you want to feel when you have created what you want.
- Describe what you are experiencing in a brief statement, including what you are feeling.
- If necessary, edit your affirmation to make it meet all of the above guidelines.
* Source: The Success Principles by Jack Canfield