Have you ever tried affirmations for female business owners…but the affirmations felt ineffective?
While affirmations can be a powerful mindset tool, any mindset work that doesn’t involve your nervous system will always be extremely limited.
In this video, I explain why, and give you a powerful resource to “fix it”.
Mindset Background
As a marketing and business coach, most of my career involved helping others determine what to sell, and their strategies to sell it. Because of that, I was a little surprised that a few years into coaching, I realized that it wasn’t strategy most people got stuck on: it was mindset.
Some of the biggest income shifts for clients began happening when they mastered their mindset.
2019 was the first year I experienced the power of mindset personally, through creating a vision, using affirmations, and doing the theatre of the mind.
When Mindset Fell Short
HOWEVER…the value of mindset hit a wall.
For both myself and clients, we’d have huge breakthroughs: but then get stuck in our heads again. I would read an affirmation card, and I was just unable to feel good about it.
What was going on?
Mindset is limiting because your cognitive brain only accounts for about 20% of the information you process. The rest is processed in your nervous system: so in order for transformation work to be effective, we have to involve our bodies.
How to Combine Mindset with Somatics: An Introduction
So how do we involve our mindset work with our nervous system?
Here’s an exercise to try.
A few years ago, my husband and I created a mindset card deck together (a card deck of 52 affirmations). If you don’t have the deck, you can just simply use a list of affirmations.
Choose an affirmation, and read it out loud.
How does it feel in your body?
- When you read it, do you feel light? Grateful? Excited? Good! Lean into that feeling, and see if you can make it bigger, and brighter. Expand it in your body.
- When you read it, do you feel constriction or stress? That’s fine too, keep reading it.
Use Constriction to Find Bridge Statements
If you felt constriction, then reading the affirmation over and over again may not be that helpful for transforming your mindset. This is because even though your brain says “I believe this” your body is saying “heck no we don’t!” And that’s ok – you can work with that.
What we want to do now is create a bridge statement: something that relates to the original affirmation that our bodies endorse.
YouTuber and therapist Kati Morton said “bridge affirmations” are a great way to start building up your self-esteem… It’s almost impossible to go from the negative contents we refer ourselves directly to positive affirmations, but a connection explanation lets you get there slowly.
“Let’s say we have really bad body image and we think we’re fat and ugly, ” she said. “Then the connect proclamation could be like: ‘It’s probable that I’m not as ugly as I reckon I am. I might be, but it’s probable that I’m not. I could be over-reacting.’”
In the video above, I give another example:
“Failure doesn’t exist.”
If that feels unbelievable to your body, try replacing it with:
Not everything I do works the first time, but I’m going to keep trying until I succeed.
The goal, ultimately, is to find a bridge statement that feels GREAT in your body. Then lean into that feeling as much as possible.
Is this something you need help with?
Book a somatic coaching session here.
