Success in any field of life requires hard work and dedication. You may be inspired to live the life of your dreams, but without a clear plan you are unlikely to get to your dream destination. A business plan, natural talent and tenacity will take you a long way to achieve success in your life.
However the number one factor in whether you will succeed or not is your mindset. If you think you can achieve your goals, and if you can keep going through thick and then you have a higher chance of success in your endeavours and that is very much a result of the power of positive thinking. Goal affirmations can help keep your mindset positive and upbeat as you go about achieving your goals.
Goal setting invites challenges
It would be great to set a goal and then immediately achieve it and for some people maybe they have been lucky and that happened for them. But for the most of us, setting a goal is an invitation for difficult situations, accidents, setbacks and disasters to immediately appear. The road to your best life ever is not going to be an easy one but it will be a worthwhile one.
As Winston Churchill said, and this is one of my favourite quotes,
‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm’
Keeping a journal is also a useful tool in helping to achieve any goal. Journals help you keep track of your progress as well as your achievements. One of the great things about keeping a journal is that you can use if for any reason and for any subject matter.
This blog post explores and demonstrates ways in which you can use your journal to create and use your goal affirmations to ensure success in whatever goal you have set.
Positive mindset and goal affirmations
There are various ways to keep a positive mindset while you are working your way to success, such as creating goal affirmations for yourself.
Goal affirmations affirm the goal that you want to achieve. The way goal affirmations are phrased is that you express gratitude for them as if they are currently available to you. Goal affirmations are not the same as the law of attraction. With the law of attraction the idea is that your goals are attracted to you by your stating them out loud. Goal affirmations work on your subconscious mind to help you replace negative thoughts and create the perfect mental state in order for you to be able to do the work necessary and achieve the desired goal.
If you talk to successful people who have encountered difficult times and achieved big goals they will often say that their inner strength came from not giving up and from telling themselves every day, “Success is just around the corner”, or “Today a small step, tomorrow a business”, or “There is £1Million in my bank account waiting for me and I am grateful.” Even if they haven’t intentionally practiced goal affirmation they may have done so without realising.
Goal affirmations
An example of a goal affirmation is:
“I am so happy and grateful now that I am effortlessly depositing an extra $1,000 per month into my bank account.”
Goal affirmations indicate to the subconscious mind that the goal has already been achieved.
The power of affirmations
Creating a series of positive statements that you use regularly is a powerful tool.
This is how to get started:
Choose a journal – it can be plain and spiral bound or elegant and luxurious, it really doesn’t matter
Set your intentions – how many affirmations are you going to use? Are you going to rewrite them each day, say them out loud or read them
Create your affirmations – Either create your own affirmations or use your journal to collect favourite affirmations as you find them that resonate with you.
There is no right way or wrong way to create or use an affirmation. In general the shorter the affirmation the better. If it is longer, divide it into short sentences. We have an easy affirmation creation formula that you might want to use.
It might be useful to keep your affirmation creation formula in your journal for easy reference
Affirmation creation formula
I / I am + verb in the present tense with positive emotion + desired result
I love exercising each day to achieve my dream body
I am working hard each day to create my own business
Using your journal for goal affirmations
Use your journal to divide your goals affirmations into different categories. How you do this is entirely up to you. You could divide between long-term goals and short-term, you could divide between themes, home goals and work goals. Or you could have one work goal and divide it into different categories.
This blog post will take you through some different scenarios, offering you goal affirmations for each scenario. It will also help you set up your journal so that you can make these categories part of your goal winning routine. Positive goal affirmations, tracking perfomance and physical exercise are all great practices, but unless they become good habits and part of your daily life, they will not manifest the potential of their great value. Your journal will help keep you on the right track and facing the right direction to achieve your desired results.
Relacing negative self-talk with daily goal affirmations
What you say to yourself each and every day matters because it is received by the brain as fact. Over a period of a week (longer or shorter would also be fine), track your negative thought patterns, and write down specific thoughts that you have. Write down all the little things that you think hardly matter at all, as well as bigger thoughts that you think on a regular, daily basis that you might even think are true.
At the end of the week, write down all the negative phrases on the left hand side of your journal. And use the space next to each phrase, on the right hand side, to write the positive inversion of your negative phrase, using the formula listed above. This should give you a very powerful affirmation.
For example you might have thought:
I’m so bad at my job
I’ll never get this business launched
Now, turn those round, using language with lots of positive energy:
I’m so bad at my job = I am improving at my job each day
You don’t need to immediately skip to ‘I’m really good at my job’. But you could if you wanted. Keep repeated it and one day, you will believe it and it will be true.
I’ll never get this business launched = Each day I work on my business to get it launched
Create a list of motivational affirmations
Dealing with your negative self-talk is a first step to achieving your goals. Now it’s time for some straight out totally positive affirmations
Use these affirmations to feel them in your body and really embody them. It will empower you and help start your day in the right way. With thanks to Tony Robbins for this inspiration:
Straight out totally positive affirmations are for you to use each day to start your day. Tony Robbins talks about ‘state’ and these affirmations are going to get you in that positive state that will help you realise your full potential.
Every day, and in every way, I am getting stronger and stronger.
At last, at last, the past is past; I’ve broken free and won. And now it’s time to love myself and really have some fun.
All I need is within me now.
I love my life and I am so blessed.
I’m so happy, and I can’t stop smiling.
Day by day I live my life with happiness and harmony. I share my gifts, my dreams, my heart and love has set me free.
I confidently and easily achieve my monthly financial target
Curating your own list of motivational affirmations
Motivational affirmations get you motivated towards your goal. There are days when your goal seems far away, when even the most positive person will struggle to be positive. Use your motivational affirmations to get you back on track mentally.
The best way to do this is to set aside a double page spread in your journal for collecting and creating your own list of motivational affirmations. Give yourself some time to collect them. Take on affirmations that really mean something to you.
You can also create your own motivational affirmations which is great fun to do
For creating your own motivational affirmations:
- Think of the end goal, what does it look like. eg I’d like to earn $77k this year, or I’d like to be a millionaire in three years’ time.
- Start with ‘I am’
- Be very specific. If you want to earn $77k in one year, describe it in detail, eg
‘I am earning $6.42k each month, paying all my bills, having no debt, taking holidays, earning $77k in one 12 month period.
Top tip:
use -ing words, eg earning, paying, having, taking, earning. -ing words make it more real to your brain, closing the gap between your reality now and the reality you are helping your brain create, or rather your brain is creating!
Using goal mantras
Mantras are typically shorter than affirmations and are good if you want to repeat them during the day. They are typically written as if you are already experiencing what you desire. They are not as specific as goal affirmations, and they are spoken as if what you desire is already a reality.
Use I / a motivating adverb or adjective / be positive and use positive language
I create my own path and walk in it with joy
I deserve to find love
I am strong and getting stronger each day
Goal affirmations to help performance
Goal affirmations can be used to encourage you during the process of achieving your goal. They can also be used to remind you where you are in the process and keep you focussed on that area.
Using your journal the first thing to do write down the ways in which you want to track your performance for a specific goal.
For example, if you are creating a dress to go into a clothing collection you might track like this:
Design dress with sketches
Create dress in work room
Sell dress online
(this is a very simple list for example purposes)
The next level up is to write goal setting affirmations next to each stage of the process. Having goal affirmations to track your process will help you keep a right mindset through the life cyle of the project. At each step of the way will be accompanied by focus affirmations to help you succeed.
Eg for ‘Design dress with sketches’ the goal affirmation could be ‘I easily create 20 sketches in two days’.
The affirmation needs to have a goal attached to it. So the affirmation is not ‘I easily create 20 sketches’ but has the goal ‘in two days’ attached to it.
Writing these goals affirmations in your journal and using them every step of the way is one of the important factors in achieving your overall goal and ensuring you reach your ultimate goal.
I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and found it useful.
If you like this post you may also like:
Simple mindfulness journal prompts and exercises to appreciate life better
How to develop confidence using a self-love journal template
17 reflection journal prompts to get to know yourself better