Affirmations To Improve Your Life

Affirmations or self-talk have long been recognized as a way to affect the way you look at and interact with the world. Affirmations affect both the conscious and unconscious mind allowing you to plan and sink ideas and actions into your life almost unnoticed.

Emil Coue is credited with popularizing affirmations with his famous 'everyday in every way I'm getting better and better.' In reality affirmations have been around almost forever. Consider these verses from Proverbs 4:

20 My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. 21 Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. 22 For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.

Keep them in the midst of thine heart! Proverbs is promoting the idea of scripture as affirmations and keeping them in your heart. This is the whole idea:

1. State desired thought/action in a positive way.
2. Repeat.
3. Keep it in your heart, in other words keep it in mind all the time.
4. Keep to a single theme in your affermations for a few days or a week. Keep it short and repeat.

If you suffer from negative thoughts, create or find a good affirmation to replace it. Some people use Bible Quotes: Norman Vincent Peale in "The Power Of Positve Thinking" gave several scriptures for this purpose. Notably Philipians 4:13 - "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."

I like to record about a minutes worth on a common theme and then loop the playback with Real Player or ITunes. You can read more about it and download free affirmations at the Fitness and Health blog.

There are lots of resources on the web and many want to charge money for affirmation recordings but there is no need to pay. The formulas are very simple and you can do it for yourself. If you don't have audio recording software, try Audacity - it's open source and free. It should be able to do anything you need.

Here's where to find Audacity and the basics of how to install it:

1. Download Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/latest/audacity-win/audacity-win-1.2.6.exe
2. Execute and follow the prompts
3. Download lame: http://www.rarewares.org/dancer/dancer.php?f=226
4. unzip it and save the file lame_enc.dll to C:\Program Files\Audacity. Ignore the rest of the zip contents.
5. The first time you use the "Export as MP3" command, Audacity will ask you where lame_enc.dll is saved. Point it to: C:\Program Files\Audacity

That should do it.

Remember keep it short (about 1 minute). Keep it positive. Repeat.