Dr. Noah St. John explains afformations, a question-based alternative to affirmations. After years of posting statements like "I'm rich" on his dorm walls with no results, he had a breakthrough in 1997: the mind works through questions, not declarations. He switched to asking "Why am I rich?" instead, a shift he now demonstrates in keynotes to show why statements fail without belief.
Yeah, absolutely. So, in fact, let me— I'll show everybody. So, yes, you're absolutely right. So, this is my book from Hay House called The Book of Afformations. And it is, it's spelled A-F-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N-S. And you can go to afformations.com and learn more about my Afformations method. So, this is something I invented 30 years ago. I was actually a broke college student. I was a religious studies major. And I'd been reading self-help books for years and years. And I spent an insane amount of time doing all the books, reading all the books, and just really immersing myself in that universe, in that literature. And I did everything the books told me. And as, of course, anybody who's ever read a self-help book knows that every self-help book says the same exact thing, which is if you want to change your life, you got to use affirmations. You got to use these positive statements, right? So, we've heard this a million times, right? And so, I had all these Post-it notes all over my college dorm room. I'm happy, I'm rich, I'm successful, when the reality was, no, I'm not. I'm broke, unhappy, and miserable, right? And so, I was like, what the heck is wrong with this method? What aren't they telling us? What are they leaving out? And so, I was so frustrated by this because I've been doing this for so many years, doing everything the book said and not getting any results. So, I was actually in the shower one morning. In my books, in my coaching programs, I call it the shower that changed everything. Because I'm sure we've all had those aha moments in the shower, right? You're, you know, and you're thinking about that thing and all of a sudden, boom, and you get that light bulb moment, that eureka moment. Well, that's what happened to me in April 1997. And I realized that the human mind actually works using something much more powerful than statements. And that is the power of questions, right? And in fact, if you think about what is human thought, human thought really is the process of asking and searching for answers to questions. And so, I said, if that's true, why are we going around making statements we don't believe? Why don't we just cut out the middleman and go right to the question? And then, I said, well, what would that look like? So, let's take a classic affirmation. I love to do this, by the way, as a keynote speaker. I'm an executive coach, a business coach, but I'm also a keynote speaker. So, I get to do keynote presentations live and virtually for teams, organizations all around the country, around the world. And so, one of the things I like to do as a keynote speaker, I'll say to my audience members, Okay, I want everybody—we're going to stand up and we're going to say a traditional affirmation, just like the gurus taught us. Now, everybody say, "I am rich," and everybody goes, "I am rich." You know what happens next? Everyone starts laughing.
