The words you repeat

The teaching

As the psychology of affirmation since Émile Coué teaches it.

Autosuggestion

Émile Coué taught that every idea which fills the mind tends to become true for the person who holds it, and to turn itself into action. Some of these ideas are put there by others, which is suggestion; some a person puts there themselves, which is autosuggestion. Most people practise autosuggestion all day without knowing it, telling themselves that they cannot sleep, cannot remember, cannot cope. His method was to make the practice conscious and to point it the right way.

Imagination before the will

At the centre of his teaching stands a claim about the will. When the will and the imagination are in conflict, he says, it is always the imagination that wins. Lay a plank a foot wide on the ground and anyone can walk its length; raise it to the height of a cathedral's towers and almost no one can, however firmly they will it, because now they imagine that they will fall. The harder a person tries against their own imagination, to fall asleep, to recall a name, to stop laughing, the worse it goes. His pupil Charles Baudouin called this the law of reversed effort.

Coué stated it as four laws. When will and imagination are opposed, imagination wins, without exception. In that conflict the force of the imagination grows as the square of the will, a figure he said was only an illustration. When the two agree, they do not add but multiply. And the imagination can be directed. Hence his advice to train the imagination rather than the will, and to banish from one's speech the words difficult, impossible and I cannot. In their place he put a short sentence for any reasonable task: it is easy, and I can.

The formula

Coué's daily practice is simple and exact. Each morning before rising and each night on getting into bed, close the eyes and repeat twenty times, in a low, monotonous voice, counting on a string tied with twenty knots, the sentence: 'Every day, in every respect, I am getting better and better.' In his French it runs: tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.

The words are said mechanically, without effort and without straining to believe them. The phrase 'in every respect' is given a little weight, because it is meant to cover every need, so that no special suggestions are required.

What Coué did not claim

He insisted that he had never healed anyone: the power, he told his audiences, was in themselves, and he was only a teacher of how to use it. He also held that his method applies to what is reasonable. The house keeps both his limits and adds a third. A sentence repeated morning and night is a way of turning attention toward recovery and effort; it is never a treatment for an illness, and never a reason to put off seeing a doctor.

The affirmation of the self-help books

The affirmations of modern self-help follow rules that grew out of New Thought and out of Coué. Speak in the first person and the present tense, as though the thing is already so: I am calm, I am enough. Say what is wanted, not what is feared, so that the mind dwells on the right picture. Keep it short enough to say in a breath, and say it with feeling. Louise Hay added mirror work: saying the affirmation aloud while looking into one's own eyes in a mirror.

Hay also taught that particular patterns of thought cause particular illnesses. That part of her teaching the house does not hold: illness is not caused by a person's thoughts about themselves.

When the words sting

The present-tense rule has a known failing. A sentence that the speaker believes to be false, said by someone who already feels low, can sound in the mind like a taunt and leave them feeling worse. The remedy taught today is to choose a sentence that can be accepted as true now. 'I am learning to speak up' can be said honestly when 'I am fearless' cannot. Sentences about doing and growing carry further than sentences about being: I am getting stronger at this, I can take the next step, I am someone who keeps going.

The coach's voice

How a person addresses themselves matters as well as what they say. Speaking to oneself by one's own name, or as 'you', the way a coach or a friend would, puts a little distance between the self and the trouble. 'You have done hard things before; start with the first page' steadies a person under strain better than the same thought said as 'I'. The affirmation becomes a word of encouragement given to oneself, which is easier to believe than a boast.

Affirming a value

A different practice shares the name. In self-affirmation, as Claude Steele described it, a person does not repeat a sentence about themselves. They reflect on something they value most. From a list of values, such as family, friendship, honesty, faith, music, learning, humour, kindness and making things, choose the one that matters most to you, and write for ten minutes about why it matters and about a time when it guided you.

The writing does not touch the trouble at hand, and that is its strength. A threat in one part of life, a test, a hard piece of news, a quarrel, looms smaller when the self is seen as larger than that part. People who have affirmed a value meet criticism with less defensiveness and listen better to unwelcome facts. It is a practice to do before a hard occasion, not a sentence to chant.