As we work together to unlock our natural gifts to raise entrepreneurial daughters, I wanted to talk about the second principle of MAGIC with you today – Affirm. What does it mean to affirm? And what are affirmations?

I’ll start with a story that beautifully illustrates the power of affirmations and what it means to affirm in our lives. This story is a Native American proverb, and it involves an elderly Cherokee man telling a story to his grandson about the battle of two wolves. He tells his grandson that in each and every one of us, there’s a battle of two wolves going on. One of these wolves is evil. This evil wolf is full of everything bad in the world. Things like sorrow, regret, arrogance, self pity, resentment, inferiority, and lies. On the other side is the good wolf. The good wolf is made up of all the things we all want to have more of – love, joy, empathy, peace, kindness, and compassion. So as the man tells his grandson about this daily battle we all face, the grandson asks, “Well, which wolf wins?” And the Cherokee grandfather wisely says, “The one you feed.”

So imagine this battle going on within each of us every single day. You may know this battle as the voice in your head that just won’t shut up. The voice that keeps going, saying words that you would never allow other people say to you or to your daughter, yet they keep playing in our own heads. These harmful words could be your own words, or they could be words someone said to you even as far back as your childhood. And many times, this is the bad wolf that’s getting fed. Sometimes that wolf shows up as comparison, saying things to you like, “I’m not as good as she is as a mother. I’m not as smart as, I’m not as fast as…” And we could subconsciously feed this wolf.

So what does an affirmation look like?

An affirmation could be something as simple as, “I am worthy of living a life that I love.” Now, when you say that, some of you may be thinking, “I don’t believe that. How can I say that if I don’t believe that it’s true?” That’s okay. You don’t need to believe it, because the funny thing about our subconscious mind is that it can’t take a joke! So even by just repeating the words, our subconscious will take those words and go to work for us, because that’s how we were designed and made.

This means you can actually craft affirmations that will design the life that you want to live, that will allow you to become the person that you want to become. That is the power of positively framed affirmations.

Consider these affirmations:

“I’m always learning and growing.”

“I have all the resources I need.”

Again, you don’t need to believe in your affirmation in the moment. Instead, view it as a muscle that gets worked like any other, and as we work that muscle, we feed that good wolf so that it can eventually win.

It’s no surprise that many of us love to affirm our daughters. It’s very common for us as mothers to say things like: “You can do it. I’m so proud of you. You’ve got this. You’re brave, you’re strong, you’re courageous.” And those affirmations are good for our daughters. But how much more powerful would it be if we were able to actually model how to affirm ourselves, so that she can affirm herself? So that when we’re not around, she has all the resources she needs to be able to feed her own good wolf? Because it won’t always be good enough for us to feed her wolf.

And that’s where it goes back to modeling, mom! We get to model the exact behaviors we want for our daughters, so they can learn from it and then adopt how to affirm themselves. Think of not only how powerful that would be for her, but also how powerful it would be for you to be able to design and live the life that you truly desire. Share this message with someone that needs to hear it today – the world needs more empowered women to go empower more women. Let’s make some MAGIC happen today!