You might already be familiar with the power of affirmations. They’re short, positive statements that you can read, repeat to yourself, or listen to from recordings. With affirmations, you can reprogram your subconscious mind to help you think more positively about yourself.
As Black people, we have face decades of institutional racism and policies that have treated us less than human. We must believe in ourselves and sure that we succeed at living our lives at optimum health, wellness, and self-confidence. Your self-confidence level might fluctuate throughout life because being Black in America, we are constantly faced with challenging situations. However, you have the power to build your self-confidence.
Although parents can encourage young children to believe in themselves, only you hold the keys to strengthening your confidence as an adult.
An example of an affirmation is “I am powerful and confident.” It doesn’t matter what your current state is; you can; achieve this state by repeating and believing the affirmation. Your subconscious mind will pick up on the statement and bring forth the new feelings and energy to empower you to achieve.
Understanding Affirmations and How They Work
Affirmations are suggestions and thoughts that you give to yourself and can be either positive or negative. As you give yourself these suggestions, you feed them into your subconscious mind, which ultimately helps your mental attitude.
Suppose you feed positive thoughts and suggestions into your subconscious mind. In that case, this will ultimately build a positive or optimistic mental attitude. When you constantly provide your subconscious with sound and happy ideas, your mind begins to accept these suggestions as reality because your subconscious cannot differentiate between your imagination and your truth. When you consistently inject positive ideas into your subconscious, it will start to trust them as reality, and it starts to work, producing similar thought patterns.
When your thoughts become positive, you start to become more optimistic about your life and the world around you. Your thoughts, after all, construct you. By thinking positively, you can empower yourself and build a healthy mindset and a healthy frame of mind that is always thinking of growth, development, and new ideas.
A positive mindset will give you the strength and courage to believe in yourself and follow your dreams. Additionally, positive attracts positive opportunities. When you create a positive thought in your mind, it moves out and starts drawing towards you helpful and constructive options to fulfill your goals.
Affirmations Can Change Your Life
When it comes to the world of affirmations, the only requirement is to approach it with an open mind. After that, you simply allow the statements to wash over you, and you can change your life all by yourself.
It may seem difficult at first, but the key is to get the affirmation into your subconscious mind. This is easiest when you’re just waking up or when you’re drifting off to sleep. These are moments when your conscious mind is less likely to interfere.
If you use the “I am powerful and confident.” example without an open mind, of course, your conscious mind will say, “Hey! “I am not powerful and confident.”.” Don’t get frustrated if your conscious mind likes to jump in a lot; eventually, the messages will make it to your subconscious mind.
Affirmations for Black Children
Affirmations are a powerful tool for Black children to learn how to create confidence, happiness, and self-esteem within themselves. Black children are not different than Black adults; they also face forms of racism and bigotry as children. It is our job as Black parents to empower them with the tools of affirmations to overcome opticals.
Children often rely on parents for these positive emotions and concepts. At some point, we all must take responsibility for these things ourselves. When we can create our own positive emotions, it’s much easier to make wise decisions and stay out of trouble.
Affirmations are perfect for Black children. Their brains are developing at a rapid rate, and their thought patterns are much easier to amend now rather than in adulthood. Effective mental habits and thought patterns developed now can set a confident child’s stage with their Blackness.
Taking control of one’s belief systems is easier for a 10-year old than a 50-year old. Consistently reaffirming positive beliefs at a young age can be enough to create and maintain those beliefs for a lifetime.
How To Use Affirmations
There are a few ways that you can choose to use your affirmations. First, concentrate on the things in your life that you want to change. Try to keep it simple by focusing on one at a time.
Typical topics are usually health, wealth, and relationships. You might use affirmations such as “I feel energized” or “I enjoy my job.” Write a few different ones that pertain to the same subject.
Then choose a time to repeat the sayings to yourself every day. You can even make a recording of yourself repeating the affirmations with soothing music in the background. This is especially helpful for using affirmations in the morning and at night when you have a more vital link to your subconscious.
Tips for writing your affirmations:
- Write them in the present tense because that’s the only way to improve your life in the present moment.
- Be short and concise to keep things simple.
- Read and write your affirmations when you’re calm and away from distractions.
- Remember to stay positive.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Make sure you keep up with your affirmations. If you don’t see results right away, try sticking with it for a while longer. Before you know it, you’ll realize that these short, simple sentences have improved your outlook, one thought at a time!
It isn’t easy to change how you see specific areas of your life or dig into complex and sometimes dark places. As you explore different affirmations to improve various areas in your life with growth and positive change, you can use them to impact them with patience and grace. Positive affirmations are a tool that you can use daily to help you relax or energize, focus, connect or release. It all depends on what you need and where you think you have to go. You have to trust your instincts, stay true to your path and stay positive.
You can teach your mind to re-write the narrative to your story. You can start at any place and move forward in the direction of your goals. And, if at any point, you find yourself off the path you were meant to head in, fix up a new affirmation and get going where you need to go. You have control over your thoughts, which means you have control over your actions. Your actions will then lead you to your reality, and this is how you can make fantastic things happen in your life. It all starts with your thoughts.
Now that you have learned how to make affirmations work in your life and your child’s life, as a family unit, it’s empowering to process your desires and goals to manifest; it is time to choose one and start repeating it to yourself, and your children can do the same. . The more you repeat it, the more it ingrains as the truth in your mind. When your mind believes it, your actions will live it. And when your actions live it, your reality, in turn, reflects it.
You can read more about Affirmations in Damon’s upcoming book titled. “ Affirmations to Reprogram the Subconscious Mind for Black Power”.
