How To Use Affirmations To Boost Your Productivity

I acquired several skills and talents by changing the way I used affirmations and here is how you can too

James Ssekamatte
Mind Cafe
Published in
8 min readJun 3, 2021

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Photo by hp Koch on Unsplash

Many people( even me in the past) never pay attention to affirmations choosing to believe that it's “spiritual woo-woo” but the truth is, we all use affirmations to reinforce our beliefs and convictions in some way whether consciously or unconsciously. There is scientific research that talks about affirmations and shows the benefits of using affirmations. Many top performers from sports to business use affirmations to help them show up better to their work.

But most people that talk about affirmations only talk about positive affirmations. They tell you to affirm how awesome you are and as much as that is ideal and surely works for some people, such affirmations do not always work because, for most of us, they do not match with our existing beliefs. To put it clearly, Dr. Jeffrey Huber from Indiana University separates this idea into working and automatic memory. He says that the affirmations are just words that are in your working memory and to make them work effectively for you, they must be accepted into the automatic memory. This is what I mean when I say make your affirmations match with your existing beliefs.

If someone grew up being told how they are a worthless piece of dung and they’ve had experiences that seem to prove that idea, telling them that they are worthy is crossing the bridge before you get to it. They will most likely not accept that idea because the idea of being worthy is only playing in their working memory but it conflicts with the idea of unworthiness that occupies their automatic memory. For them to accept the new beneficial idea, that idea has to take up room and be accepted by the automatic memory. Then there is the other less talked about side of affirmations which is negative affirmations which operate the same way with the difference being that you fill your automatic memory with nothing but negative ideas.

The goal of this article is to therefore help you understand the different types of affirmations available, how to recognize which affirmation type suits you the best, and how to best execute it in your life to get you where you want to be.

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James Ssekamatte
Mind Cafe

Concerning non-fiction. I'm available for client work: ssekamatte76@gmail.com