Common Manifestation Mistakes–Affirm Intentions to Fix Them

Aspirations with the effort and cognition that doing so in the proper way can lead to positive outcomes one should affirm regularly

There are manifesting-adjacent emoji (the Nazar Amulet, which in many cultures’ folklore is believed to ward off the evil eye, is a favorite) and guides on how to create your own sigils, a personal motif often used in witchcraft. Perhaps the time has come to cut through the malarkey, get to what is actually happening, and decide for ourselves about this thing called manifesting.

Since manifesting can be understood as making aspirations with the effort and cognition that doing so in the proper way can lead to positive outcomes, the next logical question is “What are affirmations?”  Affirmations refer primarily to the practice of positive thinking and self-empowerment—fostering a belief that a positive mental attitude supported by affirmations will achieve success in anything.

Affirmations help!

As Tad Lusk reminds us, affirmations can help us:

• Build confidence
• Overcome stress and anxiety
• Empower yourself to take action
• Shift your mood from “meh” to “awesome”
• Improve your perspective
• Manifest goals for health, wealth, love and happiness (https://bit.ly/3JN62iL)

The best things to remember are that you need to keep things simple, keep things in the present tense, keep things positive, and of course feel the emotion.

Affirm specifically, affirm in present tense, affirm in the positive and Feel It!

Keeping things simple? Yes, don’t write a James Joyce novel with a thousand pages of stream of consciousness before you get around to what it is you actually want. An affirmation should be only one or two short sentences, easy to remember and easy to verbalize.

Keep things in the present tense? This isn’t eighth grade English class, but the first person singular is the only way to go. Instead of “I hope” or “I plan to” try “I am,” as in “I am going to have a day free of pain.” 

Keep things positive? Indeed. What this means is that you want to say “I am energized” rather than “I don’t want to feel fatigued.”

Feel the emotion? Certainement! As you make your affirmation, imagine that it has just come to fruition and as you say it, feel how great it feels. 

Those are the Do’s. There are also some don’ts. And they are just as vital.

Remember just a minute ago when I mentioned that you ought to let yourself feel the glory of the feeling of having what you want during the process of making your affirmation? Well, that is sound advice. While it is crucial that you understand the meaning of the words you speak, the emphasis should be more on the emotional content than the literal.

Keep things in the present tense. . . again. It is easy to slip into projecting into the future. “When I get to the point where. . . “ is changing your affirmation into a hypothetical and that can cancel it out.

Be precise. While you do not want to get bogged down in a morass of words and conceptions, you do need to avoid conditional statements and qualifiers. These are basically the same two things. When you say, “If Irving invites me to the dance, then I. . .” that is conditional: If this, then that. On the other hand, when you say “After the plane lands, then we will have rhubarb pie,” you are adding qualifiers you don’t need. Just have the pie!

Do not frame things in the negative. Instead of saying “I hope I don’t have that ache in my right elbow again today,” try instead “I am going to experience a healed and functional elbow today.”

Please do not make affirmations for things that do not actually matter to you. That might sound absurd, but you would be surprised how easy it is to get this wrong. If you are not invested in your affirmation emotionally and are instead just going through the motions (or worse yet, affirming something that you have internal resistance to), it is an empty exercise and will not work. Feeling is the language of the subconscious mind and what helps to truly install a belief, so you have to genuinely feel it.

Here is an example: Someone you respect tells you affirmations are great and that you ought to try them. Figuring you have nothing to lose, you decide you will give affirmations a try so that you can transform your life. But you are not totally committed to the idea that affirmations can really make a difference. As a result, you end up going through the motions and getting nowhere. You don’t take the time to identify your weaknesses and target your affirmations specifically to address these. Instead, you find some affirmation examples online that seem to fit the bill. You copy these for your list of affirmations.

Here is another example of the wrong approach. Some people actually want their affirmations to fail and–surprise!–that is just what happens. But why would anyone want an affirmation to fail? Perhaps a fellow thinks that he wants to quit smoking. He knows the cigarettes are killing him, everyone he knows has quit and his friends bug him so much about it there’s hardly any fun left in it for him.

So he affirms that today his lungs will be smoke free. And he fails. He fails miserably. He doesn’t even get out of the driveway before he lights up–not because he is a bad person or because he is delusional about the horrors of smoking cigarettes but simply because he is not fully committed to quitting. Without that commitment–about whatever the matter might be–you can affirm until you are red, white or blue in the face and none of it will matter. 

The important thing to keep in mind is that when other people tell you manifesting affirmations do not work, what that means is that they either have not tried them themselves or else likely went about the process unprepared. I hope this little guide helps prepare you.