I fear for people who buy into a course or book and then left to their own judgement. They don’t yet have the experience.

Questions I often ask are:

a) where are the experts who are supposed to mentor their clients?

b) do these experts really care and provide the proper support for the users of their teaching products?

I know of many successes personally but I also know of many more people who give up on self affirmations simply because of the lack of the 2 points above.

I find that it is the care, the mentorship, the friendship…in short, the support from real live warm people that works best.

Personally, I believe that most productive people who have high degrees of a sense of self worth and accomplishments do actually make affirmations to themselves habitually, but this doesn’t happen in an orchestrated method, but it more of an organic process. What if instead of being verbs, people tried active verbs. per your example, a person may love being slender or healthy, but that doesn’t necessarily make them slender or healthy. Affirmations should built on action that leads to some sort of satisfaction. Instead of looking in a mirror and saying it, think it when you wake up, while having breakfast and doing your normal routine. Instead of thinking something along the lines of “I am slender (or whatever)” think “I’m going to” use the stairs or eat something that is good for me or something like that.

Affirmatation-building goals that lead to steps toward a desired development. Another thing this does is remove the “self” from the thought. Take yourself out of the center for a little bit and put something else there. Studies in happiness of both people who do religious activities and of those who engage in community and social activism (I’m in the middle of a post on this) show that when people are engaged in thinking of doing positive things that take the self out of the center, and especially when it’s built on a structure of tangible activity, they have much higher senses of self worth and self respect. I think that this could possibly be repeated even in self image issues. Instead of looking at yourself standing there and saying it, use that great gift we have: imagination, and picture yourself doing and behaving in the way you think lives up to that image and keep it realistic enough that you might actually do what you picture during the day. The thing about low self esteem is that it has knock-on negative results.

A person with low body image or esteem issues may drink too much or smoke or do participate other destructive habit. These become habit. An overweight person who is fixated on this may decide what’s the use? and add to the problem by over indulging on unhealthy food options. Tie it to action: I’m going to … today because I’m worth ….. Make it manageable and realistic so there’s a higher potential for a sense of accomplishment to build upon, but put the emphasis on the activity and not the self, because the value adjustment is then on a vastly different scale.

Anyway, them’s my two bits on that.

Big fan of Al Franken here