Hello, welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson, and we are here to talk about tips and strategies that you can employ to deepen your faith, improve your relationships, and just get the most out of your life.

Thank you for joining. Let's get started.

All right, before we get into our episode on affirmations, I want to begin by saying,

bow ties are cool. Now, I don't know how you feel about bow ties. And in truth, for a really long time,

bow ties were not cool at all. But in 2010, Matt Smith took over as Doctor Who. I don't know if

you're a Hoovian or not. I enjoy Doctor Who. I caught it when it rebooted back in 2005, and I've watched most episodes

since, and Matt Smith comes on the scene, replacing David Tennant, the greatest doctor of all time,

and he's wearing a bow tie. Now, at the time, very few people thought bow ties were cool, but he kept

wearing them. Every episode had his bow tie on, and at every opportunity,

he would say, bow ties are cool. He just kept telling himself that, and he kept telling everybody

else. And wouldn't you know it, bow ties became cool again. Like everybody in Europe that

watched the show, people who watched on BBC America, all of a sudden bow ties are the thing again,

because he believed in it and he stuck with it.

So that's why our episode is entitled Affirmations Are Cool, because most people consider

affirmations to be not very cool.

The idea that you're just going to kind of sit there and say nice things about yourself,

say confident things about yourself, and claim personal victory over the day, and then get

out there and do great, is just not something that a lot of people are into. I think for me,

and look, let me just say this, two show references in one episode. I do not watch Saturday Night Live.

However, I used to back in my younger days, and there was this actor named Al Franken,

and he did a skit called Daily Affirmations, and he would look in the mirror and say things like,

...