Dr. Noah St. John teaches Afformations, a technique using empowering questions instead of affirmations to access the subconscious mind. Susan S. Hallmark used the method to escape $60,000 in credit card debt and repair her marriage after financial stress left her feeling stuck.
What I teach my clients, Mark, is that money acts as a magnifying glass. Okay? Money doesn't change anything. It reveals everything.
Oh.
So whatever is there, money problems will just exacerbate whatever is there. So let's say you have a couple and they're going through money problems. If they're close, that can actually bring them closer together, believe it or not. However, if there's a distance, that will tend— distance will tend to become greater and greater. The inner game is what happens in here. That's what the book is about, about Afformations, using empowering questions to actually change and improve your inner game. So if you ever heard of an affirmation, it's a positive statement like, I am happy, I am good enough, right?
Yeah.
The problem is a lot of people don't believe them. They say the statements over and over. So what I invented is a method called Afformations. And so an Afformation is an empowering question like, why am I so happy? Why am I good enough? What happens is that actually engages the embedded presupposition factor of your brain, because when you ask a question, your brain searches for the answer. What you need to realize is that most of the arguments about money, if not all of them, are about assumptions. Okay?
Always.
Our beliefs, our actions are based on our assumptions, right? So most people assume, well, that person looks at money the same way I do. That assumption is usually not right. So I talk about the spender, the saver, the avoider, and the monk. Those are the 4 basic money types. The spender spends, the saver saves, the avoider avoids, the monk just says, I don't want to get my hands dirty. Don't talk to me about money. There's ways to do smarter spending. We're not really going to change a spender into a saver. That's not really going to happen.
I think I am an avoider. I don't want to talk about it. Before I came to this show, I had been going through a very, very hard time. I'd left work in order to start a new career, and I was investing a lot of money into educating myself on how to do that, and I wasn't bringing in any income, and using my credit cards to pay for my education, so I was getting up to over $60,000 in credit card debt at that point in time, with no income to pay for that. That created a little stress at home. It was really problematic because my husband, Peter, would not— he didn't want to pay my way through this, and he didn't understand how I could get us into such a mess. And I didn't understand why he wouldn't just be my daddy and pay for everything.
Take care of it.
And in many ways, what he was doing was kicking me in the butt. He was saying, fix it. Basically what happened is that I heard him on an internet audio program and he was talking about getting unstuck. And if there was any word I would use to describe myself, it was stuck. I really listened. I tuned into what he had found in this technique he calls affirmations. And affirmations are positive why questions. Why am I so happy? Why am I so blessed? Why do I know that I have value to others? Why do others value me? Why is everything going to work out all right? Why am I enough? Flipping your thinking so you don't You don't want to go to the place where you're going, why am I so stupid? Why am I so crazy? Why couldn't I figure this out for myself? You're really utilizing the subconscious part of your brain, what he would call the 95% of your brain that you're not aware of consciously at all.
It's like an iceberg. About 5% is the conscious mind. The 95% is the subconscious. That's what Afformations help, is to bring that up to the conscious level.
And it's this huge search engine. You know, Google didn't get the idea of a search engine out of nowhere. I have a routine. I get up in the morning and I meditate and I journal. And so I usually try to express for some sort of gratitude for what's working in my life. And I tried something called prepaving, which is when you define how you'd like the day to go. But the majority of the work I was doing was reciting affirmations continuously. If I was— in the beginning, I was listening to audiotapes of more affirmations, and I would create my own that affected— it even affected how we built the show here, because I would— if things were not going so well in one area or another, I would go back and I would look at what's the affirmation for this? What's the— if this is the bad thing, what's the positive thing? What's the good?
