006: Visualization & Affirmations - Why they're so important, and how they'll change your life!

In this episode we'll talk about the definition and importance of affirmations, how to write and use affirmations to improve your life, the importance of visualization in achieving your dreams and goals, and how to most effectively visualize.

You'll also be filling in the next two pages of your Best Life Master Plan document after this episode, so if you haven't already gotten your free template, go visit the episode 3 show notes. It's not too late to start it, and it will definitely change your life!

You can request your free Best Life Master Plan template by providing your email address on my website here:

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• Access the episode transcript here

  Hi, my name is Katy Blommer and my passion is helping women learn how to put themselves first, I learned all the tools for success on my own 12 year journey that has led me to finally figuring out how to live my best life. My journey included overcoming body image issues, and yo yo dieting, climbing the corporate ladder to a multiple six figure career, navigating mom guilt through a 60 hour workweek turning around marriage issues and much more. Now, I'm truly living my best life. And I've pretty much become obsessed with teaching others my tried and true methods for creating balance, maintaining healthy habits, improving your relationship, career development, and how to stop tying your value and worth, to the way you look and how you serve others. I'm so passionate about helping others learn this, that I created the working mom happiness method to help you get there too. So if you're ready to learn how to live your best life, pull up a chair or put on your walking shoes and get ready to dive in. This is the working mom happiness method podcast.

  Hello, and welcome to episode six of the working mom happiness method. This is where we're going to talk all about visualization and affirmations. And I'm so excited. We're in module two of the working mom happiness method right now. And if you haven't gone and downloaded your free version of my best life master plan template, definitely go do that. If you're following along with the program at this point, you should have completed your values. And then you should have completed your goals. And that was three pages of goals in the best life master plan template was long term vision goals for the next year and goals for the next quarter. If you haven't gotten that document yet, and you want to go back and start from the beginning, that's great. Please do that it's totally free, you can get it on my website at women's best life university.com Just click on podcast across the top and go to episode three or five. And that's where you can pop in your email address. And we will send you a link to the template you'll get my version of the template that you can just use as an example to see how I've done these things. And then you can edit out what I have there and create your own version of the template. And then a reminder, eventually, you're going to use this best life master plan document to read every morning as part of your morning routine, which we will start creating in module four, the very beginning of module four, we do morning routines, talk about the importance of them, I'll give you some tips on how to do that. But reading this document every day, especially when it has the affirmations and the visualization in it becomes life changing, I promise no matter how cheesy that sounds, or silly or dumb that might sound to you. I really am not saying it just to say it, it legitimately and genuinely changed my life, it changed my life reading that document every morning, that you have to do it most mornings over a long period of time before you really start noticing the change. But that's happened for me and many multiple women. At this point, essentially all the women who have taken the working mom happiness method, as of this recording, it has changed their lives as well. So it's amazing. And it's just it's a free thing to do. I don't want to say it's easy, because it takes some time, you have to put in time to dig down deep and figure out your values and your goals. Write these affirmations visualization. And then in module three, you're going to add boundaries to it. And we'll talk through that in the coming episodes. So it's not easy, but But it's something you can certainly do. And it will change your life like it's it's just so incredibly worth it. So I encourage you to do that. So for now, let's just go ahead and jump in and talk about visualizations and affirmations and the importance of those for this journey of learning how to put yourself first and live your best life. Alright, so in today's episode, we're going to define, we're going to do the definition and importance of affirmations. We'll talk about how to write and use your affirmations we'll talk about the importance of visualization and how to do the visualization exercise. So let's start with affirmations. I love the definition that Hal Elrod gives them in his book The Miracle Morning. And if you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. It's what years ago got me started on the morning routine that has now changed my life. And that's the morning routine that I have built off of the morning routine in the working mom happiness method. So it's a fabulous book. His story is an incredible story. And he tells you how to start a morning routine in just six minutes. So it's awesome. So here's his definition from the book. He says affirmations are positive, constructive, constructive statements that you repeat to yourself as a tool for reprogramming negative thinking to help you change or accomplish something. They are one of the most effective tools for becoming the person you want to be and achieving your goals.

  So here's the

  thing, as women, scientific studies have shown that 80% of our thoughts are negative during the day. I mean, 80% of your thoughts during the day are negative or critical of yourself, right. And again, that's because society has conditioned and raised us as women to base our value on the way that we look where our bodies look, the way that we look, and how we serve all of those around us. And then what we do is we tend to, like beat ourselves up about those things all day long in our minds, right. And so as we talked about in back in module one, one of the most important things we can do is start to recognize those negative thoughts about ourselves, just have the awareness. And then if you're starting to get good at that, remember, I said back in module one, that when you start to get good at noticing the negative thoughts that you have about yourself, you'll know you're getting good when you start to notice when other people say negative things about themselves, you'll start to pick up on that and really notice it that then the next step is to start to rephrase those negative thoughts into something more positive. And the way that I like to think about it is if your negative thought was something like, Oh, I'm so ugly, it doesn't mean you have to turn around that thought and say, I'm so beautiful, because maybe you don't believe that at the moment, you're not feeling that way at the moment. And that's okay. It's just restating something, you do believe that's positive about yourself. So it could be, I'm a good friend, I'm a good mom, I'm good at my job. I'm a good cook. Just something that you really do believe is true in that moment, because that'll start to reprogram your subconscious mind with those negative thoughts. But this is one of the huge benefits of affirmations. Because actively choosing positive, constructive thoughts about yourself is really an amazing way to change your life and reprogram that subconscious mind into believing positive things about you believing you have value and worth outside of the way you look or serving others. And that's what really is going to lead to you being able to finally put yourself first finally put you first in your life and take care of you first. Because the cliches are true, you're going to be a better mom, a better wife, a better person at your work a better family member, if you take care of you first. And we just as women, it's so hard for us to take that seriously. But it is so incredibly true. And affirmations are a great step to help reprogram those negative thoughts, especially when you read them first thing in the morning, when your brain is the most absorbent, right? So what we want to do is, we want to Well actually, there's one more thing I want to talk about before we move over to, to explaining your homework and what I want you to do with affirmations.

  Thoughts become things, our thoughts become a reality. And this is one of the reasons why affirmations are so incredibly important. And you may have heard about manifestations manifesting or the secret the book and the movie, the secret, right? Thoughts become things thoughts become a reality. And that might feel a little woowoo to you, you might not like that you might have a negative connotation in your mind with manifesting or the secret. And, but and you might not there people, some people like things that are a little woowoo. And some people don't I understand that. So I actually really like to get very logical about it. Because it can help people understand it, even if you're not into kind of that woowoo side of things. And so the basically the process is thoughts become words, words become actions, actions become habits, and habits are our lives and our reality, right. But we can take a really simple example to help solidify an understanding of this. Wherever you are, right now, as you're listening to this or watching it.

  If you can just look around yourself, you're gonna see things, different things depending on where you're at. If you just pick one of those things, and you you look at it, she goes through this example. And you think about it, that thing you're looking at, it started with a thought it started with a somebody, a human being thinking of it, an idea, somewhere along the line, depending on what you're looking at, it could have been years and years, hundreds of years ago, or depending on what you're looking at. It could have been 20 years ago, whatever. But it started with a thought in someone's mind. Then they spoke words about it, whether it was to themselves or another person or team and company, whatever. It became words, those words then turned into some form of action. And by the way, I promise this little tangent but I promise they failed a bunch of times along the way, when they started taking action before they got to the thing you're looking at right now they failed. There was a lot of failure involved, because failure is how we learn and progress and make new things right. Messy action. That's why I love the phrase taking messy action. We'll talk about that more later. But I just get so excited on all these tangents. So so many cool things. So it started as a thought it became words it became actions and then the actions actually turned it into the thing it is today.

  So quite literally, Thoughts become things. That's how the world works. That's how humans work, which is really exciting and really cool. So if we take more of an example that relates to you specifically that can relate to your life, let's let's do an example with body image. So let's say you have negative thoughts about the way your body looks. So a lot of times that turns into words so that it could be words in your head that you're speaking to yourself in a mean way. It could be words that you speak out loud, to a partner, or a friend, or whatever, you know, we're a lot, most of us are beating ourselves up out loud in words. And I know I said this in module one, but I have to continue just really putting it out there. Because it's so important that when you say something negative about your body out loud, the person who hears it hears it about their own body. That's how that works. And even though you're not meaning to do that, you're not meaning to have them hear about their own body. And that's how that works. So if we can learn to catch ourselves, when we're saying negative things about ourselves, that's a game changer. It's huge. But it starts with a thought, and then it becomes a word. And then it really does turn into actions. Because what happens when we have a negative body image, it makes us much it makes us much less likely to do healthy habits. Because if your subconscious mind feels crappy about your body, why would your subconscious mind really push you in the direction of doing nice and good things for your body, it doesn't, it's much harder to maintain consistent, healthy habits, if you have a negative image of your body, if you can learn how to accept and appreciate and respect your current body, you're much more likely to maintain consistent healthy habits, right? So so the action becomes not doing the healthy habits, the opposite of the healthy habits, right. And then the reality becomes your you know, the health doesn't progress, right, or body image stuff doesn't progress. So then we go the opposite if you have positive thoughts about your body, so if you write an affirmation that says, I accept and respect my body, my current body exactly as it is right now, I appreciate it for getting me through life. And for what it does for me, if you start to read that every single morning, your subconscious programming about your body is eventually going to start to change and shift into a more positive way. And that's going to turn into words, you're not going to be speaking negatively about your body out loud anymore. You might even say positive things, you might even repeat it to your children. If you if you have a child who says something negative about their body, you might just say, well, that body is amazing. It gets you through life. So that's words, right. And then it's going to turn into actions. And what you're going to start doing with your actions is taking better care of that body because you appreciate it and you respect it. And then those are going to turn into habits. And then that's going to be your life, as it relates to a healthy lifestyle. That really is how this works. And you can take that with anything, you can do it with a goal, you can start saying I have a million dollars in the bank. That's an affirmation. And a lot of times, affirmations feel like lies, right. That's why a lot of women who have taken the program have struggled with the feeling of like, they're, they're telling a lie to themselves. It's okay to tell a lie putting lie in air quotes in an affirmation because you're, you're stating a positive thing that you haven't achieved yet, but that you want to achieve, and you're stating it as if you have achieved it. So the way you want to write these affirmations in your best life master plan document is I have a million dollars in the bank. If that's a goal for you, I'm not assuming it is right. Whatever, I'm just making things up, this is a common one that people can understand, right? So it's fine if you don't have that, but I have a million dollars in my bank account is the perfect way to write an affirmation. And then what happens is if you write that every day, your brain starts to think it, your words will eventually start to take you in that direction, they will start some sort of action that will lead you towards making more money.

  Eventually, that will solidify itself and turn into not always a million dollars in the bank. Remember how when we talked about in the last episode, shooting high for your long term vision like even if it sounds crazy fantasy, the higher it is and the crazier it is the the closer you're going to get to it with that thoughts, words, actions, habits process, the way that our brains work. So maybe maybe you don't ever get to a million dollars in your bank account. Or maybe you do. But you're going to get closer by having that be a thought that you start every morning out with you're going to be more likely to take actions towards that throughout your days. And it is those small consistent actions over time. Remember that change your life that truly change your life. By the way, you're going to hear me just beat that one to death about the small consistent actions over time you're going to hear all throughout the different parts of the working mom happiness method in the episode so get excited, but it really is so true. So what you're going to do your homework assignment on that best life master plan is to write out your affirmations as if you've

  already achieved them. And I want you to go back and you can look at your goals and your values in order to write the things that are the most important to you. And you're going to, once we start the morning routine, you're going to start reading them everyday. And you don't have to wait until module four, it'll be quite a while. Until we get there, there are quite a few episodes in between. But you can start now if you want, or you can wait until you formally create your morning routine in module four. And the other thing that I want you to work on doing when you do your affirmations is bringing up a positive emotions feelings in your body because our brain solidifies things creates new neural pathways basically creates new wiring, if you want to think about it like that, during periods of strong emotion. So this could be a period of really negative strong emotion or a period of really strong positive emotion, but deep, strong emotions, whether they're negative or positive, help us create those new neural pathways, or those those new wirings in our brains. So if you can try to think of some really cool, good happy memory, or a person who makes you really happy, or a pet, anything like that, before you read your affirmations, and you can get like that really good excited feeling going in your body, when you read them, that's going to even help them implant even further in your brain. So that's amazing. If you're not feeling that way, that morning, I still want you to read them, there's still benefit in reading them. Even if you can't get those positive juices flowing in your body, that's okay, still read them. But if you can, that'll help them solidify in there even stronger. Okay, so that's the assignment, you can take a look at mine to see how I've done it. If any of mine resonate with you, feel free to still love to share those. And obviously delete the ones that don't and create your own page of affirmations. Okay, the next thing visualization. When you combine the visualization with the affirmations, it really does program your subconscious mind for success. As we're talking about creating those neural pathways, the positive emotions that come with experiencing those feelings that you get when you achieve your goal makes the possibility of achieving your goal feel more realistic. So it's kind of what I was just saying. So when you visualize yourself achieving your goal, right, you're visualizing it, those positive feelings that come up, create those neural pathways in your brain, that's going to make it much more likely for you to take those actions to get towards that goal. Because that subconscious programming is going to be there, it's going to solidify, which is so cool. And so exciting. And I just I love it so much. I think it's just amazing. So let's talk about how to effectively visualize. So what you're going to do in your best life master plan document is you're going to just go out online and just find pictures that represent the things that you want in your life. And you'll see examples on mine, lots of lots of women who've taken the program like to put pictures of a certain house or a certain kitchen, like they want their kitchen to look a certain way, they'll have pictures of like family connection. You'll see on mine, I have a picture of speaking in front of a huge audience, I have like a picture of the New York Times best selling book, some people have pictures of amazing vacations, right. So really just go back and look at your values and your long term vision goals and find pictures that align with those and just classic vision board, just copy paste the pictures into the best life master plan document. And what I want you to do is you're gonna start you're going to look at those. And as you visualize, I want you to bring up every sense you possibly can in that experience, okay, so if you pick a really amazing beach vacation, or maybe it's a beach home that you want to retire to, when you visualize yourself laying on the beach, I want you to really try to encompass all the senses. So I can smell you know, that salty, beachy smell of the ocean, which I love. To me, that's a positive scent, I can hear the sound of the waves, I can feel the sun on my body in the sand. You know, I can see the beautiful ocean, maybe there's taste, maybe you have a taste associated with being at the beach, try to bring up as many senses as you can, the more realistic you can make it, the more likely you are to achieve it because you're going to create those subconscious programs that believe you're going to habit which will make you more likely to have it because thoughts become our reality, our thoughts become our reality, cannot stress that enough. So you want to get have that happy vibe going just like you did with the affirmations. And that's why I put these together in the best life master plan as you're going through it. And really on on any average given day when you're doing this section of reading it during your morning routine. It can just be for like 30 seconds if you have longer awesome, but if you don't, that's fine. And you can just pick one of the pictures each day to focus on and bring up those senses. You don't have to do it on every single one of those pictures every day. But it's amazing what it does. So you want to be visualizing that you are the person who has achieved that. So in your visual when you're laying on that beach, if that's one that applies to you. You are

  A person who has a beach home, you're a person who has a beach home, right? So we a really powerful thing is tricking our mind into thinking you are a person who does X, okay? And this is why they say like, if you're struggling with, say, exercising, just, they start by, say, start by just exercising for one minute in the morning. That's what Hal Elrod says in the Miracle Morning, just do one minute of running in place, or jumping jacks or situps, or stretching, whatever. Because then your brain starts to believe I am a person who exercises and once you have that belief, it starts to turn into a habit, then it becomes reality. And you'll go a little longer and a little longer and a little longer. It's really, really cool. So you're, you're visualizing, I am a person who has this thing in the picture. If it's a beautiful kitchen that you love, I am the person who lives in this house and has this kitchen, you want to visualize yourself as that person. It's just it's so cool what it does as far as pushing you to get towards that point. Okay, awesome. So that is your homework, your assignment. That's it for this episode, it's just go and fill out those two pages, I don't want to say just I don't want to simplify it. I know these things aren't easy, but use mine as an example and as a guide, and go fill those out. And then we have one more episode in module two. And that is continuing on just body image, self image and maintaining healthy habits. That will be a theme throughout this, we're going to talk a little bit more about that in the next episode. And then after that, we're going to move on to boundaries in module three. So as always, if you're getting any benefit out of this, it would mean so much to me. If you are willing to go and leave a positive review, subscribe, like depending on where you're looking at it follow. And please tell your friends and family to come listen, because that helps it get seen and heard by more people, the more people who like it and review it and follow it, the more people get the algorithm shows it to so that would just mean so much to me. Because as always, my goal is to change the world by changing the way women and girls learn to value ourselves. We right we want to switch from valuing ourselves based on the way that we look, and how we serve all those around us. We want to move that over to valuing ourselves just for being human beings just for being who we are. That's sort of the goal with all of this is learning how to put yourself first and value yourself sort of that radically right and it shouldn't be radical, but it feels radical to us because of the way that we were raised. So please help me spread that. As always, you can follow me on Instagram at Katy Blommer KTYV L O M M E R. And if you're interested in taking this course in a more structured and formal way there is a group and a one on one option. You can go check that out at women's best life university.com All right, thanks. I'll see you in the next episode.

  Thanks so much for listening to the working mom happiness method. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who might benefit from listening for show notes or to enroll in the working mom happiness method coaching courses, visit www dot women's fast life university.com

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