24 Sep How To Make Your Positive Self Affirmation Work For You!

How To Make Your Positive Self Affirmation Work For You!

Do you have difficulty matching your positive self-affirmations with what you really believe?

For example, you say that you know God will meet your needs while at the same time excessively worrying about the loss of your job, or wondering how you will pay your bills.

Are you experiencing painful emotions such as anxiety and depression but at the same time you are confessing that you have found so much peace and joy in Jesus?

I’ll be honest: one common Christian spiritual practice used to counteract these emotions that bothers me is the use of positive self-affirmations.

What is Positive Self-Affirmations?

This practice suggests that if we say positive words over and over again, we will manifest, or cause to come to fruition, our desired answers. When this is the only practice you are using to counteract these painful emotions, this is a “quick fix” to complex problems. In other words, it simply puts a band-aid on the deep issues we face.

If we dig deeper, we’ll find that our perceptions and behaviours are rooted in the nonconscious mind. If what we are trying to positively affirm is incongruent with what we think in our hearts (or non-conscious mind), then that creates cognitive dissonance and internal conflicts. What we confess with our mouths has to match what we believe in our hearts to be effective.

Most of the darker emotions we experience, such as anxiety and depression, are created by cognitive dissonance and inner conflicts that arise when we ignore the junk in our hearts. If we fail to replace the lies we have believed in the past with the truth, then we continue to suffer emotionally and in our overall mental well-being.

The heart is the mission control center

The Word of God asks us to “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23, NIV). This means that our belief system is centered in our hearts, and our behavior is motivated by our belief system.

Proverbs 23:7 (KJV) tells us that, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”. This means that we are what we think in our subconscious, and this is why using positive self-affirmations at only the conscious level could be a dangerous practice since the conscious and the non-conscious mind are usually not in agreement.  

My Testimony: I hit rock bottom and then I found clarity

Romans 10:9 tells us that “if you confess with your  mouth “Jesus is Lord” and believe in your hearts that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (NIV).

When I gave my life to Christ on August 15th, 1993, I confessed to the above scripture and believed I meant it. What I did not know then was that my confession did not match my belief system. I experienced so much frustration because what I confessed with my mouth did not match what I really believed in my heart.

In reality, I really didn’t believe that Jesus was my Lord. I doubted who He was but pretended I believed like everyone I saw around me. I wanted to believe I was free because of Him, but I really didn’t feel free. What I thought would happen when I became a Christian, wasn’t happening.

After many years of professing positive self-affirmations while neglecting the underlying issues of my heart, I finally hit rock bottom.

The effects of many years of self-neglect, abandonment, people-pleasing, and trying to always be in control finally caught up with me. Not to mention my rocky marriage of over twenty years filled with abuse and mistreatment only deepened the emotional issues I was dealing with.

At this point, I did anything to hide my struggles and trauma in an attempt to please people which left me worn out, extremely depressed and anxious, and experiencing frequent passive suicidal thoughts and ideations.

Now I know that believing is a process that requires work! John 6:29 says that our work is to believe in Jesus Christ.

This indicates that we have to intentionally put in work to believe what God says in His word so that our beliefs can be in congruence with what we say. After many years, I joined a faith community where I could explore the root of my emotional beliefs in a safe space.

I worked out the root of my issues and started believing the truths I had been hearing about for so many years. I grew stronger in my faith and then was eventually able to help others receive the same healing.

Making Your Positive Self-Affirmations Work For You: The IRP Method

As the saying goes, what didn’t kill me made me stronger! My passion to help people align their belief system with what they confess with their mouths was born out of my own experiences trying to rid myself of cognitive dissonance and live a more aligned life.

I’ve dedicated my life to helping people identify their self-sabotaging behaviour, learn how to reframe their thoughts, and become Kingdom leaders. Through coaching, I provide tools and techniques to help reframe erred thinking into truthful thinking.

I use the IRP (Identify, Reframe & Practice) framework during coaching sessions, which I believe produces effective and true results. My testimony is a proven result that the IRP method works.  As aforementioned, when I used to have significant emotional, mental, and spiritual issues, going through the IRP method allowed me to become healed and start enjoying peace and joy while helping others do so.

The IRP framework is based on 2 Corinthians 10:5 which tells us that we must “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and…take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” In short, using positive self-affirmations in conjunction with doing the hard work of examining barriers to our faith, is a great way to experience true healing and consonance in your life.

This is How Positive Affirmations work:

1) Identify: identify the specific self-sabotaging patterns that you have formed and are now keeping you stagnant and hurting. These patterns are formed by the erred thoughts you have believed in the past

2) Reframe: After you identify and acknowledge the negative thought patterns, the next step is to reframe them. One of the best miracles that can happen in our lives is when we shift our perceptions from fear to love and from lies to truth.

3) Practice: Start practicing new thoughts. Practicing our faith is an ongoing thing. God asks us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).

We are instructed to not be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2, NIV).

So do not be afraid to dive deep into the destiny God has for you!

Be Blessed Believer!

Dr. Jane Wamucii

**Through coaching sessions with me, I will help guide you in your journey towards healing and breaking self-sabotaging patterns using the IRP Framework. Click here to start your freedom journal from self-sabotage to Kingdom Leadership