“Think positive!” You’ve probably heard this advice, but you may not realize that affirmations, or positive statements, offer a powerful tool that helps you succeed as a writer and author. If the voice in your head offers more negative than positive feedback about your writing career, consider learning how to compose and use affirmations. This skill offers a powerful addition to your success toolkit.

I’ve had many critics and cheerleaders in my life. I don’t know who the biggest cheerleader for my writing has been, but I do know who’s been the greatest critic. Hands down. No contest. It’s the voice in my head. That critic is with me from the moment I think about getting out of bed in the morning until I fall asleep at night. He’s tireless, relentless, effective, and sometimes downright mean.

But he is just a mechanism, a “critic-bot,” if you will. Some mental coding that is programmed with a specific purpose, which I’ll tell you about in a bit.

First, I want to make you aware that you have an inner critic as well, a voice in your head that berates, criticizes, and distracts you. If you just heard a voice in your head say, “What voice? I don’t hear any voice. There’s just me in here,” that’s it! That’s the voice I’m talking about.

It’s sneaky and tries to convince you that it is you. It makes you believe the voice in your head is you speaking your truth. It’s not! You are not the voice in your head. You are the listener. You are the one choosing either to engage with that voice or think of something else that better serves your purposes.

Who is that Negative Voice in Your Head?

If that voice is not you, who is it? It is your brain doing its job. Specifically, it’s the lesson imprinted upon your brain from a physically or emotionally traumatic experience you had a long time ago. Your brain uses that lesson to keep you “safe” by constantly telling you not to do things like the actions that previously resulted in that traumatic experience. And its methods work, as evidenced by the fact that you are still alive and breathing—and not repeating behaviors that could cause trauma again.

This powerful evolutionary brain-based mechanism helped humans become, for better or worse, the now dominant species on Earth. This critic-bot evolved in prehistoric times when the world was full of mortal dangers for your distant ancestors.

Thus, ridding yourself of negative self-talk can’t be done in an afternoon. It is the force of evolution trying to keep you safe from mortal danger. Never mind that the inciting event was probably not dangerous at all—nor is the action you want to take now that has agitated that voice.

Your Internal Dialogue Impacts Your Ability to Write and Publish

Your internal dialogue can adversely affect any area of your life—including writing. In my life, the inner voice limits my health by repeating what I was told by well-meaning authority figures (like doctors) and any negative bodily experiences I had as a child. It restricts my financial freedom by repeatedly sharing the lessons I was taught about money and my value while growing up. It sabotages my personal relationships by reminding me of how lovable and likable I believe myself to be based on my experiences as a child and adolescent. It can, will, and has distracted me from writing this blog post and my book by using the same words chosen by my doctoral advisor, who severely criticized the first draft of the introduction to my thesis. I can still hear his anger…and his voice…in my head.

That’s in the past, as are the other examples I shared. Yet, the voice in my head continues to remind me of those experiences, impacting how I feel and behave. I know my doctoral advisor’s words—repeated in my head by that inner voice—stop me from writing. I don’t write as a means of keeping myself safe from criticism.

I could be criticized for my writing, but it is inconceivable that I would be truly harmed unless I choose to take such feedback personally. Yet, my brain keeps telling me I am in mortal danger.

Train Your Brain for Positive Self-Talk

I recently published my first book, Affirm Yourself – 15 Principles to Retrain the Voice in Your Head. I wrote this book for myself as a guide in retraining the voice in my head to repeat more positive and truthful statements that help me achieve my goals. These consciously selected ideas are commonly referred to as affirmations.

Acknowledging my affinity for alliteration, I named the default, negative self-talk awful-mations. They are the antithesis of affirmations.

Affirmations train your brain to positive self-talk, possibilities, and ways to achieve goals. Awful-mations do the opposite.

Some people believe affirmations are woo-woo nonsense. However, repeating positive statements can train your brain to provide the type of self-talk that helps you succeed as a writer—or in any area of life. There’s a lot of scientific evidence proving self-talk matters, which I’ve summarized in Affirm Yourself.

You Created Your Self-Talk and Can Change It

You wrote the current default script the voice in your head uses to berate and demoralize you. You crafted the script the way you did to reinforce the lessons you learned at an early age—lessons you learned before you could discern whether they were true or helpful. In fact, most of those lessons are not based on fact but on a perspective informed by your strong, negative emotions.

Now you know better! You realize that these awful-mations are false and harmful. So, you can change the script by writing and repeating your own personal affirmations with strong, positive feelings. That’s why it’s essential to learn how to craft and use affirmations.

Two Overarching Affirmation Principles

When it comes to affirmations, two overarching principles “rule” over all the others. The first of these master principles is that you are the best person to write your affirmations. Here’s why this is true:

• No one else knows exactly what you want as well as you do.
• No one else speaks exactly like you do, phrases things the way you do, uses language in the same way that pleases you and may be most important,
• No one else is aware of the aversion you might have to certain words, phrases, or ideas. If any of those are included in the affirmation, you will tend to avoid it even if your aversion is mild.

The second master principle is that you should not wait until you become an expert affirmation writer before you start writing them for yourself, because:

• The only way to become an expert is by starting as a novice and practicing; as with all skill development, you get better with practice.
• Even your most feeble, ill-practiced attempts at writing your own affirmations will provide an infinitely better script for that voice in your head than the awful-mations that it has been spouting by default for decades. Hands down, no contest.

But it all starts with recognizing and acknowledging where you are. That means paying attention to what that voice in your head tells you day in and day out, 24/7. It’s probably not a pleasant audio. If you listen to it, it can get downright depressing. But that’s where you start.

Once you have noticed the voice, you can begin writing them.

Tips for Writing and Using Affirmations

An affirmation should be personal, positive, and written in the present tense. It will be more effective if it is also passionate or emotionally charged. You can make it practical by crafting it as process-oriented, not just goal-focused. For example, if the voice in your head is telling you one of these awful-mations, here are affirmations to substitute:

Simply writing these affirmations or repeating them a few times aloud or in your head will not make much difference. After all, those awful-mations took a long time to create, and you have been repeating them for years. It won’t take as long to replace them, but you will have to repeat them a few hundred times with feeling before they take hold.

You may think you don’t have time for that, but you don’t need to set aside special periods. It only takes a few seconds to repeat an affirmation to yourself. And there are so many brief times throughout the day that you could use, like when:

• You are waiting at a stoplight.
• You are on hold on the phone.
• You are waiting in a line or for an elevator.
• You first wake up in the morning or wait to fall asleep at night.

How to Separate from the Voice in Your Head

It is important to learn how to separate from the voice in your head that constantly provides you with awful-mations. Here’s a trick I use to accomplish this goal.

I imagine I’m sitting in a diner or a restaurant, and the voice in my head comes from the person sitting in the booth behind me. This allows me to experience the voice as not me. I can listen to it and decide whether what it is saying is of any value to me or not. Plus, I can easily tell myself, “That person behind me” is wrong about what they are saying, and the exact opposite is true.

Use Affirmations to Regain Control of Your Self-Talk

Do you think I am making a big deal out of a little voice in my head, a little voice that really doesn’t matter? If so, know this: that is the voice in your head trying to stay in control, trying to fool you into thinking it doesn’t matter when it does. And it’s the voice that stops you and me from writing for all the wrong reasons.

When you begin writing affirmations for yourself, you take back control of that voice. You retrain your brain with positive statements that make it easier to write your nonfiction book and succeed as an author.

After all, if the voice in your head says, “You are a great writer,” you are likely to sit down and write—or even publish what you write. On the other hand, if it says, “You are a terrible writer,” you may never write a word; if you do write something, you will be reticent to allow anyone to read what you wrote.

Studies show that affirmations are powerful contributors to success. In Affirm Yourself, I provide summaries of research from sports, healthcare, and psychology to demonstrate the power of what we tell ourselves intentionally or unintentionally. I also share all 15 principles that guide you in creating more effective affirmations. Plus, the fact that I wrote and published the book proves that affirmations help writers.

Every writer or author needs affirmations in their success toolkit. They come in super handy when the voice in your head starts spouting negativity, and you find yourself becoming unproductive or afraid to write and publish your work. Switch on your affirmations, and you’ll write and publish again before you know it.

Have you tried writing or using affirmations to help you succeed as a nonfiction writer? Let us know about your experience and share any tips you found helpful in a comment below. And please share this post with another writer or author.

About the Author

Jerry Levin, Ph.D., L.M.T., is a medical research scientist who retired to become a massage therapist. These careers grew out of a fascination with science and more natural methods of healing. He also developed a deep interest in spirituality. Jerry looks for the practical application of scientific discoveries and spiritual insights. He seeks to identify the common ground in science and spirituality, two approaches that many believe are mutually exclusive, although they seek to answer the same deep, life-affirming questions.

Jerry uses his experience and current challenges to help you understand why you may be “stuck” in some areas of your life and how to gain the freedom you desire.

To learn more about writing and using affirmations, visit his website or purchase a copy of Affirm Yourself.

Photo courtesy of facesportrait.