Creating a Cascade of Confidence: Rewire Your Brain with Positive Thoughts

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 225. I have got this fun exercise for you to try in today's episode. This exercise will quickly help you to feel more self confidence, and it will also be a really big help if you're struggling with negative thoughts about yourself, negativity in general, or self limiting beliefs. Let's just get all those negative factors out of our way so that we can actually head straight for our goals and save ourselves a whole lot of time and aggravation. I look forward to explaining this exercise and giving you a glimpse into how I did this exercise for myself inside this episode. Let's go listen to it now.

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:58]:
Hi. I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power,

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:29]:
you're going

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:29]:
to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:41]:
I thought I would try something a little bit different for today's episode because I heard something on a podcast episode that I was listening to, and it was so striking to me that I got very excited about it. I decided I wanted to do this exercise in my own life, and, of course, I wanna share these kinds of really wonderful things with you, my dear listeners. So the podcast episode was episode number 738 on the Mind Your Business podcast, which happens to be hosted by my coach, James Wedmore. The guest on that episode, her name was Morgan Nolte, n o l t e. And the episode was not about the exercise that I'm about to share with you, but for me, the exercise that she did for herself to encourage herself and her business and her family life and her general life was just again, so stunning that I wanted to just try it for myself. The exercise actually involves a process of listing lots of different affirmations in a row. So I would say 20 or even 30 affirmations listed one after the other. And what she did was refine and build this list over time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:03:17]:
And it was just a stunning group of positive, beautiful, life affirming, business enhancing statements. And for the purposes of my episode, I'm gonna call that exercise creating an affirmations waterfall. That's the phrase that I came up with because it really reminded me of just the cascade of words and that feeling that you are being washed over by this beautiful, positive feeling as when you are underneath a waterfall. If you've ever had that experience in real life, and I have, it's a really powerful, cleansing, enlivening, beautiful, and sometimes chilly experience, but it's really a fun kind of breakthrough breakthrough all the old layers that you've had in your life because you're just being cleansed by nature, by energy, by the force of the waterfall. And I'm just gonna go ahead and describe why affirmations work, why I think a waterfall is a particularly powerful way to use affirmations. I'm going to share part of my own affirmations waterfall, and then I'm gonna give you instructions for how to go ahead and start building your own. So we've got a lot to cover today and it's all gonna be super fun. So I just looked up what an affirmation is, and an affirmation is a single positive sentence crafted to elevate your self belief and your self confidence and to counteract negative thoughts.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:12]:
So it's really a positive statement that you can craft when you're feeling negatively or you're feeling frightened or you're feeling not enough in some way, and you craft this positive affirming statement, this statement that says you are enough, that you have what it takes, that everything is going to work out. All of these types of statements we can call affirmations. And I think most of you have heard that term before, But I'm going to guess that like me, you haven't heard an affirmations waterfall before because this whole episode that I described with Morgan Nolte was a brand new experience for me. It was so, so powerful because, again, it was positive statement after positive statement after positive statement. And it is really hard to, I think, refute that feeling when in general, I think most of us, most of the day long, all we're craving is actually a better feeling. We're craving happiness. We're craving calm. We're craving feelings of success.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:29]:
We're creating feelings of completion like we've done the work of the day. We're craving more more income, more connections, more satisfaction, more status, whatever you're wanting. Generally, you're wanting a little bit more of that. So that feeling is really contagious and attractive and appealing. I just wanted to share that with you. If you wanna hear Morgan Nolte's waterfall, you can go ahead and go to the mind your business podcast, episode number seven thirty eight. And it's towards the end of the episode, but, again, very, very powerful and worth a listen, I would say. So now let's turn to why do affirmations work in the first place.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:19]:
There are several reasons why, and I think we can feel it just from raw experience in life. When a teacher tells you you did such a good job, it's basically hard to feel badly when someone is giving you a word of praise. And affirmations are just you doing that job of praising yourself, of validating your worthiness, of supporting your abilities. And I think that's a generic reason why affirmations work. And here are some of the more technical reasons why affirmations work. The first reason is that neuroplasticity is a real thing. Our brains form new pathways based off of repeated thought patterns. So when we repeat positive affirmations consistently to ourselves, we help our brain to form and strengthen more empowering neural pathways.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:24]:
So take, for example, a new habit that you have developed or you'd like to develop. It takes several repetitions for any one thing, for any one behavior to become ingrained for a pathway to form. And so we need that repetition before our brain actually lays down that neural pathway. But that is why affirmations and repeating them can be such a positive experience because we can transform, once negatively held belief into something that is much more helpful and much more positive. A second reason is that affirmations help us to interrupt the negativity bias. Our brains have a built in bias towards remembering negative experiences more strongly than positive experiences. I believe that is because our brains and bodies are wired towards our basic survival, our human survival, life and death type of survival. And that's why we wanna remember the things that cause us harm or put us at risk for harm, just so that we know to avoid these things in the future.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:39]:
But when it comes to living our regular lives and achieving our goals, all that negativity, I believe, really doesn't do us much good. I think it really helps ourselves to put ourselves into a purely positive mindset where we understand that we are ad based and very basically routinely safe. We are safe from life and death situations, and we can now focus fully on achieving the big goals that other people might think are impossible for us. But we have this pure belief that we are created and ready and able to achieve these lofty and amazing goals. So things like affirmation waterfalls can really help to override that negativity bias that our brains have. And I think you might connect with this one intuitively, that it's hard when you're feeling overwhelmed and your brain is just pumping out reasons why things are impossible, why you feel like you have no energy, why you feel like you're a failure. That's a really hard state to arise out of and escape from sometimes. So it can be really helpful to make sure you have an affirmations waterfall that you practice every morning or every afternoon or every night at your disposal.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:08]:
One that is crafted by you specifically for you with real heart so that you know that once you even touch that piece of paper with your affirmations on it, you already feel that you are countering that negativity, that negative bias. All right. Another reason these affirmations really are powerful and work are that they engage the reticular activating system, the RAS, which is a part of your brain that is basically a filtering system. So when we repeat these positive affirmations, we train the brain to filter things in the environment to align with the thoughts that you're having. So if you're thinking, I wanna be a faster runner, your brain and the reticular activating system I always have trouble with that phrase. It's a complicated name. Your reticular activating system is going to search for opportunities to help you become a faster runner. They're going to show you how maybe the the next training system that you can adopt, the next coach you can hire, the next trail that you can run that might speed up your time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:12:26]:
That is the role of the reticular activating system and affirmations cue your reticular activating system to be on the lookout essentially for things to help you achieve that goal. Alright. So the reticular activating system will be supported by these positive beliefs. Your system will know what you want to focus on. And when you know what to focus on, you're going to find more supporting evidence for that material, for that goal. Now, the next point is that it has been shown through research that using positive affirmations will reduce your cortisol levels. So that means practicing positive affirmations can lower stress hormones in your body, which can of course encourage your greater resilience and your greater emotional resilience and hardiness as you go. And finally, positive affirmations increase the likelihood that you're gonna change your behavior.

Dr. Christine Li [00:13:40]:
When you think about it, if you're stuck all day long thinking limiting beliefs like, oh, I'm not worth it. Oh, I don't have what it takes. It's gonna be more difficult for you to say, oh, I'm gonna step into that new challenge with confidence. And if you are just bathing yourself and showering yourself with an affirmations waterfall, it's just gonna be easier for you to see yourself as doing the next thing, as rising to the next level of succeeding in the goals that you haven't yet met, but that you have fully placed on your vision board that you have in your mind as things that you want for yourself. We all have these goals privately, publicly, small and large. And I say, why don't we just prepare ourselves to reach everything that we want for ourselves? It's our one precious life. We have all these tools at our disposal. We have our experience.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:43]:
We have our training. We have our courage. We have these waterfalls of affirmations. We have sometimes coaches, therapists, friends who are supporting us. YouTube, Google, ChatGPT. We have all these technological tools. You can tell I have jet lag. Right? Because the words are coming a little more difficult, difficultly today.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:08]:
Oh my god. I don't think that's even a word. But I want you to believe that you can achieve what your mind has a vision of already. Those goals that really mean something to you. Okay. Now I'm gonna share a few sentences from my own affirmations waterfall. So you can hear what the waterfall part of the affirmations exercise really feels like. Like.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:31]:
Here we go. I find joy in connecting with colleagues and clients and use my skills to help others expand their own capacities in ways they didn't believe in or know could be possible. I enjoy being creative in unusual and different ways. I accept and consider criticism from within and without, without bending or breaking. I release old patterns that have reinforced my not being enough or have created fear and uncertainty within me. I trust the universe and my role within it. I understand my path is mine to create, and that that is a privilege and a right that I should never take for granted. My time is precious and I use it with full knowledge of that preciousness.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:32]:
So that was just about a third of my waterfall. And of course, some of it is more private than I might want to share on this podcast, and some of it is not because I just shared some of it with you. I want you to do in your waterfall what feels good for you, what feels private, what feels personal, what feels real, what feels like it's going to move you, especially when you're in a state of overwhelm or when you're tanked by your own negativity. I would love for you to craft a waterfall that just fits you. It does not have to be some grand masterpiece, by the way, because I think we can get ourselves really stuck when we start to get perfectionistic inside these creative exercises. Let yourself have fun. Let your intuition feed you the affirmations that you need to hear day after day after day. That's what I did to write my own.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:33]:
I let my own intuition feed me the things that I needed to hear and the things that I wanted to work on and get stronger in and with. Alright. So now some suggestions for your affirmations waterfall. I just gave you one of them, which is don't be perfectionistic and let your intuition feed you the individual affirmations that will make up your total waterfall. The next thing is that you can put on music in the background to help that flow within you really flow. So you can go to YouTube and look up music for writing or music for creativity. Those are the prompts that I typically search in YouTube when I need some music for a workshop or a creative writing thing that I'm doing for myself. So put on some music.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:25]:
Give yourself some time to be really open. You don't wanna be doing this in between meetings or in a cramped situation where there are people around. You want privacy. You wanna feel calm. You wanna feel safe. You wanna have enough time where you can really get into this flow of writing, and you can really hear your ideas where you're not really forcing anything. This is your time to write and to create. The next tip is to always remember that this is yours, right? It's your first draft.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:58]:
You don't have to be perfect again, and this can be redone. You can make it into your masterpiece if you want to. But I don't want you to put pressure on yourself for this first draft. Have fun with it. Let it be what it needs to be. And then I wanna give you another tip for how to create this waterfall. If you're struggling to begin or if you are having more ideas than you can even capture in any moment, the starting moment of writing, You want to use those individual struggles and consider those struggles as patterns of yours. Okay.

Dr. Christine Li [00:19:44]:
For instance, if you have the trouble starting, you want to turn that into an affirmation that says, I start things quickly and easily and without conflict. Right? You turn your problem into a solution based positive affirmation. If you have that problem of I have more ideas than I can capture, you wanna turn that into an affirmation that sounds like I am filled with creativity, and I trust that what I'm able to capture is more than enough. So you're really just calming your nervous system. You're brightening up the picture. You're getting away from the negativity and you're getting your sentences written and down on the page. The next step that I have for you is a two step step. And it's basically my guidance for you to have two buckets, two general buckets for these affirmations.

Dr. Christine Li [00:20:42]:
One bucket, I think, is the easier bucket. One bucket is just the pure positive statements, the statements that you already have in your mind, like I am an amazing swimmer. Right? The things that you're aiming to be the pure positive goal achieving, goal achieved kind of sentences. Just write those down and make them super positive. They're positive in your mind. Make them one or two levels, maybe a hundred levels, even more positive so that you have this wonderful set of affirmations for yourself. That's one bucket. The other bucket is the bucket that is comprised of affirmations that are created from the negative things that you tend to tell yourself.

Dr. Christine Li [00:21:28]:
So if you tell yourself, Oh, I am a rotten, dirty procrastinator. I'm just making this up spontaneously. You want to turn that funny statement into something that's more beautiful and more true, which is I have great levels of motivation that sustain me and support me as I move into all of my projects with ease and confidence. That sounds a lot better than I'm a dirty, rotten procrastinator. Right? So you wanna turn those struggles that you've been struggling over into opportunities for seeing yourself as a success story. I promise you this is such a wonderful general exercise. Whether you get an affirmation out of it or not, it is just healthy to begin seeing yourself as an achiever, as someone who's successful, as someone who is not a down and dirty scoundrel or procrastinator. It's fine.

Dr. Christine Li [00:22:32]:
You are fine as you are. Remove the negativity, bring in the positivity, and you're going to heal your body, your brain, and your nervous system. And then you're going to get your goals in reality. Alright. Now, as you might've just noticed, this writing practice and this thinking process may bring up some difficult material as so much of life can. Right? When we start to look inside of ourselves, some of the stuff is uncomfortable to sit with or to recognize or to deal with sometimes. But I wanna encourage you to take the time to really sit with this stuff, to really understand that these are all natural, wonderful parts of you as well. We're all comprised of the negative and the positive.

Dr. Christine Li [00:23:23]:
We all have weaknesses and strengths. And the game really gets more fun when you understand that all of those parts of you are part of you. And that means they're good. That means they're okay. That means you're safe and that you don't have to be ashamed and discard the negative. You just need to come to terms and to bring to light the parts of you that you feel are the negative parts of you. Let's make peace with them. Let's turn everything into a positive story so that we can coexist with those negative pieces.

Dr. Christine Li [00:24:03]:
Those pieces that need our support, our attention, our healing efforts. This is all one giant healing exercise after all. So please take your time and please be kind and patient with yourself as you do this affirmations waterfall exercise. Now I invite you to share with me what happens when you do the waterfall. I would love to hear a few of your personal affirmations if you care to share them with me. I invite you to contact me through the direct message capacity, the DMs on Instagram. I'm @procrastinationcoach on Instagram, and you can always message me there with your affirmations or your thoughts about this episode. And, of course, share this episode out with anyone that you think might benefit from a pick me up and a nice personal development exercise.

Dr. Christine Li [00:25:00]:
I, of course, have a free download for you that accompanies this episode, which will help to guide you in crafting your own affirmations waterfall and that you can get at maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/waterfall. Again, it's maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/waterfall. And I'm just thinking, I mentioned that I had jet lag, but I didn't mention where I have been. I have recently got off the plane back home from a lovely ten day trip to Paris and Portugal, and it was just an amazing time. I highly encourage you to set up your waterfall and then plan your next trip wherever your heart desires. Because getting away, exploring other cultures, just breaking the habit of the everyday was really such a wonderful experience. I hope you get the opportunity soon and I hope to see you next week when the next episode drops on the Make Time for Success podcast. Thanks so much for listening and enjoy crafting your own affirmations waterfall.

Dr. Christine Li [00:26:14]:
Take care.

Dr. Christine Li [00:26:16]:
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to, And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.