Learn how to set goal affirmations with these personal productivity tips!
Setting affirmations for goals can help you accomplish your goals. Why? Because repeating goal affirmations can help change the limiting beliefs and negative thought patterns that get in the way of getting what we want. In other words, setting positive affirmations for goals allows us to be in charge of what we tell ourselves and whether or not we can achieve our goals and live the life of our dreams.
When we tell ourselves something enough times, we begin to believe that it is true. The problem is that most of the things we tell ourselves, and thus our ability to achieve our goals, is often done unconsciously. These unconscious thought patterns put our limiting beliefs and negative thought patterns firmly in the driver’s seat. Therefore, these unconscious patterns will remain in charge until we consciously put something in its place. Positive goal affirmations can do just that.
Related: How to Set SMART Goals
Why Make Goals Into Positive Affirmations?
If you want to change your life, you need to change your habits.
The things we tell ourselves and the words we use are habits. These thinking, feeling, and emoting habits matter more than most people realize.
Want the good news?
The way we think and the things we tell ourselves is a habit we can change!
The best way to change the habit of limiting thinking is to start acting “as if” you have already achieved your goals. And, the best way to do that is to make positive affirmations for achieving goals.
Our subconscious thought patterns will continue to let us down if we don’t do the work necessary to change our negative thinking. So, let’s set goal affirmations to accomplish goals and realize our dreams instead.
Related: How to Create a Powerful Daily Routine or Rhythm
Goal Affirmations Can Transform Unconscious Thought Patterns
Stating affirmations for accomplishing goals can help you change the negative thought patterns and limiting beliefs that unconsciously sabotage your efforts to achieve your goals. If you don’t believe you can achieve your goals, it is unlikely that you ever will. When we believe that our goal is attainable it makes it a lot easier to accomplish it. Believing our goal to be attainable is one of the many reasons that it is essential to set SMART goals before working with positive goal-setting affirmations.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.
~Buddha
We must believe it to achieve it. If we don’t think that we can accomplish a goal, we probably won’t. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, your right.” Goal affirmations can help us transform our beliefs, and that is why they work so well!
Changing our beliefs can change our lives in the same way that maintaining good habits can. Doing both will put you on the fast track towards achieving your goals. Make your hopes, wishes, dreams, and goals come true by acting “as if” they have already entered into being with positive goal-setting affirmations, and create a new positive habit that will change your life! Learn how with the step-by-step instructions below!
Related: Household Rhythms: The Power of Routine in the Home
How to Set Goal Affirmations
The easiest way to turn goals into affirmations is to take each of your goals and rewrite them “as if” they are valid in the present tense.
The key is to make your affirmation both something you feel good about telling yourself and something you believe you can achieve.
Related: How to Use the Power of Habit to Change Your Life
Setting Affirmations for Goals:
- First, add “I am” to the beginning of the goal affirmation statement.
- Next, add a feeling action word to energize goal-achieving affirmations.
- Last, change affirmations for goals to the present tense to act “as if” and help make your goal feel real now.
4 Rules for Setting Goal Affirmations
The most important points to remember about setting affirmations for achieving or accomplishing goals are:
- Affirmations for goals need to be something you believe you can achieve
- Goal achieving affirmations should be something you want to tell yourself or like to hear.
- A positive affirmation goal is written and said aloud in the present tense, “as if” it were real now.
- Goal affirmation statements need to be as specific as possible–vague goal affirmations lead to vague results.
Related: Achieving Goals: How to Create an Action Plan to Achieve Goals
Feeling Action Words You Can Use to Create Goal Setting Affirmations
Below you can find a few examples of feeling words to use to energize your goal-setting affirmations or goal affirmation statements. Feel free to come up with your own words to convey your feelings or use whatever emotive words make sense to further energize each positive affirmation for your goals.
- successfully
- easily
- happily
- lovingly
- excitedly
- aware
- joyfully/joyously
- enjoying
- trusting
- gratefully
- gracefully
- living
- appreciating
- courageously
- creating
- co-creating
- delighting in
- basking in
- loving the
Related: How to Set SMART Goals
Positive Affirmations for Goals: A Few Examples
Following are a few old examples of goal affirmations that I created long ago when I first wrote this post in 2014. I shared them to see how I used this technique to transform each of my BIG goals into a goal affirmation statement.
And, please, make your goal affirmations as specific as possible–mine are purposely vague. Write as many affirmations as you like for each goal. Larger goals with smaller goals can have a goal affirmation for each interim goal or subcategory to increase efficacy.
Goal 1: Get Organized and Release Clutter
One of my goals is getting organized and releasing clutter.
When I add “I am” to the beginning of this goal, it becomes: “I am getting organized and releasing clutter.”
Next, I add the feeling action word “happily” and change the tense to sound right. For example, “I am happily getting organized and releasing clutter.”
Yes. This positive goal affirmation feels good to say, and, most importantly–I believe it! What’s not to be happy about when you are getting rid of clutter and getting organized?
Now I know I am going to achieve this goal. Beliving that I can accomplish a goal is one of the many reasons that setting goal affirmations works so well!
Update 2016: I officially live a clutter-free lifestyle and find it easy to maintain because my whole family uses the power of rhythm!
Goal 2: Get Outside and Connect
Another goal I have is to get outside to connect every day.
When I add the word “gratefully” to this goal and change the tense, it becomes a lovely positive goal-setting affirmation.
It now reads, “I am gratefully getting outside and connecting.” I like it, but it’s not perfect. I want to add a little more to energize it further.
When I get outside, I like to connect with nature, with myself, with anyone else I’m with, and with God, so I want to include that in my affirmation somehow.
“I am gratefully getting outside and connecting with everything that matters.”
That’s much better. The phrase connecting with everything that matters can represent all of those things, and I know I will feel grateful that I go outside every day so that this affirmation will work for me.
Update 2015: I get outside every single day and I love it! Our family dog makes a fantastic accountability partner and gives me the solitude I crave when this INFJ needs to be alone. I have accomplished this goal and will continue to crush it for the rest of my life!
Want one more example?
Goal 3: Build and Grow My Business
My last primary goal is to “build and grow my business.”
Let’s change this final goal into a positive affirmation. “I am easily building and growing my business.“
Next, I want to add a little extra to give it more power and make it real now. “I am easily building and growing my business and successfully meeting goals.“
Update 2016: This is still one of my overarching lifetime goals, and I continue to set specific goals with goal affirmations that work like a charm to help me stay focused. My business affirmations help me take the steps I need each quarter and keep me on track to meet each goal I set.
Can you see how setting goal affirmations to accomplish your goals works?
Related: Word of the Year Ideas with Printable Worksheet
State Goal Setting Affirmations Daily for Best Results
Turning goals into affirmations can help you manifest your dreams by bringing the power of positive co-creation into play. Acting “as if” something is already present can make it real in the present moment.
For maximum effectiveness, place your positive goal affirmations somewhere you will repeat them daily. For example, I like to write out my positive goal affirmations and stick them on my bathroom mirror, fridge, and computer monitor so I see them and say them every day.
Kick those limiting beliefs and negative thoughts in the butt this year with positive goal affirmations. The more you repeat and believe your goal affirmation, the faster you will achieve your goals. Yes, really!
The power of positive thinking is incredible and always works when you believe what you are telling yourself. So make it real in your mind, and it can become real in your life. Use one of the printable habit tracking sheets from the Dream Life Tool Kit to make stating your affirmations a daily habit!
Learn more about Rhythms of Play HERE!
Fabulous article, a veritable “How-to” of Affirmations. I use the power of affirmations in daily living and thrive. Have a fantastic day! Nancy Andres, Author of “Colors of Joy: A Woman’s Guide for Self-Discovery, Balance, and Bliss.”
Thanks Nancy! Glad you liked it 🙂