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This is pop psychology. Most self-help authors, and even successful people like Oprah, make the mistake of confusing cause and effect. Feeling confident helps w

This is pop psychology. Most self-help authors, and even successful people like Oprah, make the mistake of confusing cause and effect. Feeling confident helps with acquiring success (and I agree it is better than the opposite), but it is a very, very small component of it. On the contrary, if you talk to many successful people they will tell you that they didn't have much confidence in themselves at the beginning. The trick, however, is that you definitely feel confident once you're successful, so you believe (after the fact) that this might be the cause. Becoming successful by mental affirmations is like saying that you can have a convertible car by just feeling the wind in your face. Owners of a convertible will tell you that this is the real feeling -- but it is not the cause for them having the car in the first place. The link between mental affirmations and making money is even weaker: many times you don't even need to be successful to have a lot of it. Most fortunes are result of inheritance, marriage, blind luck (lottery winners), being in the right place at the right time (e.g., an early engineer at Google), and, don't forget about it, corruption.

swombat 14y ago
You can't become successful with affirmations, and that's not at all what I've been talking about. What I proposed is that some beliefs are holding you back and you can neutralise them with affirmations and other similar tools. Chanting "I'm going to be rich" in front of a mirror is not going to make you rich, but constantly, internally repeating to yourself "I'm not going to be rich" will most likely make you poor.
- coliveira 14y ago
  I agree that the negative thoughts may hold you back -- and this is an important self-awareness step -- but the affirmations don't do any good for you, either. You are wasting time that could be better spent doing something that may give you a better chance to become successful, like starting a company or learning to sell effectively.
  - minikomi 14y ago
    Come on mate, identifying your pain points and spending a few minutes in front of the mirror reminding yourself isn't going to wear you out for the rest of the day!
    - coliveira 14y ago
      It is not a matter of effort, but of creating false expectations. If you use affirmations, you are creating a positive statement of something that doesn't exist. For example, to combat the idea of "I am a loser", you create an affirmative statement "I am a winner". The problem, however, is that neither of these statements are true. You are not a loser neither a winner a priori. All you can do is to improve your chances of being successful, since you cannot really control the results.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    This is an awfully bold statement. It's difficult to overstate the impact of an individual's psychology. Self-awareness is not a simple binary switch you flip and then you have perspective. Every moment of our experience in the world is created by our brains in fractal recursion. If it's 10000 layers of abstraction down to the neurons, we can only hope to be consciously aware of the top 4 or 5. I'm not sure why you would jump to the conclusion that affirmations can't do anything beneficial for anyone.
    - wallflower 14y ago
      On the topic of Free Will, a new book that I would like to read: > His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: "Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." We assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also assume that we consciously originate "our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-sam-harris.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-...
insickness 14y ago
Affirmations alone are ineffective. But affirmations along with taking action can be affective. When you take action to do something you've never done before, self-doubt creeps in, usually in the form of negative self-talk. Instead of trying to "get rid" of that negative self-talk, affirmations can serve as a reminder that, yes, it is possible.
SamuelMulder 14y ago
A lot of pop psychology latches onto these ideas, but they are fairly closely related to the Seligman's concept of optimism, which is pretty well documented with controlled studies. Having an optimistic mindset definitely increases your chance of success in most business related things.
kyro 14y ago
I don't think the author actually said self-affirmations will lead you to success. If anything, they'll help improve your self-image and confidence, and put you in a better position to seek out opportunities. Your convertible analogy doesn't accurately represent the issue here. What I think is a convertible could very well be objectively not. Others can look at it and tell you that what you're driving is not a convertible. With feelings of failure, they are most of the time not reality, but rather gross misinterpretations of what we've experienced. And these misinterpretations, like I mentioned below, are a product of a behavior that we've developed to fit a self-narrative. Self-affirmations with real, objective analysis can help you unlearn those destructive behaviors. I don't think swombat is advocating you stand in front of the mirror every morning to tell yourself how amazing, special, and talented you are, but rather to keep yourself grounded in reality while staying optimistic. So instead of saying "I'm the best and I'll fail at nothing", you'd be better off saying "Today is a new day, let's make the most out of it and weather the obstacles." You're saying people will fool themselves into believing they're better than they really are, but that's not the point here. The point is to bring people, who have fooled themselves into believing the complete opposite, back up to a normal and healthy level of confidence, which could very well improve their chances of finding success.
dredmorbius 14y ago
I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith. Confidence as a prerequisite to success is a chimera. Though persevering in the face of doubt may matter. False confidence is highly dangerous to yourself and others (and very common, particularly in management). http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00....
- king_jester 14y ago
  > I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith. This is a really bad example, as she believed that those in suffering should be denied access to medication, particularly pain relieving medication. It could be argued that she should have felt bad and uncertain in making active decisions to allow others to suffer.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    As I said: regardless of your view of her work, and I've got similar issues to yours, she was tremendously religious. And yet, profoundly troubled by doubts about her faith. Which is to say, confidence in her faith had little to do with her ability to become a religious exemplar, directly contradicting a major tenet of the article. Anectdata and all that. Not so far as I've read, troubled by her actions. If you've got any documentation that she was, that might be relevant.

swombat 14y ago

You can't become successful with affirmations, and that's not at all what I've been talking about. What I proposed is that some beliefs are holding you back and you can neutralise them with affirmations and other similar tools. Chanting "I'm going to be rich" in front of a mirror is not going to make you rich, but constantly, internally repeating to yourself "I'm not going to be rich" will most likely make you poor.

coliveira 14y ago
I agree that the negative thoughts may hold you back -- and this is an important self-awareness step -- but the affirmations don't do any good for you, either. You are wasting time that could be better spent doing something that may give you a better chance to become successful, like starting a company or learning to sell effectively.
- minikomi 14y ago
  Come on mate, identifying your pain points and spending a few minutes in front of the mirror reminding yourself isn't going to wear you out for the rest of the day!
  - coliveira 14y ago
    It is not a matter of effort, but of creating false expectations. If you use affirmations, you are creating a positive statement of something that doesn't exist. For example, to combat the idea of "I am a loser", you create an affirmative statement "I am a winner". The problem, however, is that neither of these statements are true. You are not a loser neither a winner a priori. All you can do is to improve your chances of being successful, since you cannot really control the results.
- dasil003 14y ago
  This is an awfully bold statement. It's difficult to overstate the impact of an individual's psychology. Self-awareness is not a simple binary switch you flip and then you have perspective. Every moment of our experience in the world is created by our brains in fractal recursion. If it's 10000 layers of abstraction down to the neurons, we can only hope to be consciously aware of the top 4 or 5. I'm not sure why you would jump to the conclusion that affirmations can't do anything beneficial for anyone.
  - wallflower 14y ago
    On the topic of Free Will, a new book that I would like to read: > His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: "Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." We assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also assume that we consciously originate "our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-sam-harris.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-...

insickness 14y ago

Affirmations alone are ineffective. But affirmations along with taking action can be affective. When you take action to do something you've never done before, self-doubt creeps in, usually in the form of negative self-talk. Instead of trying to "get rid" of that negative self-talk, affirmations can serve as a reminder that, yes, it is possible.

SamuelMulder 14y ago

A lot of pop psychology latches onto these ideas, but they are fairly closely related to the Seligman's concept of optimism, which is pretty well documented with controlled studies. Having an optimistic mindset definitely increases your chance of success in most business related things.

kyro 14y ago

I don't think the author actually said self-affirmations will lead you to success. If anything, they'll help improve your self-image and confidence, and put you in a better position to seek out opportunities. Your convertible analogy doesn't accurately represent the issue here. What I think is a convertible could very well be objectively not. Others can look at it and tell you that what you're driving is not a convertible. With feelings of failure, they are most of the time not reality, but rather gross misinterpretations of what we've experienced. And these misinterpretations, like I mentioned below, are a product of a behavior that we've developed to fit a self-narrative. Self-affirmations with real, objective analysis can help you unlearn those destructive behaviors. I don't think swombat is advocating you stand in front of the mirror every morning to tell yourself how amazing, special, and talented you are, but rather to keep yourself grounded in reality while staying optimistic. So instead of saying "I'm the best and I'll fail at nothing", you'd be better off saying "Today is a new day, let's make the most out of it and weather the obstacles." You're saying people will fool themselves into believing they're better than they really are, but that's not the point here. The point is to bring people, who have fooled themselves into believing the complete opposite, back up to a normal and healthy level of confidence, which could very well improve their chances of finding success.

dredmorbius 14y ago

I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith. Confidence as a prerequisite to success is a chimera. Though persevering in the face of doubt may matter. False confidence is highly dangerous to yourself and others (and very common, particularly in management). http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00....

king_jester 14y ago
> I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith. This is a really bad example, as she believed that those in suffering should be denied access to medication, particularly pain relieving medication. It could be argued that she should have felt bad and uncertain in making active decisions to allow others to suffer.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  As I said: regardless of your view of her work, and I've got similar issues to yours, she was tremendously religious. And yet, profoundly troubled by doubts about her faith. Which is to say, confidence in her faith had little to do with her ability to become a religious exemplar, directly contradicting a major tenet of the article. Anectdata and all that. Not so far as I've read, troubled by her actions. If you've got any documentation that she was, that might be relevant.