If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ve heard me mention Ray Higdon. He’s a remarkable man, who came from a background of abuse and addiction, to rise to become one of the best generic trainers in the network marketing sphere. The reason? Personal development. The following reflects a recent training I heard from him.

Personal development is the art of changing aspects of yourself that you don’t like – changing the stories that you have always assumed to be true about yourself and others. If your story has always been that you are flawed and unworthy of success and love, likely because of childhood trauma of some sort, you may think that that is an immutable part of who you are. As a life coach, I am here to tell you that that is not necessarily true. It may not be easy to change, but it is not impossible.

A powerful tool to help with this change is affirmations. While most people only know about affirmations because of how they were mocked on The Simpsons, they are in fact a great way to access your subconscious mind and change the stories there. There are many excellent books and courses on this, and I particularly recommend the work of Joe Dispenza, Gabrielle Bernstein, Gay Hendricks and Joseph Murphy.

There’s one catch, though. Everything you say to yourself is an affirmation, so it’s important to be aware of the chatter within your head.

While you may be spending ten minutes each day gazing at yourself in the mirror and affirming how much you love yourself, are you spending the rest of your day berating yourself for being an idiot, and worse? Do you tell yourself you are beautiful, then flinch every time you see your body reflected in a store window? Do you tell yourself you are worthy, but then deflect every compliment?

Changing our negative self-talk can be a long process, but it’s necessary if we are going to improve how we feel about ourselves, and therefore what we are worthy of achieving in life – love, success and abundance. Why not you?