Affirmations Part 1

DAM Monday January 15, 2001

Affirmations or what you say in the privacy of your own head.

Affirmations are the statements we repeat, usually to ourselves, over and over again.

Affirmations can be positive or negative statements, which have a profound effect on our daily life and the outcomes of many of our goals, hopes and desires.

To understand how to put affirmations to work for you first you need to understand the nature of “self talk.” By self-talk I mean the on going multiple, often times contradictory, and always repetitive series of conversations each of us carries on the inside our head. We all have voices and we all have more than one message being played over and over between our ears. The real key to understanding this is to begin to pay attention to those voices. So often we don’t realize we have given up or changed our mind simply because we played an old tape and acted on it without conscious thought.

Russian Sports Psychologist realized the importance of the voices in the early days of their sports psychology programs. The belief was great athletes have only positive thoughts and voices, while poorer performing athletes have mostly negative self-talk. What the Russian researchers found was great athletes hear negative thoughts as often as they hear positive thoughts. And the other athletes had the same number of positive and negative thoughts as the great athletes. So what was the difference?

Interestingly enough what the Soviets soon learned was the great athletes were only paying attention to the voices that were positive. Even though the negative thoughts were still going on the great ones had decided to tune them out and focus only on the positive.

Anyone who has a teenager understands how tuning out works.

Once the Soviets realized how athletes were succeeding with self-talk they devised exercises to train others to focus only on the positive. The exercise is so simple yet incredibly powerful. Here’s how it works.

Get two radios or tape players, identical is best but not necessary, and place them at opposite sides of a room.

Put a chair in the middle of the room between the two radios.

Adjust the volume of both so that they are the same.

Tune each radio to a talk radio station, a different talk station on each radio.

Now comfortably sit in the chair between the two radios and focus on listening to one station while tuning out the other.

If you have trouble at first turn the volume down slightly on one radio, this makes focusing a bit easier.

When you get good at this exercise you will be able to jump from one station to the other in a split second.

You now have the tools to control which voice you will pay attention to and be influenced by. So next time you hear yourself say “I can’t make that interval” choose to listen to the voice that says, “ Yes I can.”

Next week it’s time to create your own affirmations.

See you at the pool.
Bobby