I have to be honest with you—I’m a die-hard fan of affirmations. 

This technique of repeating positively worded-statements is the single most effective mental training tool I have ever used with clients across 16 years of high-performance coaching. It’s also my favourite mental training tool for personal growth.

Affirmations enable you to program your mind to achieve your dreams.

But I totally get why people are sceptical of them. And also why people who do test them out are often left disappointed.

A lot of “gurus” on the internet would have you believe that writing “I can do it” on a post-it and sticking it to your mirror will change your life.

It’s not quite that simple.

The reason why so many of the generic affirmations on the internet don’t work, is because they don’t address the deep subconscious limiting beliefs and blocks that hold people back from success.

They are not specific enough or tailored enough to elicit deep transformation.

If you are only repeating “meh” statements that don’t address the true root causes of self-sabotage and underperformance, then you’re going to get “meh” results.

When created and implemented effectively, however, affirmations can change your life.

You just need to know how to craft them and how to practise them to unlock their true potential.

My Underwhelming Introduction to Affirmations

 I was about 23 years old, sitting in a therapist’s consultation room. The therapist was a specialist in eating disorders…and I needed help.

I wanted to be free of the constant self-criticism and the daily practice of assessing my worth by whatever number was reflected back to me on the scales.

Unfortunately, I was in the wrong place.

I knew this when the well-educated and well-meaning therapist enthusiastically announced his solution…

“Every time you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive one!”

Boom…eating disorder vanquished!

I can still remember the retort that flashed through my mind at his epiphany…

“Man—I have about 50 negative thoughts about myself every second. And you want me to catch and reframe every single one of them in real time? That’s going to be more than a full time job”.

I gave up on that therapist. I almost gave up on therapy itself.

And I came very close to accepting that my mindset, and therefore my life, couldn’t change.
Years later, after a psychology masters and many more attempts to heal through different disciplines, I realised why his advice didn’t work for me.

– his solution only addressed the surface symptoms of a deeper condition.

Mental Tennis

Let me explain this with a tennis example:

Imagine you are standing in front of one of those machines that spits out tennis balls automatically at a rate of knots. It goes haywire and shoots 50 balls at you every second so that you are getting bruised black and blue. 

Following our therapist friend’s solution?

You feebly attempt to bat every single ball away with your racket but it’s too overwhelming and completely ineffective.

Or alternatively… you just go and switch the machine off so that the balls aren’t pelting you any longer.

You deal with the problem at the root.

This is how affirmations can be life-changing.

Done right, you can use effective affirmations to reprogram your mind at the deepest level.

When you shift the contents of your subconscious mind, those tennis-balls – the critical thoughts, doubts and negative self-talk – don’t get produced in the first place.

You don’t need to play mental tennis to feel good about yourself or achieve your goals.

Over the past 16 years, I’ve used affirmations to help high performers—from professional athletes to traders and entrepreneurs—break through barriers and achieve peak performance.

The Science Behind Affirmations

Affirmations aren’t just feel-good statements; they’re rooted in neuroscience. Here’s how they work:

1. Rewiring Neural Pathways: Repeating positive affirmations activates neuroplasticity, helping you form new, empowering thought patterns.
2. Counteracting Negativity Bias: Your brain is wired to focus on threats and failures. Affirmations help redirect your focus to strengths and possibilities.
3. Priming for Success: When you repeat affirmations, you train your brain to expect and recognize opportunities for growth and achievement.

How to Craft Effective Affirmations

To unlock their transformative power, affirmation statements need to be:

• Specific – targeted to the root causes of underperformance as well as the surface, obvious performance challenges.
• Personal – crafted using language that resonates with you.
• Positive – structured using only positive statements and concepts.
• Vivid – ideally evoke a strong mental image and emotional response upon listening.
• Simple – using short sentences and simple language can help your subconscious mind to more easily absorb the statements with little cognitive effort.
• Deeply aligned with your unique challenges and goals.

The single most effective way to practice affirmations, in my experience, is to write a script of about 30-40 statements, all targeting the specific performance or life issues that you want to address. 

Then, record yourself reading this script out loud. Usually the recording will end up being about 7-9 minutes long.

Listen to the full script each day to reprogram your mind for success at the deepest level—it’s the constant repetition that creates the reprogramming. If you only listen inconsistently it’s likely you won’t experience the full benefits of the practice.

Bonus Tips 

Here are some simple additional tips to help you create affirmations that genuinely work:

1. Identify the Root Belief: Pinpoint the limiting belief or self-sabotaging thought at the core of the behaviour pattern you want to change. For example, the performance challenge of under-charging for your services could be driven by a subconscious “Impostor Syndrome” program and beliefs such as “I don’t have enough experience/ knowledge/ credibility to warrant charging higher fees”.
2. Flip the Script: Transform the belief into a positive, empowering statement. For example, “I deliver exceptional transformation and value to my clients and I proudly charge the fees that reflect my high quality of work.”
3. Make It Personal: Use language and imagery that resonates with you. Instead of a generic “I am successful,” try, “I am the Cristiano Ronaldo of entrepreneurship. I consistently perform at my peak and this consistency helps me turn over more than three million dollars in revenue every year.”
4. Engage Emotion: The more you feel the truth of the affirmation, the more effective it will be. Imagine the emotions you’d experience if the affirmation were already true.
5. Reinforce Consistently: Repeat your affirmations daily, ideally in a relaxed state, such as during meditation or before sleep.

Affirmations in Action

Let’s apply affirmations to a common challenge for online entrepreneurs: Burnout and the belief that you need to work yourself to the bone, doing everything in the business yourself, to grow your revenue. 

Imagine you’ve promised yourself to delegate aspects of your workload and prioritise personal wellbeing, but emotions like fear of scarcity, perfectionism, guilt or sheer overwhelm pull you off track. Instead of berating yourself, use targeted affirmations like:

• “I fiercely protect my personal time and prioritize my health, relationships, and personal fulfilment”
• “I fully embrace the idea of periodisation—downtime and vacations are equally as important for my success as the direct work I do on my business”
• “I know that creating from a place of joy and fullness brings me unmatched success”.

These statements rewire your mindset to align with the actions and outcomes you desire.

Your Turn

If affirmations haven’t worked for you before, it’s not because they’re ineffective—it’s likely because they only targeted symptoms or weren’t tailored specifically to you.

Try crafting specific, emotionally resonant affirmations using the steps above. Commit to a consistent practice and notice how your mindset shifts over time.

Affirmations are not a magic bullet, but they are a powerful tool for anyone willing to put in the work. 

With the right approach, you can reprogram your mind to achieve extraordinary results—in trading, business, or life.

To your success,

Créde

The post Affirmations For Entrepreneurs: Do They Even Work? appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

Affirmations are a technique used to help you transform subconscious blocks and elevate your mindset and performance. Use this affirmation script to help you develop a wealthy mindset focused on increasing abundance and prosperity.

 

Listening every day will help you program your mind – repetition is key

 

For best results either say each affirmation out loud or repeat in your mind after you hear each statement

 

Hi, I’m Créde Sheehy-Kelly. I’m a High-Performance Psychologist. I help traders and online entrepreneurs to master their mindset for peak performance and a richer life. I have spent over 16 years coaching world leaders in professional sport, entrepreneurship, business, finance and trading.

The post Money Mindset Affirmations | Program Your Mind for Wealth appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

The post Trade With More Confidence and Self-Belief appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

Can the universe co-create your trading success? An increasing number of traders who follow the Law of Attraction and the concept of Manifestation believe so. To be clear, they are not throwing their trading plans out the window and hoping that the universe delivers profit into their accounts…they are leveraging the principles of manifestation to perform better in their trading and to accelerate the realization of their life-goals.

In a recent Twitter poll, 60% of traders reported believing in manifestation and the Law of Attraction, with 27% reporting not believing in them and just 13% reporting never having heard of the concepts.

Personal development Gurus like Joe Dispenza, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle and even Oprah have popularized the concept in recent years. This is not a New Age concept though, the discipline actually has roots stretching back to the 1^st century and crosses religious and philosophical doctrines.

What is the Law of Attraction?

The Law of Attraction states that whatever you focus on you bring towards you and manifest into your reality. Based on the principle of “like attracts like”, the Law of Attraction encourages people to choose their thoughts, beliefs, energy and words mindfully. Proponents of the Law of Attraction believe that the law is always working, just like the law of gravity. 

“Whether consciously or unconsciously, you are the creator of your everyday experiences”

If you are unconsciously sending out negative thoughts, beliefs and words into the world, you will attract negative experiences that are matched with the energetic vibration of what you are emitting. Conversely, if you want to upgrade the quality of your reality, you can leverage this law to intentionally choose positive thoughts, beliefs, actions and words to experience higher-vibration results.

Want that beachfront mansion? You’re not going to get it by focusing on how many losing trades you had today and indulging your negative self-concept as a victim of the market. 

What is Manifestation?

Manifestation is the process by which people leverage the Law of Attraction to create desired results in their physical reality – dream holiday in Hawaii, fast-growing trading account, ditching the 9-5 to become a full time trader – you get the idea. The manifestation process relies on a number of specific principles which inform how a person should go about upgrading their reality and securing their desires in physical form.

So what if you’re a die-hard fan of scientific, evidence-based techniques? Does the Law of Attraction seem a little too *woo woo* to invest your trust in (and potentially the health of your trading account?).

Here’s the good news…

There actually IS a scientific basis to the principles of manifestation. At least if we are looking through the lens of performance and trading psychology. Each of the following manifestation techniques that I am about to share with you have been researched and empirically proven within the field of performance psychology (albeit with no intentional reference to the Law of Attraction or manifestation). 

The main differentiating factor between the performance psychology and manifestation schools of thought is the mechanism by which the techniques achieve their results. Performance psychology explains the efficacy of each technique from the perspective of within-person factors (e.g. activation of neural pathways, influence of the subconscious mind on guiding our actions etc.). Manifestation, on the other hand, incorporates the role of a higher power or universal consciousness in how these techniques help us manifest our desired results.

The bottom line is that believers and non-believers alike can benefit from these top 7 trading psychology tips that align with the principles of manifestation. Implement these 7 techniques to bring about better trading performance and maximize profits.

7 Tips to Manifest Better Trading Results and Level Up Your Wealth

1.     BE SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT

When it comes to stating our desires – trading-related or otherwise, the more specific the better. Imagine the trader who sets out with the goal of “being a profitable trader” versus the trader who sets out a goal to be in a position to leave their 9-5 job in one year by growing their account by 10% each month. The latter trader is much more focused and intentional with setting out their vision and therefore can take more specific actions to achieve it.

2. WRITE DOWN YOUR GOALS

According to performance psychology, the very act of writing down your goals makes you more likely to achieve them. People who write down their goals have been shown to persist longer in the face of adversity, have higher levels of confidence and motivation for achieving their goals and ultimately are more successful in achieving them than those people who don’t document them. 

Manifestation details how you can achieve your desires by first getting specific about what they are and then “asking for them” by petitioning the universe through journaling, prayer, meditation, speaking them aloud, creating a vision board or visualizing yourself achieving them.

3. TAKE INTENTIONAL ACTION TOWARDS YOUR GOALS

It’s not enough to just write down your specific desires and then lie back on a sunbed and wait until the benevolent universal tide brings you your results. Stating your intentions is the first part of the process. The second part is taking intentional action. I’m stressing the word intentional here because it pays to be strategic about the actions you are taking.

If your desire is to increase your trading account size by 10% each month, you can’t just focus on your P&L and expect success. The trader who only sets goals and takes actions based on their P&L is setting themselves up to break their trading rules and lose a lot of money to the market. The only way to be consistently profitable as a trader is to consistently execute your trading plan. Your goals should be aligned with this fact.

Instead of setting a daily profit target, set performance goals that hold you accountable to the execution of your plan (e.g. 90% or more of all trades taken fit my A+ setup criteria). This way you will shift your focus and measure of success to how well you are sticking to your trading plan. Ultimately that’s what will deliver your long-term results. From a manifestation perspective, you are co-creating your reality with the universe, so actions are required to meet your part of the bargain.  The more strategic and intentional these actions are, the quicker you can expect to see results.

4. PRACTICE GRATITUDE

The present moment holds a lot of power when it comes to both psychology and manifestation. In the midst of working towards manifesting your desires, it’s important to stay mindful and thankful for the good things that are already present in your life. It’s also important to acknowledge even the smallest ways that you are moving towards your goals (or the smallest ways that the universe is delivering on them depending on your belief system).

Keeping a daily gratitude journal is a great way to magnify your awareness of all the love, abundance, prosperity and good fortune that is in your current life. This can be as simple as just writing down 5 things that you are grateful for in a journal each evening. Practicing gratitude in this way has been proven to improve sleep, lower high blood pressure, strengthen the immune system, improve patience and self-confidence and increase resilience, among many other benefits.  It also raises your energetic vibration to that of abundance. Gratitude eclipses any scarcity thinking and trains your mind to stay focused on the idea that your desires are constantly being fulfilled and all your needs met.

5. LET GO OF INTERNAL RESISTANCE AND LIMITING BELIEFS

Your subconscious mind rules 95% of your actions. If your subconscious mind is not aligned with your conscious goals, the result will be self-sabotage. In trading terms, when your conscious goal of *making ALL the money* conflicts with a subconscious limiting belief like “I am not deserving of success” or “all rich people are greedy”,  the result can be destructive trading habits like revenge-trading, over-trading, ignoring stops and loss limits or hesitating to take trades.

To reach your trading potential, become aware of any deeply-held subconscious beliefs that may be tripping you up in your trading. Once you have pinpointed exactly what those beliefs are, then you can use a highly effective mental training tool – Affirmations – to reprogram your subconscious mind for success. While affirmations are a stalwart of the manifestation toolkit, they are also grounded in psychotherapy and self-talk research within performance psychology. You can access a free Affirmation Script for Traders here on my YouTube channel if you want to test it out.

6. VISUALIZE SUCCESS

Visualize the end result you desire as if it’s already in your reality. Want that bank account balance to hit seven figures? Visualize yourself opening up your banking app and seeing the number staring back at you. Hoping to trade from your laptop on a tropical beach in the not-so-distant future? Visualize yourself sipping Mai Tais with your feet in the sand at the end of another successful trading session. 

Within the performance psychology field there is empirical evidence dating back to the 1940s to support the effectiveness of using visualization to achieve higher levels of performance. Neuro-imaging studies have shown that when we visualize, it activates the same neural pathways as if we were experiencing the event in real life. We are, in effect, wiring our brains for success. 

The key to successful visualization is to make the image as vivid as possible in order to elicit a strong emotional response – the same emotions as if we were experiencing the event in real life. From a manifestation perspective, this emotional charge is what raises our vibration to the level that matches the vibration of that which we desire, bringing it into our physical reality.

7. ACT “AS IF”

Take the actions you would take as if your desire was already achieved. Set up a viewing for the 5-bed villa you have on your vision board. Donate 10% of your current trading profits to that cause that is close to your heart. Dress in a shirt and tie for your home trading session as if you were already a professional trader for a prop firm going into the office to trade. These small actions reinforce to both your conscious and subconscious minds that success is imminent and that you have unshakeable belief in your ability to manifest your goals. 

Not only are you raising your vibration in manifestation terms, the increase in confidence in your ability to achieve your goals has many psychological benefits. People with higher self-confidence in their ability to successfully execute a task or achieve a goal persist longer in the face of adversity, take on more challenging tasks and remain more highly motivated even after setbacks than their counterparts with lower confidence.

And if you’re looking for further inspiration to start “acting as if”, the actor Jim Carrey once wrote himself a 10 million dollar cheque well before he was being paid the big bucks. He wrote it out to himself for Acting Services Rendered and dated it Thanksgiving 1995. He carried it around in his wallet for years and just before – you guessed it – Thanksgiving 1995, he found out he was to be paid 10 million dollars for his role in Dumb and Dumber.

The post Law of Attraction Meets Trading Psychology appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.

I have to be honest with you.

I’m the “Queue-In-The-Rain-Overnight-For-Tickets” type fan of Affirmations. 

This technique of repeating positively worded-statements is the single most effective mental training tool I have ever used with clients across 16 years of high-performance coaching. It’s also my favourite mental training tool for personal growth.

Affirmations enable you to program your mind to achieve your dreams.

But I totally get why people are sceptical of them. And also why people who do test them out are often left disappointed.

A lot of “gurus” on the internet would have you believe that writing “I can do it” on a post-it and sticking it to your mirror will change your life.

It’s not quite that simple.

The reason why so many of the generic affirmations on the internet don’t work, is because they don’t address the deep subconscious limiting beliefs and blocks that hold people back from success.

They are not specific enough or tailored enough to elicit deep transformation.

If you are only repeating “meh” statements that don’t address the true root causes of self-sabotage and underperformance, then you’re going to get “meh” results.

When created and implemented effectively, however, affirmations can change your life.

You just need to know how to craft them and how to practise them to unlock their true potential.

My Underwhelming Introduction to Affirmations

 I was about 23 years old, sitting in a therapist’s consultation room. The therapist was a specialist in eating disorders…and I needed help.

I wanted to be free of the constant self-criticism and the daily practice of assessing my worth by whatever number was reflected back to me on the scales.

Unfortunately, I was in the wrong place.

I knew this when the well-educated and well-meaning therapist enthusiastically announced his solution…

“Every time you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive one!”

Boom…eating disorder vanquished!

I can still remember the retort that flashed through my mind at his epiphany…

“Man—I have about 50 negative thoughts about myself every second. And you want me to catch and reframe every single one of them in real time? That’s going to be more than a full time job”.

I gave up on that therapist. I almost gave up on therapy itself.

And I came very close to accepting that my mindset, and therefore my life, couldn’t change.
Years later, after a psychology masters and many more attempts to heal through different disciplines, I realised why his advice didn’t work for me.

– his solution only addressed the surface symptoms of a deeper condition.

Mental Tennis

Let me explain this with a tennis example:

Imagine you are standing in front of one of those machines that spits out tennis balls automatically at a rate of knots. It goes haywire and shoots 50 balls at you every second so that you are getting bruised black and blue. 

Following our therapist friend’s solution?

You feebly attempt to bat every single ball away with your racket but it’s too overwhelming and completely ineffective.

Or alternatively… you just go and switch the machine off so that the balls aren’t pelting you any longer.

You deal with the problem at the root.

This is how affirmations can be life-changing.

Done right, you can use effective affirmations to reprogram your mind at the deepest level.

When you shift the contents of your subconscious mind, those tennis-balls – the critical thoughts, doubts and negative self-talk – don’t get produced in the first place.

You don’t need to play mental tennis to feel good about yourself or achieve your goals.

Over the past 16 years, I’ve used affirmations to help high performers—from professional athletes to traders and entrepreneurs—break through barriers and achieve peak performance.

The Science Behind Affirmations

Affirmations aren’t just feel-good statements; they’re rooted in neuroscience. Here’s how they work:

1. Rewiring Neural Pathways: Repeating positive affirmations activates neuroplasticity, helping you form new, empowering thought patterns.
2. Counteracting Negativity Bias: Your brain is wired to focus on threats and failures. Affirmations help redirect your focus to strengths and possibilities.
3. Priming for Success: When you repeat affirmations, you train your brain to expect and recognize opportunities for growth and achievement.

How to Craft Effective Affirmations

To unlock their transformative power, affirmation statements need to be:

• Specific – targeted to the root causes of underperformance as well as the surface, obvious performance challenges.
• Personal – crafted using language that resonates with you.
• Positive – structured using only positive statements and concepts.
• Vivid – ideally evoke a strong mental image and emotional response upon listening.
• Simple – using short sentences and simple language can help your subconscious mind to more easily absorb the statements with little cognitive effort.
• Deeply aligned with your unique challenges and goals.

The single most effective way to practice affirmations, in my experience, is to write a script of about 30-40 statements, all targeting the specific performance or life issues that you want to address. 

Then, record yourself reading this script out loud. Usually the recording will end up being about 7-9 minutes long.

Listen to the full script each day to reprogram your mind for success at the deepest level—it’s the constant repetition that creates the reprogramming. If you only listen inconsistently it’s likely you won’t experience the full benefits of the practice.

Bonus Tips 

Here are some simple additional tips to help you create affirmations that genuinely work:

1. Identify the Root Belief: Pinpoint the limiting belief or self-sabotaging thought at the core of the behaviour pattern you want to change. For example, the performance challenge of taking too many low quality trades might be driven by a core belief of “My trading results determine my self-worth as a person”.
2. Flip the Script: Transform the belief into a positive, empowering statement. For example, “I highly value myself for who I am.”
3. Make It Personal: Use language that resonates with you. Instead of a generic “I am successful,” try, “I am a consistently profitable trader with impeccable discipline.”
4. Engage Emotion: The more you feel the truth of the affirmation, the more effective it will be. Imagine the emotions you’d experience if the affirmation were already true.
5. Reinforce Consistently: Repeat your affirmations daily, ideally in a relaxed state, such as during meditation or before sleep.

Affirmations in Action

Let’s apply affirmations to a common challenge: trading self-sabotage. 

Imagine you’ve promised yourself to only take high quality trades, but emotions like greed or frustration pull you off track. Instead of berating yourself, use targeted affirmations like:

• “I wait like a tiger stalking its prey for my A+ setups to appear.”
• “I remain calm, composed and focused under pressure.”
• “I am a disciplined and confident trader; I follow my rules because I highly value myself.”

These statements rewire your mindset to align with the actions and outcomes you desire.

Your Turn

If affirmations haven’t worked for you before, it’s not because they’re ineffective—it’s likely because they only targeted symptoms or weren’t tailored specifically to you.

Try crafting specific, emotionally resonant affirmations using the steps above. Commit to a consistent practice and notice how your mindset shifts over time.

Affirmations are not a magic bullet, but they are a powerful tool for anyone willing to put in the work. 

With the right approach, you can reprogram your mind to achieve extraordinary results—in trading, business, or life.

Three Ways I Can Help You Master Your Trading Psychology

Want to learn more?

1. Join The Trading Psychology Masterclass (Free):  Join my FREE masterclass to learn the secrets to overcome some of the most common trading psychology challenges that hold traders back from reaching consistent profitability. Plus get two FREE bonuses to help you apply the insights covered in the masterclass to your trading for maximum impact.
2. Enrol in Go Deep to Level Up Your Trading: This is my signature Trading Psychology Program to help you permanently end destructive trading habits and reach pro-level consistency in as little as 8 weeks.
3. Unbreakable Trading Psychology —The Book. Join the waitlist for my upcoming book: Unbreakable Trading Psychology: The Seven Principle Playbook for Building a Razor-Sharp Mental Edge. Launching in 2025.

The post Affirmations For Traders: Do They Even Work? appeared first on Créde Sheehy-Kelly.