Books That Have Inspired Me Lately

The Physics of Miracles: Tapping in to the Field of Consciousness Potential

The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits

Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age

Busting Loose From the Money Game: Mind-Blowing Strategies for Changing the Rules of a Game You Can’t Win

Busting Loose From the Business Game: Mind-Blowing Strategies for Recreating Yourself, Your Team, Your Business, and Everything in Between

Affirmations

I am Love…

I am Happiness & Joy…

I am the Infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility…

I am the Power and Presence of God

I am the Infinite Power of the Universe

I am the Absolute Creator of my Life

I am complete and perfect in every way!

My very nature is limitless freedom and happiness

I am playing the Human Game without limits or restrictions

I am experiencing Infinite Abundance – right here – right now

I am responsible for everything I create in my life

My Consciousness is creating everything in my human experience down to the smallest detail

Everything that happens to me I create consciously or unconsciously

There’s NO power outside of me – not in anyone, not in anything…

I experience ever-expanding feelings of unconditional love and appreciation for myself and all my creations

I feel my connection to my Expanded Self in everything I do

I trust my inner guidance completely

My fears are melting away and my Joy and Abundance are growing to infinite proportions

I am always filled with Happiness and Joy – no matter what’s going on around me or the story I choose to tell myself about it

I love myself unconditionally and nurture myself in every way

I openly give and receive unlimited love and appreciation

I am free of judgement – both of myself and of others

I choose to forgive everyone for whom I feel less than unconditional love

I choose to see the perfection in everything, just the way it is…

I accept people and situations exactly as they are – absolutely perfect

Every pressure or discomfort I feel is a signal to relax, release, and let go…

My life is filled with Infinite Abundance

All my needs, desires, and goals are met instantaneously for I am one with the Universe

I have an infinite supply of money to express appreciation with – right here, right now

My capabilities and potential are unlimited

I express my Infinite potential more and more each day

I can be, do and have everything I want

Lucrative opportunities always come my way

I am a generous giver and an excellent receiver

I am appreciated and I appreciate others

I am open and willing to receive massive amounts of appreciation and abundance into my life – right now

I start each day with enthusiasm and joy

I live every day with power and passion

My life is a great and exciting adventure

I love myself unconditionally and nurture myself in every way

I am perfect just the way I am

I am healthy and strong, filled with energy and vitality

I always have more than enough energy to do all I want to do

I awaken each day feeling healthy and alive with energy

Every cell in my body vibrates with health, healing, vitality, and love

The cells in my body work together in perfect harmony to create perfect health

Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better and better…

It’s easy to say that we are working towards something, and we may even feel that we are making a serious effort, but our efforts – like anything else in life – can become a habit, and habits are not always effective. One of the key components to success is to only spend time on practices that produce the desired results.

Despite our best intentions, we often get into the habit of continually doing things that do not bring us the results that we want, yet we do not realize it until we have expended a lot of time and energy. A mental checklist – or even a physical checklist – can help us to stay on track daily, maximizing our results, and minimizing wasted time and effort.

There are numerous success systems that people use on their road to greatness, and it falls to each person to choose and utilize whatever systems work best for them. However, no matter what system you choose, if you don’t use it properly and consistently, you won’t get the results.

Here are several popular success systems, and tips on how you can make sure you are using them effectively.

Visualization

Visualizing is basically the act of seeing yourself as being successful before you actually attain whatever success you are looking for. Visualization has long been held as one of the most effective and simple to use success systems, yet people often do not get results because they visualize ineffectively, or they do not visualize often enough.

Effective visualization includes all of the following:

• Feeling like you are actually in that present moment, rather than feeling like that moment is in the future. Visualizations are always in the NOW.
• Feeling exactly how you are going to feel when that moment actually arrives. Don’t visualize a scene in your head as if looking at a painting or a picture. Make it real and make it enjoyable by feeling the feelings of actually being there.
• Having a sense of 100% confidence and expectation whenever you visualize. You are not visualizing something that you hope is going to happen, but rather something that you KNOW is going to happen.
• Visualizing frequently, preferably several times per day. The most effective times for visualization are when you are about to fall asleep at night, and when you first wake up in the morning. However, visualization can be done anytime, anywhere.

Recommended Resources: Vision Boards, Mind Movies

Affirmations

Affirmations are basically the act of saying something over and over again – in your head or out loud – in order to “reprogram” yourself so you can attain whatever it is that you are affirming for. Unfortunately, saying something to ourselves that isn’t yet true sounds like a lie, so it feels like a lie, and we end up not believing it, and thus not getting very much out of it.

Here are some ways to get the most out of your affirmations:

• Say your affirmations out loud. We are all proficient at saying things in our head, but if that hasn’t been working, bring those statements out into the “real world”. Not only does that make your affirmations more effective, but it also helps you to realize how you truly feel about whatever it is that you are saying.
• Say your affirmations in front of a mirror. Again, realizing how you feel about what you are affirming for will help you to overcome any self-limiting beliefs about it. Say it out loud and in front of a mirror so you can look yourself in the eyes when you do it. It’s hard to lie to someone straight to their face.
• Say your affirmations in the present tense. Again, just as with visualization, you are creating something NOW, not in the future. “I am so happy and grateful now that…” as opposed to “I will be so happy when…”
• Say your affirmations many times throughout the day. Affirmations work by programming your conscious mind as well as your subconscious mind, so don’t be afraid that you’ll “overdo it” by affirming too often.

Recommended Resources: BMindful, ThinkRightNow

Meditation

Meditation is probably one of the least understood success systems because – in essence – it means to just do nothing! You just sit there, and most meditative practices will have you not even thinking, let alone doing anything else. There are other types of meditation as well, yet all of them share the goal of having you free your mind so that it can let go of the day-to-day struggles, leaving you with clarity and peace of mind.

Clarity and peace of mind may not seem very valuable to someone who wants to be on the fast track to success, yet when you consider that 90%-95% of your life is controlled by your subconscious mind, the power of clarity and peace of mind becomes immediately apparent.

Here are some ways to get the most out of meditation:

• Make sure to let go of your thoughts when you meditate. If you are just sitting there thinking about all of your problems and all of the things that you have to do, you might as well just get up and go do them. You are not getting anything out of meditation if you are not letting go and letting your mind wander.
• Make sure to stay awake. Many people cannot stay comfortable is a sitting up position for long periods of time, so they lay down to meditate. Although there are some meditations that can be used as you fall asleep, most meditations are supposed to involve conscious awareness, which you obviously don’t have if you’re asleep.
• Meditate without having some definite purpose in mind, such as trying to think of a solution to a problem. Although meditating is an incredible way to resolve issues, if you give conscious thought to the problem during the meditation, all you are doing is engaging your conscious mind, rather than your subconscious mind. Instead, think of the issue that you want to solve very briefly before you meditate, release your attachment to finding a solution for it, and then start your meditation.
• Look for answers and clarity unexpectedly, rather than immediately following your meditation. Meditation helps your subconscious mind to achieve focus and to find solutions, and sometimes that happens quickly, while other times it will take longer. If you consciously try to “rush” your subconscious mind, you will potentially shut down the entire subconscious solution-finding process.

Recommended Resources: Meditation Music, Guided Meditations

Attitude

No success system in the world is going to help you if you don’t have your mind right. You can visualize, affirm, and meditate all d
ay long, but if you don’t have an attitude of confidence, success, and expectancy, you will meet with limited results. Your attitude creates the very reality that you walk through every day, so create an environment that ensures your success by keeping your mind and your emotions focused on success, rather than failure.

Here are some ways to get the most out of your own attitude:

• Check your attitude as soon as you get up to start your day. Our dreams and/or our memories from the previous day can carry over into the new day. If those are positive, uplifting, and confident memories or feelings, then go with it. If not, then release any negativity before programming yourself for a new day by using affirmations, visualizations, and meditations.
• Check your attitude frequently throughout the day. It’s easy to “fake it until you make it” when you don’t really feel like smiling or acting confident, but faking it will only get you so far. Negativity can creep back in without you even realizing it, so set reminders or cues to go off throughout the day that snap you back into a positive, confident mindset.
• Check your attitude after a negative situation. If you get into an argument with someone, get stuck in traffic, get a negative message or piece of mail, etc., it can be very easy to fall into a feeling of gloom and doom. People who succumb to those types of feelings are not the kind of people who produce success. If you just got mad, sad, frustrated, or upset by something, now is the perfect time to go back to those affirmations, visualizations, and meditations.

Recommended Resources: Positivity Space, Manifest a Miracle

Conclusion

Everyone wants whatever it is that they want out of life, but only a small percentage of the population are willing to consistently and effectively take action in order to get what they want.

If you have been struggling to attain your desires, why not pick a success system (or two or three), and consistently apply those systems over the long-term? You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain!

Now that the Law of Attraction concepts have hit the mainstream, both the believers as well as the non-believers are coming out of the wood work.

A search on Google for the term “law of attraction” brought back well over 7 million results, although it also won’t take you long to find plenty of people who who think it’s all a bunch of nonsense. Check here, here, and here if you would like some examples.

Now, any regular readers of this blog know my views on this whole concept, and this post is not meant to discuss my personal ideals, but rather to plug some of these concepts into a typical life scenario to see if they actually hold water.

To that end, I picked 3 specific practices that are commonly used by the LOA (Law of Attraction) believers, who also call themselves “deliberate creators” since they believe that via these practices they can literally create their existence here on planet Earth.

So, whether you are a believer or a skeptic, if you truly feel that your point of view is the correct one, then you shouldn’t mind a little bit of close scrutiny to see if these concepts are worth considering.

If they are, then here are 3 possible ways to use them. If they are not worth considering, then you now have 3 great examples of the uselessness of these tools that you can use in your on-going crusade to debunk this whole affair. Here we go…

Visualization

One of the primary weapons of mass abundance that the teachers from the movie ‘The Secret’ endorse using in order to invoke the law of attraction is visualization. In fact, Joe Vitale goes even further to say that you should use “holographic visualization” which is basically the art of both mentally and emotionally putting yourself inside your vision of success. You experience those moments so precisely in your mind that it seems that you are actually there.

Proponents - From a believer’s standpoint, this type of visualization will send actual vibrations out from the visualizer into the Universe, and will in turn attract similar vibrations. Done consistently over the course of time with a high level of emotion and belief, and the vibrations will all coalesce into a series of circumstances, people, events, or inspired actions that will eventually lead to the visualizer actually being in the situation that they visualized.

Opponents - People who do not believe in this concept simply say that there is no scientific basis for this idea, and that there is no way to prove that doing this will be anything other than a complete waste of time. They believe that if you want to have an experience in your life, you need to take whatever action is needed in order to marshal the resources that will allow you to have that experience.

The Benefit for Non-Believers - Believers in the LOA do not need any further convincing of the validity of this practice. However, for non-believers, the act of visualizing has one very, very important side effect that has nothing to do with the Law of Attraction, and that benefit is FOCUS.

Even if you do not believe that some magic genie is ripping around town on a magic carpet finding ways to turn your daydreams into reality, any reasonable and logical person will agree that staying focused intensely and consistently over the course of time on any particular goal will bring about positive steps toward that goal.

Those steps may come in the form of financial or career maneuvers that will lead to the goal, or they may come in the form of the simple ability to keep from getting distracted by things that would normally take the person off track. Taking your eyes off the prize runs the risk of delaying or preventing the attainment of whatever it is that is being focused on.

A simple example of this is weight loss. It is a common belief that if you eat a lot of junk food, you will not have a body like a super model. If your goal is to have a body like that, and you consistently visualize yourself having that body, it is going to be very difficult for you to believe that scarfing down an entire pepperoni pizza all by yourself is a good idea.

Will your weight loss be “magic” or will it be a result of you continually taking part in healthy exercise and eating habits as a result of having a super model picture of yourself that is playing over and over again in your head? Well, once you have that super model body, who cares HOW it actually happened?

Affirmations

Affirmations come in many shapes and sizes, but in a nutshell, it is the act of writing down what you want to have in your life, and then repeatedly saying it either out loud or in your head for the purpose of changing your mental point of view regarding those desires.

Proponents – Believers in the power of affirmation basically think that by continually repeating something to oneself, that thing will eventually become a reality. Where the LOA comes into this part of the equation is that the common belief behind conscious creation is that the vibrations that are sent out into the Universe are acted upon in order to bring our goals into existence.

However, as most people carry around years worth of self-limiting beliefs, the only vibrations they are sending out are those of NOT having whatever it is that they want. By consistently practicing affirmations, the vibration is changed to one of confidence and belief, thus attracting the object of desire.

Opponents - Non-believers in affirmations once again cite the fact that there is no evidence to support the belief that anything less than taking action will bring about goal attainment. They may even go so far as to say that by repeatedly talking about something that you don’t have will actually only serve to make you even more convinced that you’ll never have it.

The Benefit for Non-Believers – By repeatedly affirming that you want something, you assign the task of finding a way to bring that thing into your existence to your brain and your subconscious mind. In order to do this, thou
gh, you must ask for solutions, not affirm non-existent realities. For example:

“I am independently wealthy and I never have to work another day in my life.”

vs.

“How can I create a situation that makes me independently wealthy so that I never have to work another day in my life?”

The first example stated something that wasn’t true, and by continually saying that statement over and over again, you may not activate the amazing power of your subconscious mind in order to help find a solution.

However, by continually asking yourself that question over and over again, your mind will be constantly looking for a solution as you go about your day to day business. Eventually – maybe sooner or maybe later – you will get slapped in the face with a great idea or the beginnings of a plan of action that will lead you to that life of riches and relaxation.

Positive attitude

This is probably the oldest and most well-known tool that is in the bag of tricks that believers in the LOA carry around with them. Long before today’s gurus were touting the power of positive thought, yesterdays authors and visionaries were extolling the benefits of this practice.

Proponents – People who believe they can activate the Law of Attraction by living in a constantly positive state of mind will once again point to the power of their vibrations as the catalyst for attaining their desires. By staying in a constant positively-charged state of mind, they also maintain a constant positively-charged emotional state. In so doing, they will only attract vibrations that are in resonance with theirs, thus attracting “fuel” that will drive their machines of success. That fuel may come in the form of intense coincidences that are in line with their desires, or they may take the form of opportunities or circumstances that will eventually bring forth their dreams.

Opponents - Non-believers in the power of positive thinking will say that just thinking about good things will do absolutely nothing to bring those things into your existence. They will point out the fact that everyone wants health, wealth, and happiness, so if just thinking good thoughts about those things was the key to having them, everyone would already be living happily ever after.

The Benefit for Non-Believers – Having a positive mental attitude is something that can – and does – benefit everyone. Even if you don’t believe that your positive state of mind will help you to actually attract good things into your life, at a bare minimum, keeping a good attitude will help you to enjoy life more.

This could fall under the umbrella of what people call “managing their expectations” or it could simply be called being “mentally prepared” for any given situation.

For example, if your job is lame, and you know that it is lame, you can’t simply “think” yourself out of having to go there. However, by setting your mental set point to one of being prepared for the experience, you will help yourself to not be as miserable as you otherwise would be. On the other hand, if you just sit around thinking about how bad your job is, there is no way that you are going to see anything but how bad your job is when you get there.

Another example is finances. You could sit around thinking about how much you don’t enjoy watching prime time on your 19″ television with bad reception because you can’t afford cable and a big flat-screen TV, or you could turn the situation around to actually be glad that you have that opportunity. In order to do so, just consider how bad it would be if you couldn’t even afford your own home or apartment, or if your electricity had been turned off because you couldn’t pay the bill.

You can apply that same formula to any situation in your life in order to receive the benefit of positive thinking. By simply taking on the habits of mentally preparing yourself for a potentially negative situation, or by showing gratitude for the fact that things aren’t worse (and they always could be), you will slowly but surely pick up the habit of being happy about situations that in the past made you miserable.

Now that you have seen some common ways that the LOA is used by people to “magically” manifest the lives that they want, you should also see that there is really no magic to it. The same practices that the believers are using to bring success into their lives will help non-believers to improve their quality of life as well.

Also, there are 3 potential benefits that a non-believer gets from this whole process:

1. All of this is completely free of charge. You don’t have to spend a dime to visualize, affirm, or to keep a positive attitude.
2. Each of the practices that were discussed will have a positive impact on your life, even if you are just using your copy of ‘The Secret’ as a coaster or a Frisbee
3. What if it works? What if the Law of Attraction actually works, and you stumble upon that truth by practicing LOA techniques, even from a non-believers standpoint?

After all, not only are these techniques free, but no one even has to know that you are doing them. How cool would it be to achieve some amazing success in your life without having to admit to anyone – even yourself – that you ever considered whether or not the magic actually works?

Something to think about…