Hidden Secret #1: Use Affirmations to Build Your Writing Success

Writing affirmations can help you establish a positive and creative mindset.

Here’s a simple, free, and effective way to build your success as a copywriter: Use affirmations that boost your self-confidence and improve your writing.

I’ve used affirmations for years. Repeating a few brief, positive phrases to myself over and over turned my writing career around. And it can work for you, too.

Here’s the theory: Repeating a phrase that reinforces what we aspire to gradually drives it into our unconscious until we start to feel and act as we described. Whether it’s self-hypnosis or whatever, I know that it works.

By the mid-1990s, I was a full-time writer who’d already completed hundreds of magazine articles, technical manuals, and B2B newsletters. But it was a painful process. I started every project full of self-doubt, muttering to myself, “How can I ever write this? Where do I start? Why do I call myself a writer?”

Often, we call these self-doubts negative self-talk. And I had tons of it!

Then I heard about affirmations: short peppy phrases that are basically the opposite of negative self-talk. I decided to try them. Here’s the first affirmation I developed:

Writing is easy and fun for me.

I taped that on my desk and onto my bathroom mirror. I repeated it over and over and over again, dozens of times a day. Some say for an affirmation to work, you must repeat it 10,000 times. I probably did.

And within a few weeks, I noticed my writing was getting a little easier. Within a few months, I went through a major transition. I was happy to start on a new project. I wasn’t wracked by doubts. The negativity had blown away like a mist when the sun comes up. Writing honestly had become easy and fun for me.

If you want to try affirmations for yourself, in any area of your life, here are a few tips on how to create them.

1. DO set your affirmations in the present, not the future.

Example: “I am a happy nonsmoker,” instead of “I will quit smoking in the New Year.”

2. DO include a positive emotion, not just something you want to be or do.

This is the same as showing a benefit in your copy.

Example: “I enjoy feeling good every day without cigarettes.”

3. DO write your own affirmations, don’t just find them from someone else.

Writing these for yourself tunes them to exactly what you need.

Of course, there’s no right or wrong, only what works for you. You can find out more about affirmations at Freeaffirmations.org or in a book like The Laws of Attraction.

Many years later, I’m still using affirmations. I’m looking at one right now — it’s written on a yellow sticky note on my desk:

I get the perfect amount done every day.

This helps me feel good about my workdays being shorter, now that I have two young children. I don’t have to use an affirmation for this one: “I love being a dad who is involved in my children’s lives.”

Here’s to your copywriting success, helped by the power of positive affirmations.