Affirmations

[alexlaguma]

Interested in hearing other members views on the use of affirmations / positive thinking / manifestations.

I know 'manifesting' has become a bit of a social media buzzword these days. And its kind of been taken over by girls posting silly insta quotes about manifesting your reality etc.

Does anyone here attribute any of their success to affirmations or manifesting? I'm interested in hearing if anyone truly believes in the power of it.

Note - I'm NOT suggesting or hinting that this stuff is a alternative to taking ACTION, which I believe is the most important thing in success with women (and in life generally). Just curious about people's thoughts on this topic.

 

[Chase]

@alexlaguma,

Affirmations don’t usually work for me at all. But maybe it’s because I can’t believe them? I just feel like a goof repeating something to myself that isn’t already true… and if it is already true, I don’t need to repeat it to myself. Pretty extensively field-tested… I had a stretch of about four months straight of daily affirmations and they did nothing for me at all.

That said, I know some folks swear by them, so I assume this is just a “different wiring” type deal. Maybe folks who are especially aural are impacts a lot by these. Or maybe it is replacing negative self-talk for them. I totally axed negative self-talk in my brain back in college so it’s basically either positive stuff in my head or just nothing.

Visualizations though… now that I can endorse. I just talked about one example a couple weeks back. Another guy on the thread (Kezarin) replied he'd had similar "manifestations" of girls. Several times in life I've kept a vision board with a girl with a very specific super hot look I want to meet, and done 10 minutes of daily visualizing meeting the girl, having a great convo with her, instant magic spark, and sure enough, a few months in, I meet a girl who looks like she popped right off the vision board and her receptiveness is off the charts.

I did use a kind of affirmation for business where I was writing down a daily income goal every day a bunch of times in a notebook. I'd be writing for like 10 minutes every morning. Did it for maybe 3.5 months. About a year after stopping I hit that income goal then surpassed it and stayed up there for a good while. (then when things started going back down I tried setting an absolutely absurd income goal that was way too high for where I was at and repeated the process... didn't work. You've got to pick something that is in-reach)

I tried the Jim Carrey thing where you write a check to yourself, back in 2012. Made it an absurd amount and dated it 2 years out. Did some silly stuff to make it more memorable (threw the check into the ocean and let the waves carry it back to me... lol). Didn't work; never got that ridiculous payout. I still have the check somewhere... but who knows. Maybe it just takes longer than you hope! Or maybe you need to obsess over that check more. Carrey said he carried it around in his wallet; maybe he was looking at it all the time and really focused on it or what have you. Me, I just tucked it away somewhere and looked at it once every couple months.

Anyway, my experience has been that a.) if the goal feels reasonably attainable given where you are at, and b.) you commit to 10 or so minutes of serious, focused imagining attaining that goal, a lot of the times it will happen sooner or later.

My guide to visualization is here with more detail:

5 Steps that Let You Visualize Anything into Reality

If you're the kind of hard-nosed, stubborn-headed realist I am, things like visualization usually sound like some kind of hippie-ish New Age flimflam to you the first 10 or 12 times you hear about them. That's how it was for me anyway, and I'd always laugh a little and shake my head dismissively...

www.girlschase.com

Chase

 

[alexlaguma]

Thanks @Chase

This is the type of detailed and specific response I was really hoping to get.

Currently I don't practice anything regularly in terms of affirmations, positive thinking etc. Although I meditate regularly, that is very much focused on clearing my mind rather than filling it up with anything.

I had a similar experience with financial goals. A couple of years back I wrote down how much I wanted to be earning by the end of the year. I didn't include anything specific in terms of how I would earn it, but I just wrote down a target income. It was realistic but a significant jump on what I was earning at the time.

Pretty much every day for a few months I would read over my financial goal with the aim of convincing myself it was coming. Well anyway I didn't achieve it that year and kind of gave up with the affirmation. But then mid-way into the next year I ended up reaching that financial goal (and actually going significantly beyond it).

Hard to say if there was any direct correlation between the two (affirmations and achievement of goal) but I'm open minded about it.

 

[Chase]

I had a similar experience with financial goals. A couple of years back I wrote down how much I wanted to be earning by the end of the year. I didn't include anything specific in terms of how I would earn it, but I just wrote down a target income. It was realistic but a significant jump on what I was earning at the time.

Pretty much every day for a few months I would read over my financial goal with the aim of convincing myself it was coming. Well anyway I didn't achieve it that year and kind of gave up with the affirmation. But then mid-way into the next year I ended up reaching that financial goal (and actually going significantly beyond it).

That's cool.

Hard to say if there was any direct correlation between the two (affirmations and achievement of goal) but I'm open minded about it.

I tend to think there's a large degree of "self-fulfilling prophecy" in life.

You train your mind to focus on various things, good or bad, then cause those things to happen through your various actions, behaviors, and so on.

Like, the guy who thinks no woman wants him... I have taken these guys out in the field and you will see girls signaling to these guys, but they are completely oblivious to it. The guy has been alone for years because he doesn't approach women and doesn't look for signals because what woman would ever want him? If a guy like this started visualizing beautiful women signaling him and wanting to talk to him for 10 minutes a day, he would gradually start to notice it, and then gradually it would be like he manifested into his life all these beautiful, interested women. Even though they were there the entire time.

It's a similar thing with business. I've been doing business visualization + a few other things for a few weeks again recently and it has me much more focused than I was, hustling harder, and discovering all these little opportunities everywhere. All this stuff was there before... I just wasn't focused on it and my mind was filled with a bunch of other stuff.

If you ask me, aside from any supernatural "tap into the ether" "bend reality to your whims" type woo-woo (which, I mean, I'm open-minded about all sorts of stuff, and I actually do think the conscious mind affects reality... but I don't think anyone will ever prove that either, for various "cosmic integrity"-type reasons), the biggest benefit of the various affirmation/visualization/focusing exercises is that they channel the brain's attention in specific directions and train the brain to keep a much closer eye out for opportunities, then pursue them much more confidently and aggressively.

Chase

 

[FAB DRONES]

Mantra

 

[TwoNameGame]

Fun fact; swear words are held in the "aggression" part of your brain, not the language part.

I sometimes use sayings to motivate me to get a little extra juice out of what I'm doing. This isn't an affirmation so much as something I say out loud to myself. Some words carry emotions just from saying then, so they swing my mood a bit.

If I'm on the fence about approaching, telling myself, "You hesitate, you masturbate" to get myself started. If I'm too worn down to walk, I say, "To world's end" and that lets me push on a little longer. Stuff like that.

It doesn't get the ball rolling, but it gives it a final push down the hill.

 

[Kaida]

It's a similar thing with business. I've been doing business visualization + a few other things for a few weeks again recently and it has me much more focused than I was, hustling harder, and discovering all these little opportunities everywhere. All this stuff was there before... I just wasn't focused on it and my mind was filled with a bunch of other stuff.

Off topic, but could you go in detail about what you were visualizing?

I’ve been trying to do something similar to kickstart my business motivation but I’m probably going about it wrong.

 

[Chase]

@Kaida,

Off topic, but could you go in detail about what you were visualizing?

I’ve been trying to do something similar to kickstart my business motivation but I’m probably going about it wrong.

Well, I generated an AI art image of myself smiling with a bunch of gold coins in a bank vault giving a pair of thumbs up, and slapped an "in the bank after taxes" goal on it for the end of the year. That's my vision board

Then I sit down for 10 minutes first thing in the morning, alternately stare at the image or shut my eyes, and visualize:

• Helping so many people and having such an amazing positive impact that more success than ever floods in
• Running a totally effective, streamlined, optimized, airtight operation, winning in every direction possible
• Me being constantly energized, hustling hard to make all these various projects & endeavors come to fruition
• Checking the bank balance at the end of the year and it's topped the target amount with all taxes and obligations paid off, basically all just "victory money" from doing stuff I believe in and building out useful/helpful things

The book Psychic Development for Beginners recommends (I think this is where I got it from) that if you are going to visualize business/monetary success, don't just visualize the end-goal success, but visualize the process getting there: the business you build, the raving customers you help with awesome products & services, etc. IME this helps you stay focused on the process and energized about making the small gains you need to eventually pile up into big wins.

Chase