Last week on Live. Love. Engage., I talked about the power of our thoughts to direct our beliefs and actions. In this episode, I expand on that concept by explaining how you can use affirmations to transform your life in positive ways.
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Today on the Live. Love. Engage. Podcast:
- How you can use affirmations to rewire your brain’s neural pathways
- What role emotion plays in the affirmation process
- How Gloria used affirmations during her marathon training
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TRANSCRIPT
Gloria: Namaste and welcome. Welcome to live, love, engage. I am Gloria Grace Rand. And today I am going to be following up on the last episode that I did, where I talked about positive thoughts. And I want to go a little bit deeper into talking about affirmations. And how they can be used and a little bit about why they work, because I think it’s important.
[00:00:39] And I want to share with you how I’ve used them in my life, in a, you know, real practical way, actually. So, let me just to go back in and talk about a little bit. So I talked about in the last episode that I did by myself, where I talked about the positive thoughts, a thought is just a thought and a thought can be changed.
[00:01:07] And I mentioned that you can… when you’re having something in your life that is not working for you. And a lot of times it’s because we have these old stories and these old thoughts that are running through our heads that don’t serve us. And so one way to be able to rewire our brain, because that’s essentially what we need to do is we need to re rewire the neural pathways.
[00:01:36] And, I’ve, I’ve read, I’ve read a couple great books in the last year about, how the brain works. One of them I think was called making a good brain great. In fact, and it’s the thoughts we think, it… we… it creates these neural pathways in the brain. So when we want to change those, we have to start thinking new thoughts in order to start rewrite, rewiring, rewiring those neural pathways and affirmations are, are a positive and powerful way to do that. Why? Well, the more often that you can start either writing down something and saying it out loud, it, it does help to have your brain start focusing on that. Because number one, you’re focusing on something different.
[00:02:35] You’re focusing on a different thought, but some people find they, they discount affirmations and I’ve read people’s comments before where they said, Oh, you know, affirmations don’t work. Well, if you have an attitude that affirmations don’t work, guess what? That becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and sure, affirmations aren’t going to work. So the first thing you need when you’re going to do affirmations is to have an open mind and you could even affirm, my affirmations work. I know, sounds crazy. Right. But why not? Why not? As I’ve mentioned before, the brain doesn’t know the difference, you can just start affirming that all of my affirmations work out, whether I believe in them or not.
[00:03:31] How about that? In fact, I, yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere. Someone was talking about this and, and, and yeah, that’s what you can just say. I, you know what, my affirmations work out, whether I believe in them or not. I will tell you that it’s also good. The key element in having an affirmation work is to infuse it with emotion.
[00:03:56] So, if you were just saying, for instance, I want to be rich. I want to be rich. I want to be rich. No, I am rich. I should say, Oh, that’s the other important point. Affirmations are not wishes. Affirmations are statements of truth. And for them to be powerful and for you to truly claim them, it is important to use them in the present tense, because it’s not something in the future.
[00:04:26] You are claiming this now. And using, I am in particular, I am is God. For those of you who are, well, either Jewish or Christian, if you’re familiar with the Bible at all, you know that, Moses asked God to tell him his name to tell, to reveal his name. And God said, I am that I am. So when you declare something, because I believe that we are all part of God, we are children of God.
[00:05:10] So we, we can actually claim, I am. You can say I am rich. I am healthy. I am happy. I am joy. And when you’re doing that, you are affirming that spiritual part of you, and really it’s much more powerful and get back to the other part of that is to do it with emotion. So say, just truly hold it in your heart and absolutely believe with all your heart and soul.
[00:05:49] I am rich. I am rich. I am happy. I am joyful. I am wealthy. I am healthy. As opposed to I am healthy. I am wealthy. I am joyful. Can you tell the difference in my intonation and how one of that sounded a lot more convincing for one thing. So convince yourself of this by truly holding it in your heart and believing it.
[00:06:25] Now I said I was going to share a concrete example of how this works in action, and this may sound silly perhaps, but it worked for me. Years ago, I decided to train for a marathon to run a marathon. I’ve never actually really had never run in my life. I didn’t. Okay. Maybe I ran a little bit as a kid, but like I wasn’t in track in school or anything like that.
[00:06:59] I was a dancer. I did ballet and tap when I was a kid. I wasn’t, I didn’t go out running. But my mom, she passed away from heart, heart condition and the following year, I received a letter in the mail from the American Heart Association and they were offering a program called train to end stroke, and they were offering a program to help you train, to run the Walt Disney World marathon.
[00:07:28] So I decided that this would be a good way to honor my mom’s passing and take on this challenge to see if I could do it. So I did, I did. I started a program and I trained. And for those of you who may have ever trained for any type of long distance race, whether it is half marathon or a full marathon, which is 26.2 miles, it’s a lot and you do need to train for months and you’ve got to start and you have to gradually build up the amount of running that you’re doing. Now, I will say I did, I wound up doing a combination of run/walking because I wasn’t in the greatest physical shape and running was really hard on my knees. So I did run, I did follow the Jeff Galloway method. Google him if you don’t know him, but he talks about run/walking.
[00:08:28] Anyway, where am I going with this? Okay. Because you would go, some of these long runs would be in order to practice, you would be doing like 10 miles at a time, 15 miles at a time. 20, I think is the longest one that you would, we would do. That’s a long time. And especially for me, I was out there for several hours at a time because I wasn’t the fastest runner.
[00:08:57] I was probably averaging 12 minute miles. So if you do the math, you know, for 10 miles, that’s 120 minutes, I’m doing 12 that’s two that’s two hours. No, that seems, seems like it would take me longer. Anyway, I digress. But the thing was in order to motivate myself, I started doing, using mantras or affirmations as I was out there.
[00:09:28] And to keep my body moving. And I would say things like my legs are strong. My legs are strong. I have, I have energy. I have, I have energy to run for hours and hours, or I don’t even remember now exactly what it was, but I would repeat these things. Like my legs are strong. My feet are strong. My my ankles are strong and I would repeat them over and over as I was doing this running and walking.
[00:09:57] And it really helped. It helped keep me going because I was convincing my brain, that I actually was strong. And then I had energy to spare. And so I hope that gives you some idea of how powerful affirmations can be. And my advice to you is to just try them, try them out. And like I said, do it with an expectation that they’re going to work.
[00:10:34] If you go in with the expectation that this is silly and it’s not going to work well, then it really isn’t going to work. However, if you want to make some sort of change in your life, and to change it for the better, then give it a try. Another thing that I found that can be helpful is to write your affirmations, do it like 10 times, 10 or 20 times a day.
[00:11:04] And I’ve done that for, I’ve been in a program helping with money management or money mindset, I should say. And, and one of the things that we were doing was writing an affirmation. And I did it like 20 times a day for a whole week. And when you’re doing it that way, and you are really, again, when you’re writing this really feel the emotion of what you’re writing, it makes a difference and it, it truly can work.
[00:11:38] And it’s all about the attitude. It really is. It’s all about the attitude. Oh, there was a quote. I just looked up the other day and it was, what was the quote. Oh, something about attitude and altitude. Oh no. And now I forgot what it was. Let me see if I can look it up right now. Real, really quickly because… oh, aptitude and something like that.
[00:12:08] Okay. See, thank goodness for Google. An aptitude. There it is. There’s the quote. Okay. I’m going to get it to you. It says your attitude, not your aptitude will determine your altitude. Let me say that again, your attitude, not your aptitude will determine your altitude. So what does that mean? Well, to me, I would say it means that if you go into something, if you want to accomplish something, it’s your attitude.
[00:12:42] That’s going to be the 80%, 80% of it. Maybe even more of, of what we want to accomplish is, is depends on the positive attitude or, or whatever attitude you have, your mental attitude you have. Because that’s going to determine how well you’re going to do, because if you go into something and where you are again, not positive about it, or you go in with a negative attitude and say, Oh, this is never going to work.
[00:13:16] Guess what? You’re going to really have a tough time having something work, contrast that with if you go into some sort of challenge where you have a positive attitude, then it’s going to be a lot easier. You’re going to, I believe the universe will conspire on your behalf to, to get you through because you’ve gone into it with a positive attitude.
[00:13:44] I believe that’s what God wants. God wants to meet us, you know, is willing to meet us. If we’re, if we’re willing to go, at least halfway, God is going to help out, and God is going to pick up the slack and, and carry you through. But it really does depend on your attitudes. So, I think that’s going to do it.
[00:14:06] I think that’s going to do it for me for today. So I hope this has been beneficial and that you will give it a try. And if you do, I would love for you to let me know either in the comments, on my website, if you’re listening to this gloriarand.com, or liveloveengagepodcast.com, either way you’ll get to it or make a comment, leave a review on iTunes or Apple podcasts, I guess is how it’s called now.
[00:14:36] It used to be iTunes, but now they’re, they rebranded as Apple podcasts. Definitely let me know there because I would love to know how you’ve found this to happen. Or you can also connect with me on social media as well. You can find me @GloriagraceRand on Facebook and Instagram. It’s @liveloveengagewithGloriagrace.
[00:15:03] And so I would love to be able to see what you have to say about affirmations and a positive attitude and yeah, I guess that’s going to do it. So thanks for listening. Thanks for watching on YouTube. And until next time as always, I encourage you to go out there and live fully, love deeply and engage authentically.
