Affirmation Challenge Day 3 [Ability]: ‘I can achieve anything I want, as long as I set my heart to it.’

This is Day 3 of the 15-Day Affirmation Challenge held in July 2014, where we practice positive affirmations for 15 days. The challenge is now over but you can do the tasks in your own time. Visit the overview page for all the challenge tasks.

Dear everyone, welcome to Day 3 of our 15-Day Affirmation Challenge! :D While we had 380 participants yesterday, we are at the 410-participant mark today!! :D

Here is the overview of all the posts for the challenge so far:

Affirmation Challenge announcement and signup details: 15-Day Affirmation Challenge | 410 Participants!
Affirmation Challenge Day 1 [New Beginning] | 42 Comments
Affirmation Challenge Day 2 [Self-Love] | 12 Comments

Uh… Hello? Where’s Everyone??

Here’s something interesting that I’ve observed — while we have over 410 participants in the challenge (and more if we include lurkers), there has been a remarkably low proportion of people sharing their results in the comments section!

For example, yesterday’s task on self-love only has 12 participants sharing their results (and these 12 participants — Vivian, Samuel, ASLO, Sarah, Jun Xiang, VickiB, Kae, etc. — have all shared very beautiful revelations that I encourage you to read), even though we have over 410 people participating!! Where are the other 398 of you?!?! O_O Hello? *looks around*

Wait, I get it:

Perhaps some of you are busy and you have only allocated a minute or two to glance through each day’s task, before moving on to your next to-do.
Perhaps some of you have done the tasks but are too shy to share your results.
Perhaps some of you lost interest in the challenge, decided that it’s not going to work for you (maybe the affirmations are too “positive” or too “far off” from your current place in life), and decided to drop out.

Whatever the reason, it’s totally understandable.

But… hey. Didn’t we all sign up for the challenge a week ago (upon the announcement of the challenge) and pledge ourselves to this challenge? Didn’t we agree to give this challenge a go and see what’s going to come out of it for us at the end of the 15 days? Didn’t we implicitly agree to put our best foot forward by virtue of signing up? After all, some of us have been stuck in our comfort zones for a while, repeating the same routine day after day, and perhaps we thought, Hey, this 15-day affirmation challenge may just be the right “kick” I need to move me in the right direction. I’m going to sign up and see where it brings me!

You know, honestly speaking, I’m just more than happy that you’re here reading PE and checking out these affirmation tasks, whether as an official participant or not. While I’m dedicating a good chunk of my day every day just to run this challenge (e.g. yesterday I cut short a meeting and rushed home just to finish up the blog post for Day 2; today I was out running errands for my house moving, skipped my appointment to view my wedding photos/videos (Ken did so on our behalf), and rushed home again to write the affirmation task for today), I’m doing this because I want to. Just like with the free articles I write on PE, I want to be here to support you to practise affirmations and make the right change in your life.

However, I can’t do much if you don’t step out, do the tasks, and share your results with the rest of us in the community! This challenge is designed with all of you in mind, so when I get few to nobody sharing, it’s hard for me to get a sense on what’s happening at your side of the world, and as such plan the next task. (Yes, I do dynamically create the challenge based on how everyone’s experiences at the moment, so every challenge I’ve run so far — Live a Better Life in 30 Days, Be a Better Me in 30 Days, gratitude challenge, kindness challenge, healthy living challenge, etc. — has basically always been designed around you guys!) It’s like I’m groping around in the dark and trying to aim for the bull’s-eye when I don’t even know where the dartboard is. I have no idea who’s doing (or not doing) that day’s task, how his/her experience is with the task, and what help he/she needs if any.

Regardless of whether there’s going to be 100 or 0 people commenting/sharing in the subsequent tasks, I’ll still be here running this challenge, meticulously planning and writing each day’s task, creating the affirmation wallpapers, and posting each day’s post within the day — rain or shine. Even if there are 0 people commenting for the remaining 13 days of the challenge, I’ll still be here, turning up every day, till the last day of the challenge.

But I do sincerely hope that…

…for those of you lurking in the shadows, that you can step out to officially sign up for the challenge.
…for those of you who have signed up for the challenge but are just reading the posts passively, to take a few minutes of your day to just do the tasks that I have meticulously thought through and mapped out for you. Even if you may be skeptical of them, it doesn’t hurt to just take a few minutes to try something out, something new, for yourself.
…for those of you who are doing the tasks duly but are resisting sharing your results for whatever reason, to just take a tiny step and share some of your results (however little, however much) in the comments section, just so that others can learn from your experience.
…and for those of you who have been sharing your results openly or even blogging about them (thank you and thank you!!!), to check out a couple other participants’ answers and to offer a word of advice, support, or just a pat in the back for a job well done to them, where appropriate.

…because when you do that, you don’t just help the other participants or myself; you’re really helping yourself to learn, grow, and become better — precisely what you desired when you signed up for the challenge.

I also hope that none of you take the challenges at PE or my efforts for granted, because it takes quite a lot of work to run a challenge (much less of a high-quality one, AND at a scale of several hundred participants), and I’m not charging for any of this or earning a single dime from my work here. The challenge tasks don’t just magically pop out by themselves every day — I’m working hard in the background every day to make them happen, including taking time away from my personal life (e.g. my own free time, time spent with my husband Ken, time spent in house moving) and also putting on hold other projects that I can be doing (say, running a new course) since I’ve blocked out the next two weeks of July specially for the affirmation challenge.

Okay, enough with all this mambo-jumbo!!! This is probably the first and last time I’m going to appeal to you to actively participate in this challenge, as it’s not in my place/interest to push anyone to do things especially if it’s out of his/her interest/comfort zone. Whatever will happen will happen, and I’m always ready to make the best out of any situation that happens.

Now, let’s move to today’s task! Today is Day 3, and we’re looking at…

Day 3: [Ability]

Today’s affirmation: “I can achieve anything I want, as long as I set my heart to it.”

How many times have you said, “I can’t do this,” even before you tried something?

I’m sure you have. I have as well.

The words, “I can’t,” are incredibly powerful and dangerous. If you have listened to my interview on BFM 89.9 last month on How Your Language Affects Your Success, you would know that I cited “I can’t” as one of the top five self-limiting statements that people make, along with “I won’t” and “I don’t know how.” When people say “I can’t,” it either suggests that they have a low sense of self-perceived ability, or simply a lack of willingness to try something (i.e. close-mindedness).

It really doesn’t matter if you say “I can’t” to small mundane things. For example, yesterday I was grocery shopping and I wanted to buy beverages for the household. However, I decided that they’re too heavy for me to carry home (since I had two full baskets full of grocery), so I thought, I can’t carry them home, and decided to get them in my next trip instead. It’s also okay if you say “I can’t” to things that you don’t believe in or things that you don’t want to do (i.e. learning to say no).

Where the issue of saying “I can’t” surfaces is when you say it to the important things: the things that matter, such as your biggest goals and dreams. Imagine the following:

I can’t achieve my dreams. They are too big for me. I best settle with what I have today.
I can’t blog (say, if your goal is to run a successful blog based on your passion). I don’t know how to blog and I’m not good at writing anyway.
I can’t quit this job I hate. It’s my iron rice bowl. There’s nothing else that I can do.
I can’t lose my excess weight. I’ve tried before and I just gain everything back. I’m doomed not to have a healthy body.

… and so on and so forth. Statements like these, they literally serve as the foundation for more negative, self-limiting, and self-defeating thoughts to harvest. When your thoughts affect your actions thereby affecting your results, you can be sure that thinking “I can’t” will almost always create a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a world where there are already enough challenges to live our dream life, do we really need to stand in our way to realize our own goals and dreams?

The truth is that you have all the power you need to achieve your goals and dreams, whether you believe it or not. The very fact that you have the ability to conjure up the goal/dream IN YOUR MIND is already the very evidence that you can realize it — otherwise, why would it even appear in your mind??? The universe allowed for this thought to manifest because it knows that you have the capability to MAKE IT HAPPEN. And in order to do that, you have to first get rid of those self-limiting thoughts, believe in yourself, and then take the subsequent steps to make it happen.

Today, your task is to clear your self-limiting belief(s) in a goal/dream and identify steps to make it happen. Let’s get started! :D

Your Task Today

Identify a goal/dream that you’re blocking yourself in currently. For example:
- Weight loss: I can’t lose weight.
- Family: I can’t improve my relationship with my parents.
- Studies: I can’t achieve straight-As.
- Quitting bad habits: I can’t quit smoking.
- Eating habits: I can’t stop emotional eating.
- Others: I can’t succeed in [XXX] goal.
Identify your self-limiting belief(s) in this goal/dream. For example:
- Say you want to quit smoking but you haven’t been able to. Your self-limiting beliefs may be:
  - “I can’t stop smoking because I’ve tried too many times but failed.”
  - “Smoking helps me to relieve stress, so I need it in my life. I’ll continue to smoke whenever I feel stressed up because it makes me feel good.”
Change this self-limiting belief(s). Continuing the smoking example above, the new empowering belief(s) can be:
- “It doesn’t matter how many times I fail smoking; what matters is that I learn from each relapse. I will identify the root causes of my smoking addiction and address them one at a time.”
- “I have been using smoking as a stress reliever, so I need to find a different way to cope with my stress. This way, I’ll stop being reliant on smoking to relieve stress, because it really doesn’t — it makes me more stressed instead in the long run.”
Identify action step(s) you’re going to take to realize this goal/dream. Include deadlines where applicable. For example:
- Check out internet and library resources on how to quit smoking (Today)
- Seek out quit-smoking groups (such as Nicotine Anonymous) and join them to get group support (This Friday)
- Identify the root causes of my smoking and address them one at a time (Ongoing)
Say your new belief(s), along with today’s affirmation:
“I can achieve anything I want, as long as I set my heart to it.”
(If you think it’s silly to say them out loud, you can say them silently in your heart.)

I encourage you to write down your new belief(s) and today’s affirmation so that you can always see them and commit them to your heart. Repeat them every day to yourself, for as many times and as long as needed, until they become part of your default thinking.

Affirmation Wallpaper: [Ability]

Today’s affirmation wallpaper, for download:

Download (right click and save): [1366×768] [1600×900] [1920×1080]

Share Your Results!

Share your results, check out other participants’ responses, and interact with each other in the comments section! Remember, this challenge is a community effort: by openly engaging in the discussion, not only will you help others, you’ll also help yourself.

If you think today’s affirmation has benefited you, do share it with your friends and family.

Once you’re done, proceed to Day 4 here: Affirmation Challenge, Day 4 [Setbacks]

(Images: Flower, Hot air balloon)