A Coué (pronounced “koo-AY”) refers to the Coué method, a self-improvement technique developed by French pharmacist Émile Coué in the late 1800s. It’s built on one simple idea: repeating a positive phrase to yourself twice a day can gradually reshape how your mind works, even if you don’t fully believe the words at first. The technique is often considered the origin of modern positive affirmations, though it works differently than most people assume.
The Core Idea Behind the Coué Method
Émile Coué spent nearly 30 years working as a pharmacist in Troyes, France, after graduating top of his class in pharmacology from the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris in 1882. During those years dispensing medications, he noticed something interesting: patients who believed a treatment would help them tended to recover faster than those who doubted it. This led him to study the power of suggestion, not from a doctor or therapist, but from the person themselves.
He called his approach “conscious autosuggestion,” and it centers on one famous phrase: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” In French, the original wording is “Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.” The method asks you to repeat this phrase 20 times, twice a day, once when you wake up and once before you fall asleep. Coué was specific about the conditions: you should be in a relaxed physical state, and you shouldn’t try to picture anything in particular while saying it. Just repeat the words.
Coué saw autosuggestion as something everyone already does without realizing it. He described it as “an instrument that we possess at birth, and with which we play unconsciously all our life, as a baby plays with its rattle.” His point was that your mind is constantly feeding itself suggestions, many of them negative. The method simply redirects that process on purpose.
The Law of Reversed Effort
One of Coué’s most useful insights is what he called the Law of Reversed Effort. It goes like this: the harder you consciously try to do something through willpower alone, the less likely you are to succeed. If you lie in bed telling yourself “I will fall asleep, I will fall asleep,” you’ll probably stay awake longer. If you try to force yourself not to think about something, it becomes the only thing on your mind.
Coué believed this happens because imagination is more powerful than willpower. When the two are in conflict, imagination wins every time. A person walking across a plank on the ground has no trouble, but raise that plank 50 feet in the air and their imagination fills with images of falling. No amount of willpower overcomes that mental picture. Negative thoughts tend to carry more emotional weight than positive ones, which is why they’re so effective at overriding your intentions.
His solution was to stop fighting your imagination and start working with it. Rather than using force or concentration, the Coué method uses gentle, almost mechanical repetition to slip new ideas past the conscious mind and into the subconscious, where they can take root without resistance.
How Autosuggestion Differs From Affirmations
Modern positive affirmations borrow heavily from Coué’s work, but there’s a key difference. Affirmations typically require you to believe what you’re saying. “I am confident” is supposed to be spoken with conviction and emotional investment. For many people, this creates an internal conflict. If you don’t actually feel confident, saying it with forced belief can feel dishonest, and that friction can make the practice backfire.
Coué’s autosuggestion works the opposite way. You don’t need to believe the words. You don’t need to feel them emotionally. You simply repeat them in a calm, neutral tone, almost like background noise. The idea is that the subconscious mind doesn’t evaluate truth the way your conscious mind does. It absorbs repetition. Over time, the repeated phrase begins to influence your thoughts and behavior whether or not you started out believing it. Coué argued that even skeptics could benefit, precisely because the technique doesn’t depend on faith to work.
How to Practice It
The method is deliberately simple. Each morning, before getting out of bed, and each night, as you’re falling asleep, close your eyes and repeat the phrase “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” about 20 times. Some practitioners count on a knotted string, similar to a rosary, to keep track without engaging the analytical part of the brain. The words should be spoken softly, almost mumbled, in a monotone. Don’t try to visualize anything specific. Don’t concentrate hard. The goal is relaxed repetition, not focused effort.
The timing matters because those transitional moments between waking and sleeping are when your conscious mind is least active and your subconscious is most receptive. Coué chose a deliberately vague phrase on purpose. “In every way” doesn’t target a specific problem, which means the subconscious can apply it broadly, to physical health, mood, habits, or whatever area needs the most attention.
Why It Fell Out of Fashion (and Came Back)
Coué became enormously popular in the 1920s, drawing crowds across Europe and the United States. But his method was so simple that many people dismissed it as quackery, and after his death in 1926, it faded from mainstream attention. The phrase “every day, in every way” became a cultural punchline rather than a serious practice.
In recent decades, though, research into areas like neuroplasticity, cognitive behavioral therapy, and the placebo effect has revived interest in the mechanisms Coué was describing. The idea that repeated mental input can physically reshape neural pathways is now well established in neuroscience. Self-talk, whether positive or negative, measurably affects stress hormones, pain perception, and performance. Coué didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why his method worked in biological terms, but the basic principle, that your mind responds to what you consistently feed it, has held up remarkably well.