by Linda-Ann Stewart

When you want to improve your life, you must first change your mind. Using affirmations or self-hypnosis is a way to imprint new information on your subconscious. They both use a principle of communication with the subconscious called “autosuggestion.”

You use autosuggestion all the time. According to the dictionary, autosuggestion is “The process by which a person induces acceptance of an opinion, belief or plan of action.” Whenever you talk yourself into anything, begin to tell yourself either positive or negative ideas that creates an emotional state of sadness or joy, or convince yourself of your competency or lack thereof, you’re using autosuggestion.

If you repeat a lie to yourself often enough, you begin to believe it and act as if it were true. The subconscious mind doesn’t determine which ideas are beneficial for you and which aren’t. It must accept the tendency of the thoughts that you dwell on and bring them into reality. Those concepts instill the subconscious with motivation and affect every other idea, behavior, and feeling you have. Autosuggestion is a communication between the conscious mind, which has the choice of what to think and focus on, and the subconscious, which must act on the information it’s been given by the conscious mind.

In hypnosis, a suggestion is an idea that’s presented to the subconscious, by you or another person, to help change the course of your thinking, acting, and/or believing. The thoughts you hold in your mind determine your feelings, how you behave and what you attract. And since, in hypnosis, the subconscious is more easily impressed, hypnosis can make positive improvements fairly rapidly.

Using the natural process of autosuggestion in a deliberately positive way is called affirmation. With an affirmation, you are declaring a new, positive concept and maintaining it to be true. The subconscious accepts it depending on the emotional energy you fill it with, the belief you have about it being true, and the amount of time you spend focused on your affirmation. Repeating it over and over, especially when you notice you’re thinking of its opposite, will instruct the subconscious to change its direction.

You are creating your life every moment of the day, with the things you say to yourself, the feelings they produce, the resulting beliefs, the attitudes formulated from your beliefs, and the actions you take based on your attitudes. Learn to use the principle of autosuggestion and affirmation in a positive way that manifests the life you want.

Copyright 2007 Linda Ann Stewart
All Rights Reserved

self-improvement