Why Affirmations Don’t Work
and how to engineer your own wellbeing
I watched a lovely woman on the Today Show this morning. She was promoting her new book. It was about finding Joy, contentment, a wonderful life.
I don’t remember what the book was called. She looked very happy. Her story started with a seemingly wonderful life where discontentment was the star of the show. So, she picked up her family, sold all of her worldly possessions and moved to another continent in search of the wonder that she was craving.
It didn’t work.
She admitted it to millions of people on morning television. She arrived to somewhere new and there she was, as an old friend of mine used to say, “wherever you go, there you are.” And then, in the quiet of her morning coffee, she discovered a new path, perhaps a cure for her discontentment and she began a ritual of morning affirmations.
She became a new person in a moment of seeing that she could, in her own thoughts, in her own consciousness find a new experience of life.
The TV anchors didn’t quite buy it though. They could see a deeper truth. That we all live in the feeling of our individual thinking. That affirmations over coffee don’t work for everyone. Drink decaf she said when asked what about those who get jittery from coffee. “I don’t…