Challenge 9: 5 Things to Remember about the Law of Attraction

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Self Leadership (64-slide PowerPoint presentation). Self-leadership puts together taking responsibility for our outcomes, setting direction for our lives, and having tools to manage priorities. Self-leaders work at all levels of an organization. They are front-line workers in every possible role, middle managers, and CEOs. Self-leaders like Walt [read more]

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Editor’s note: This is part of  30-day challenge series written by Hanane Anouna.   You can follow along and read the full series here.

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Have you ever thought about something in a consistent way and you get it the following day or a week after? Have you ever tried to set up your alarm clock for an important meeting or an early morning flight? What happens? You wake up very often before the alarm clock.

And what happens when you are decided to buy a new car and you know exactly the type of car you want? Then you start noticing more of them that week when driving. Is it a coincidence? Is it a miracle?

It is simply the power of attraction. You attract what you focus on either about people, places, things, or opportunities. It is also the belief that positive or negative thoughts will create positive or negative experiences into a person’s life.

There are many people who told me that “we don’t believe in the law of attraction.” LOA does not need the permission of anyone as everyone is already embracing it without being conscious of it. The only benefit of mastering this law is to empower you to use it to your advantage and not against you. Let’s understand its historical background and how it evolved.

History of the Law of Attraction

LOA was first taught hundreds of years ago by Buddha, “what you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.” In 1877, the term “Law of Attraction” appeared in print for the first time in a book written by the Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky.

The 20th century witnessed a great interest about the law of attraction, with many books being written about it, like The Law of Success (1928), Think and Grow Rich (1937) by Napoleon Hill, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) by Norman Vincent Peale, and You Can Heal Your Life (1984) by Louise Hay. In 2007, the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne made the concept very popular, with almost 30 million copies sold all over the world.

All these books agree on one major idea: in order to use the law of attraction, you must think about what you want, not what you don’t want. 

The LOA Recognizes Only the Power of the Subconscious

The law of attraction does not recognize your conscious thoughts. You may consciously think about selling an apartment (your goal), but sub-consciously feel in doubt as you are very attached to it. In this case, LOA may not function.

LOA recognizes and attracts only your thoughts that are in your sub-conscious mind, another reason to invest on yourself and clear all the limiting beliefs or anything holding you from attaining your goals.

Remember, your subconscious is a plain garden that accepts everything that you keep persistently thinking about. Beware of what you are nurturing in your mind.

Thoughts Are Things

LOA uses the subconscious to translate your thoughts into THINGS that are materialized into reality. The science of quantum physics might explain this process of how a positive or a negative thought can be translated into a positive or negative vibration that attracts eventually a positive or a negative opportunity.

Your thoughts become your reality. What you sow, so shall you reap.

If you focus on negative things, and you keep dwelling on things of the past, you will remain crippled under that cloud. If you focus on positive things, and work on clear goals coupled with faith and confidence, then you will always find a way to turn these goals into real things. 

The Emotions That Keep You in High Vibrations

The great inhibitors to your success and happiness in the book The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill “are intolerance, cupidity, greed, jealousy, suspicion, revenge, egotism, conceit, the tendency to reap where they have not sown, and the habit of spending more than they earn.”

This implies that in order to attract what you want, you need to keep your vibrations very high, by nurturing love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness… emotions that will allow the energy to flow within you.

You may be thinking right now that we are all humans and we may all have positive and negative thoughts.

Your subconscious recognizes the dominant thoughts or the emotions that are persistent. Remember, your subconscious learns through habits and repetition.  

5 Important Steps to Manifest Your Dreams

1. Set up clear goals

The subconscious does not recognize vague objectives, you need to be very specific. We all seek success, a happier life, and financial abundance, but they are all vague objectives. What would you like to succeed in? In what field? Why? Answering the why will give you a reason, a sense of purpose. You will also have to define a deadline for attaining this goal.

The more precise you are about your goals, the more likely to attract opportunities lined up with it.

2. Have Faith or Confidence

When you have a burning desire to achieve your goals, this great inner desire or passion will feed your beliefs and create a strong inner confidence.

“Thoughts are things, and powerful things at that when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire for their translation into riches or other material objects.” – Napoleon Hill

3. Move into action

A lot of people wait until they get motivated to move into action, while action can motivate them to start doing more. Your actions will create more desire and will make you more confident to take new initiatives and new actions. It is a round cycle that will never stop.

4. Visualize your goals

Visualization is powerful as it gives a physical shape to your ideas or dreams and it turns them into reality. When you visualize, you create new circuits in your brain that will enable you to achieve easily your goals. It is a technique highly recommended by psychologists, coaches, therapists and athletes. Michel Jordan rehearsed the shots in his mind before it happened. Steve Jobs could not create the iPhone without visualizing it.

It is recommended to visualize early in the morning and before going to sleep when the mind is in a state of complete relaxation, or an alpha state.

5. Let it go and don’t stress

Doing all the above does not mean that you will achieve everything in one day or even in one year. You will have to embrace patience and resilience as things may not go as expected. Being in stress or frustration will trigger cortisol in your body and will put you in low vibrations which will hinder the process of achieving your goals.

When a farmer decides to plant seeds for whatever reason, he does not stress every day looking at his seeds if they started coming up. He has a complete trust that he will get the expected results in the right season. 

This is how we need to treat our goals. Despite the absence of immediate results, we need to trust that they will be attained at the right moment or when when we are ready for the opportunity.

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