Visualizations and Affirmations. How to Really Make Them Work

A couple of very important tools in every successful personal development practitioners toolbox are Visualization and Affirmations. Unfortunately, as common as these two tools are, very few people really learn to use them properly.

I am always looking at finding ways to tweak the effectiveness of my visualization time and I’d like to share a couple of things with you today that might help you get a lot more value from saying affirmations and doing your visualizations.

First, let me tell you a little story about an affirmation that almost drove me mad earlier in my business career. Just over ten years ago I worked for a financial services company and my manager was heavily into personal development books and courses. Around that same time I was beginning to get into personal development as well. I read books like Think and Grow Rich as I worked on building my business.

A couple years later I made the decision to leave that field of work and get back into the technology sector I used to work in and I began working with a different company. Switching careers and getting back into the technology sector forced me to kind of start from scratch again and begin building my way from the bottom of the corporate ladder up. I began to make progress really quickly and I very rapidly moved from a programmer position to a leadership position within the company all the way up to an executive management position within the company.

My role advanced and changed very quickly, but the one thing that was really bugging me was the fact that no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t get past making more than $3,000/month. Soon I began to believe that the only way I could get past that income level was for me to get into an ownership position where I owned the company I worked for and then I could pay myself whatever I wanted. So in a short period of time I actually bought the company I was working for and I thought that would solve all my problems.

Well what happened next was really bizarre. Through a series of events that kept happening over and over again, it turned out that regardless what happened in the company I was running, no matter how much sales we did in a given month, no matter whether I was working 8 hours or 12 hours or 16 hour days (yes I actually used to work 16 hour days 6 days a week) or how much growth we experienced, things always just turned out in such a way that expenses would come up out of nowhere and somehow at the end of the month the most I could pay myself as an owner of the company was $3,000/month. The first few months of this I thought nothing of it, but after a while I began to grow really annoyed with this “glass ceiling” that I was smashing my head against being stuck at a $3,000/month income level.

The worst part of it was that now that I was the owner of the company, there was nobody above me to blame for it!

Then, one day I was cleaning out a closet at my house and I came across an old journal I used to keep from a few years back when I used to work for that financial services company I mentioned earlier. I was just flipping through that journal, reading about all the stuff I used to learn about personal development when I came across a page that almost made me drop the journal. I was stunned.

There was this one page, where a few years earlier, I wrote out an affirmation that said “I make $3,000/month.” You see, at the time $3,000/month was a decent goal for me and I wanted to hit it so I said and visualized this affirmation over four hundred and sixty eight times over a period of seven days. The thing is, at that time the affirmation didn’t materialize for me immediately so I just dismissed affirmations as something that doesn’t work and so I completely forgot about it. It was just this forgotten journal entry that I didn’t think about or remember until the day I found the journal a few years later.

Well guess what happened next. I immediately changed my affirmation to a bigger number setting my income well into the six figure range and immediately within a few months my income blasted through the $3,000/m mark and into the six figures per year.

Since then I’ve known just how powerful affirmations are at conditioning our hidden subconscious beliefs and just how powerful hidden beliefs are at shaping our lives.

If you’ve experimented with visualization and affirmations and haven’t gotten the results you wanted, let me give you a hint that might help you get better results from them. Here’s the hint: Make sure you’re using the same modality that your subconscious mind uses to talk to it.

You see, affirmations are subconscious things. They work by conditioning your subconscious mind to believe something. However, what most people don’t realize is that their subconscious mind is biased towards one type of modality when it records things. What is a modality? Let me explain.

Modalities are broken down into all your different senses, but the three main modalities people typically record their lives through are Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic. Some people have minds and subconscious minds that work visually, meaning they have to see something to actually get it and record it. Others are auditory so they need to hear it or read it in order to actually get it and record it. Others still are kinesthetic people who need to touch and feel things to really get them and record them.

So lets say that your mind is visual, and lets say that you decide to say an affirmation like “I make $10,000/month.” over and over again in your head. How effective is that going to be? Probably not very effective if you’re a visual person, right? Imagine, or I should really say picture your subconscious mind as a video camera (with no microphone). It records your life as a series of images or video clips with no sound. So if your mind is recording pictures and video clips and you’re SAYING your affirmations verbally, the mind will record nothing but your lips moving. Not a very effective way to communicate with your subconscious mind, is it?

So what I’m saying is that if you’re a visual person, you may be better off printing off a piece of paper in big writing that says “I make $10,000/month” and sticking it on the wall where you can see it every day, than verbally saying an affirmation over and over again. Your video camera recording subconscious mind will then record the images of that piece of paper and that image will imprint itself onto your mind.

Now let’s say that you’re an auditory person. Would it be very effective to have pictures of your dream car on the wall? Probably not right? As a visualization or affirmation, you may be better off listening to an audio recording of the purring engine of your dream car as opposed to seeing a picture. If you’re going to have an affirmation like “I make $10,000/month” and you’re auditory, chances are your subconscious will imprint that affirmation a lot more strongly if you say the affirmation out loud to yourself over and over again as opposed to seeing a picture of it on the wall.

If you’re a kinesthetic person, you may need to actually print yourself a check and fill it out for $10,000 and put it in your wallet so that you can touch it and feel it every day. If you want to affirm that you have financial abundance, you may be better off holding a wad of $100 bills, even if it’s just Monopoly money for now.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Your subconscious mind is really the one that’s working for or against you here. It is the subconscious mind that you’re trying to affect and condition when you use tools like visualization and affirmations. Your subconscious mind records things in one of these three modalities. Learn to communicate with it in the modality that it records in.

If your mind is like a video camera, show it pictures and video’s instead of talking to it.

If your mind is like a microphone, talk to it instead of showing it pictures.

If your mind senses by touch, literally allow it to feel what you desire in some way.

For me, I’m mostly auditory with a little bit of visual. So what I do is I write out my affirmations saying them in my mind as I write them, and then I read them out loud to myself. That works for me. For others who are visual that might not work as effectively as drawing themselves a picture.

Try this out for yourself, and you may be pleasantly surprised just how effective visualization and affirmations work for you when you begin to utilize the proper modality for them.

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