Affirmations or Ask-firmations how to make affirmations better
Popularized back in the ‘60s affirmations are something TONS of coaches, influencers and even psychologists will recommend their clients practice regularly. There’s science to back up the effectiveness of affirmations, too! After 60 years it’s worth asking, can we make affirmations better and the answer is, yes! Instead of a practice of affirmations, a practice of ask-firmations can make this practice even more effective. Before you read on we thought you might be interested in downloading our free guide: 70% of Entrepreneurs Fail – The 6 methods to make sure it’s your competition and not you! In this guide we walk through the most common ways professionals fail and most importantly provide you with immediate action items you can implement to make sure you’re ahead of your competition and successful! You can download the free PDF here. Affirmations are positive phrases or statements used to offset and challenge negative thoughts or beliefs. For those of us caught up in negative self-talk or looking to raise our self-esteem or create a more positive narrative of ourselves affirmations can be incredibly helpful. Research done in the 1980s as well as the last couple of decades shows the positive benefits of affirmations. They help to drive our self-identity and regular, consistent use of affirmations can shift how we think of ourselves. Talk about a powerful tool. After 60 years of popularity, it is worth exploring if simple affirmations can evolve and if we can level up the results we get from this practice. I first heard of ask-firmations from Coach Machen Macdonald, who joined us on our podcast. If you would like to hear him talk about ask-firmations you can head over to our podcasts here. Ask-firmations are another way of saying an affirmation. A traditional affirmation likely will have a clear formula of: Visualized and present tense, declarative sentences. For example: Today I am experiencing tremendous gratitude and am drawing my ideal clients to me. An ask-firmation on the other hand will rephrase this into a question formula: visualized and present tense, interrogative sentences. For example: How can I experience tremendous gratitude today and draw my ideal clients to me? Coach Machen isn’t the only one talking about ask-firmations, however. In one of my favorite sales books out there – To Sell Is Human, by Daniel H. Pink, Pink mentions the strength of ask-firmations. Both Coach Machen and Pink establish clear and logical rationale for an ask-firmation instead of an affirmation. Ultimately, affirmations are build me up declarations and ask-firmations are questions. The difference in how our brain reacts to being told vs being asked is immense. In sales, telling isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not all that effective. The best sales tools use good questions. This is because people respond MUCH BETTER to questions than they do to being told. What’s true about other people is also true about us. Asking ourselves a question about how we are going to make our traditional affirmation happen, does something to our brains. It makes us problem solve! By asking ourselves a question we are much more likely to try to reason out ways we can achieve our affirmation. If our affirmation is to experience gratitude and draw clients to us, we will start thinking about HOW we can experience gratitude and in what ways can we help our clients find us. The difference can be startling, and we encourage you to try this methodology out. Run an experiment and see if it’s a change that benefits you. For more direct help with changing your behavior and your mindset you can always contact us directly for our 2 on 1 coaching. This is a truly unique coaching paradigm marrying behavioral modification expertise with blue-blood sales and presentation expertise. You can contact us here! If coaching is on your bucket list but you’re concerned it’s not something you can afford, that’s ok! We offer scholarships to deserving individuals. You can request us to review you for a scholarship right here! Not a member of the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab yet? For direct access to JB, The Doc and a ton of other professionals you can connect with us personally in the EML, our FREE, private Facebook community.
The Anti-Resolution
There’s a lot of topics the Doc and I consider that falls into the space between the black and white, where there is no one right way to do something. In the case of resolutions, we have a rare instance where both of us agree, they just don’t work. We’ll write that again. Resolutions don’t work. The science backs us up. Only 19% of people will successfully achieve a resolution. Within the first month, 64% of people will fail. By the end of 6 weeks or 42 days, 80% will have failed. Why don’t resolutions work? Lot of reasons, the most common being: They are unrealistic We don’t have the tools to succeed in place We fail to track It’s why we believe in the anti-resolution. The anti-resolution is a belief that we need to have a strong vision, clear goals, and a commitment to disrupt the patterns in our lives and make small changes to our behaviors every day. The anti-resolution is not a one-day choice to make an extreme change to our lifestyle. The anti-resolution is a daily commitment and a journey that occurs every day throughout the year. To solve for this, we place our belief in the anti-resolution. The anti-resolution is built on the basis of our values. We value small incremental changes to modify behavior. We value small disruptions to our daily lives. We value repeating good behaviors and rewarding them regularly, in new and unique ways. We value the journey and the daily acknowledgement of growth, success AND failure. If you’re looking to make dramatic changes in your life and are sick and tired of your resolutions failing, here’s our best guidance for you! 1. Review your behaviors and what you want to change about yourself. Understand what it is you want to change and WHY it’s important for you to make that change. Make it a daily goal. 2. Commit to yourself to work towards making that change. Commit to hardening your resolve and facing the challenge on good days and bad. Commit to failing and still working towards that change. 3. Share that goal with your support system. Don’t have a support system? That’s ok, join us in the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab and we or someone we know will step up and be there for you to help support you and keep you on track, on the good days and the bad! 4. Disrupt the behavior you want to change. Eliminating our autopilot and breaking our patterns is an essential step in the process. Small disruptions work best for a long journey. It’s a marathon not a sprint. 5. Expect to fail and embrace it. Failure is part of the journey. If you didn’t fail, you probably didn’t change either. Accepting our failure and waking up the next morning to go back to disrupting the old patterns and building our new patterns will always be a part of the process. Remember, a .01 degree change every day will lead to a nearly 38 degree change over the course of the year. To hear more about goal setting for the New Year you can check out our most recent podcast here! You can also check out our vault of other blogs here. If one of your goals for 2022 is to be better with your time you may want to consider taking a look at our stand-along Time Mastery With Science course that helps you get back hours of time per day and maximize how productive you are this year. For more information on this course, check it out here.
Habits and Routines – Building An Unbreakable Life and Business
Every day you have to make decisions. Probably a good number of them. What if we told you that you only have the power to choose up to 5 good choices to make out of all of those decisions? How would it impact your decision-making? The reality is, there is no magic number of how many good decisions you make. However, there is a limit to your willpower and a definite limit to the number of good decisions you can make in a day. Sooner or later, when forced to make enough decisions, you’re going to run out of steam. Then the choices you make, instead of being good choices will end up being not so good, or downright bad. If this doesn’t scare you, it should! There’s a couple of ways to manage to this and we’ll talk about how to supercharge your willpower in another blog. Right now let’s focus in on habits and routines since they can help you avoid the problems that come from bad choices. So what do habits and routines have to do with making good choices? Nothing directly. But here’s what habits and routines absolutely can and will do for you to change your life and help you build an absolutely unbreakable life and business. Take a moment and imagine what your life would be like if you could always make the good choices and the hard decisions? If you want to get there, keep reading! Habits are automated behaviors. Routines are a touch more intentional and require some thought. Given time, consistent routines will become habit. Look at brushing your teeth in the morning. That’s probably a habit for you (we hope)! As a child, it was a routine that became consistent and over time turned to be a habit. Anything automated requires no thought. When it requires no thought, it doesn’t cost us anything to do it. No willpower, no choices, we’re doing it without thinking about it. The stronger our routines and the more good habits we have the less choices we need to make during the day. The less choices spent on those habits means the more focus you can put on choices that will drive your success in life and business. Over time, given enough focus on strong routines our habits will start to develop. These might be habits like: Getting enough sleepExercising regularlyExpressing gratitudeMeditationHelping othersSelf developmentMentorshipThe list goes on… By developing your strong routines you will, scientifically form better habits. Those habits will require no thought, no will power and will not take away from the decisions you need to make on other things. What does your day look like when you’re making all the best decisions for yourself and your business? How about your week and the month? Imagine a life where over 3 months, 6 months, a full year you are making great choices! Not because you’re superhuman and have the most amazing willpower in the world but because you don’t need to put effort into making all of the other choices that other people struggle with every day. That is the power of strong routines and good habits. To listen in to our inspiration for this blog, check out our conversation with Amy Rasquin of Bfit Health and Wellness. You can check out the full episode of the podcast here. Listen to Podcast If you’d like to connect with people like Amy or learn more about how to harness the power of habits and routines you need to join us in our lab where we provide awesome free content around subjects like these every day! You can request to join the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab right here! JOIN OUR FREE FB GROUP NOW! Join Now