Archive for Law of Attraction
The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur is one of the Top 50 Law of Attraction Blogs
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Yeah me! I just received notice that The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur is included in Evan Carmichael’s Top 50 Blogs Posts on The Law of Attraction In 2008.
If you check the list you’ll see I made numbers 36 and 39.
If you look more closely, you’ll notice item number 36 is credited to a Brazilian blog that has reprinted my post Can Using the Law of Attraction Help My Business – or Is It A Load of Crap? At least they gave me credit (sort of) and a link. Oh well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Anyway, Evan’s list is a great way to find more information about the Law of Attraction.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Can Using the Law of Attraction Help My Business – Part 5 Final Thoughts
Posted by: | CommentsOne area of the Law of Attraction that has given me pause is the idea that we have attracted everything in our life. Now I’m all for personal responsibility. I like knowing I am in control of my destiny. But sometimes sh@t happens. What about natural disasters? Crimes? Accidents?I’ve asked a number of Law of Attraction experts “so what about natural disasters – say Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in south-east Asia?” They have all answers yes, the people in those situations attracted those events.
Well I’m sorry, but this is where I have to differ from the experts. I think there’s a reason that we have the expression “acts of God” in our vocabulary. Some things are truly beyond our control – sh@t happens.
It doesn’t do us any good to wonder what we did to bring it on. Nothing! We can’t change the past. What matters is asking what can we do next to get ourselves out of this mess.
I agree that too often we let ourselves think things in our lives are out of our control, things have just happened, when really they were the result of choices we’ve made in the past and continue to make today. However, there is nothing productive to be gained from thinking we have power over nature or over the behavior of others.
The key to using the Law of Attraction is recognizing events that we have control over and doing something about them if we don’t like the results we’re getting now. Moaning and whining about what’s wrong in our lives may gain us a little sympathy from our friends but it won’t change anything.
So put the Law of Attraction into play. Define your values, set a goal that is aligned with those values, take action to achieve your goal, hunt out the negative thoughts that are holding you back. If you do these things, the Law of Attraction will be working with you to achieve great things.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Can Using The Law of Attraction Help My Business? Part 4 – Taking Action
Posted by: | CommentsFor some unknown reason, many proponents of the Law of Attraction forget taking action. But
really, how can you expect to achieve – or attract – anything if you’re not doing something to bring it about?
But if you’ve gone through the other steps – figuring out what you want, making a decision, uncovering any mental blocks – taking action should be something you’re ready for and excited about.
Take the next logical Step
There are two types of action you can take. The first is to take the next logical step. If your goal is large or long term, you’ll have many steps to take.
Look at your goal and where you are now. Then create a list of steps you need to take to get from here to your goal. If it’s a long term goal, this list may be long. Put due dates beside each step to keep yourself on track. In business, we call this a plan. Learn how to create a 90-day plan in my post How to Create Your 90-Day Goals.
If you’ve set a goal but have no idea how to achieve it, your first step should be to gather information or ask for help. Read books, go online or look around for someone who has already achieved your goal. Look to see what they’ve done.
Just one word of warning: if you’re gathering information, set a time limit for yourself. Otherwise you can spend forever gathering information and never actually take any steps towards the goal.
Inspired action
The other type of action you can take is what Jack Canfield calls inspired action. These are ideas that come to you out of the blue – while in the shower, driving your car, in your sleep. Often these ideas will leap you past many of the steps in your plan and get you to your goal much faster.
In Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction: A Simple Guide to Creating the Life of Your Dreams
I don’t know if the universe is sending you this help. Maybe. Sometimes I suspect that help is always there, but we usually don’t see it. We expect things to be hard, we don’t expect to get great ideas and we don’t expect others to help us.
But I know that when I’m committed to a goal and I’m actively working towards it, unexpected things happen. All kinds of help falls into my lap.
Recently my sister asked for my help with a new project. While we were on the phone I pulled out a business card of someone with information that could point us in the right direction. I told my sister I’d make the call on Monday. Later that day I ran into this woman at Staples. She was able to give me the information I needed while we were in the pens row.
Now, I live in a small town. It’s possible I run into this person all the time but haven’t really noticed because she’s only a casual acquaintance. Or it could be that the universe put us together because I expressed an intention to talk to her so it decided to help me along. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that when I saw her I recognized the opportunity and took action.
And that’s the real trick to this step. When you have an inspired idea or an opportunity drops into your lap you need to recognize it and take action. You can’t say “but it’s not on my action plan”. If you come across something that will leap you forward faster, you need to take it.
Negative intentions may rear their ugly head
When it comes time to take action, you may find yourself having trouble getting going. You may procrastinate, get mired in “research” or keeping busy doing tasks that look like work but are really unnecessary.
If you catch yourself doing these things and not taking action towards a goal you’re committed to, consider whether you have some unresolved negative intentions. If that’s the case, go back to the exercise from yesterday and work through the process.
If you have some deeply hidden negative intentions, you may need help just identifying them – from a coach, a therapist or a trusted friend.
I recently discovered that my overall negative thought was that everything I did had to be perfect and nothing I ever do is good enough – probably because I’m human and not perfect. It was then pointed out that my tendency for procrastination was probably a result of these negative thoughts – why bother starting something, it won’t be good enough anyway.
Uncovering this particular block has been a big help in moving forward to achieve my bigger goals.
So, if you want to use the Law of Attraction to achieve your goals, take action. Take the next logical step, take advantage of inspired ideas when they appear and ask for help.
One thing I’ve discovered from interviewing success entrepreneurs is that no one does it alone. They all have a coach, a mentor, a mastermind group – sometimes all of the above – to help them move on to bigger and better things.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about receiving and give a final wrap up – my personal thoughts on the Law of Attraction.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Can Using The Law of Attraction Help My Business? Part 3 – I Just Gotta Believe?
Posted by: | CommentsMany proponents of the Law of Attraction talk about “Belief and Expectation”; you need to believe it to make it happen.
A decision turns a desire into a goal
I think that’s part of the story. However there is one step I think you need to take first. You need to make a decision. You must decide that you’re going to achieve this goal – even
if you have not idea right now how to make this happen.
Until you do, your goal is nothing more than a wish – just like wishing when you blow out candles on a birthday cake. We’ve all made wishes. And lets face it, when we get old enough to stop putting the correct number of candles on our cake, we know wishes don’t come true just because we blew out some candles, saw the first star of the evening or carry a rabbit’s foot.
But making a decision has power. It gives you control. It’s not up to the “universe” or the birthday candle fairy. It’s up to you to make it come true.
I don’t know about you, but I like that kind of power. It excites me to have a goal and then say, “I’m going to make it happen.”
When you make a decision, it sends a message to your subconscious that it better come up with a solution. When you are committed to a goal, you start coming up with ideas on how to achieve it. Sometimes they’re stupid ideas, but very often you’ll come up with a brilliant one.
And once you have made a decision to achieve a certain goal, sometimes things happen out of the blue that almost drop your desire into your lap.
Sometimes help just drops into your lap
Last year I decided I needed to expand my marketing activities and go outside my geographic region. I decided I would do this by attending a networking meeting in one of the larger cities within a three-hour drive of my home. I added a notation on my to-do list and went to bed. The next morning I had an email from a friend inviting me to a networking meeting in a city two hours away.
Now, did my making a decision cause “the universe” to create this opportunity to drop into my lap like this? I don’t know. It may be I get opportunities like this all the time. But this time, because I’d set this as a goal and decided I would make it happen, when I got the invitation, instead of whining to myself, “it’s too far, I’ll have to get a sitter, I don’t want to drive in the winter,” I jumped at the opportunity.
The point is, when you’ve got a goal, make a commitment to yourself to make it happen. This way you’ll recognize opportunities when they knock on your door.
Sometimes it’s not so easy
But sometimes when you make a decision, instead of feeling excited you feel nervous, worried or doubtful. You don’t believe you can make this goal happen. For business owners, this doubt can often come from having significant money goals.
In Barbara Stanny’s book Overcoming Underearning: A Five-Step Plan to a Richer Life
(This is one of my favourite books. I tell everyone about it. I’ve lent my copy to countless friends and have read it four times and I only got it about 18 months ago. Really, go to Amazon or your library and get a copy!)
When doing this exercise, many people discover that there is an upper limit to how much they believe they can earn – I did. And for many people, this upper limit is surprising low – much lower than they expected or need.
Go above this level – even in your imagination – and you become uncomfortable. According to Stanny, if you go above this level in your life, you’ll do things unconsciously to reduce your income back down to your earning ceiling. So, if you want to increase your income, you first have to reset your earning ceiling.
Your mental blocks stop you from achieving your goals
You may have mental ceilings around other goals as well. There may be doubts and blocks around certain issues. And you need to address them or you’ll be battling yourself about trying to achieve this goal.
Robert Middleton in the Action Plan Toolkit calls them negative intentions. These are the unconscious (and sometimes not so unconscious) thoughts that tell us we can’t achieve what we’re trying to do. These thoughts might be in the voice of that horribly critical teacher who told us we’re no good. They might be in the voice of our mother. They might be in our own voice.
Middleton has an exercise in the Action Plan Toolkit that helps you identify and overcome these negative intentions. Michael Losier in his book Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t
The process goes something like this:
- Write down your goal
- Write down your negative thought or intention – what are those negative voices saying about this goal?
- Ask yourself, is this negative thought true? Maybe you think it is. That’s okay.
- Ask yourself, is there anyone with a similar background who is currently achieving a similar goal? How many are doing it right now? In the past week? In the past year?
- Looking at your answers to question 4, can you absolutely know, with 100% certainty, that your negative thought is true?
- Write down how you react (think, feel, behave) when you have this negative thought. For example, do you procrastinate? Do you jump from task to task without finishing anything?
- If it were impossible to have this negative thought, what would you do? Write your answer down.
- Take your negative intention and rewrite it as the opposite. For example, if that evil little voice in your head is saying, “You’re not smart enough to achieve this goal” write “I have all the skills and knowledge I need, or can get them, to achieve this goal”. If you have more than one negative thought around this goal, write the opposite for each of them.
- Look at the opposite statements you just wrote. Are they just as true, or even truer, than the original negative thought? Write down some examples in your life that show they are true.
Once you’ve done this exercise, you may find you feel more excited about your goal. It will likely be easier for you to make a commitment to achieve this goal.
I do this exercise when I’m working on a goal and having trouble achieving it. When I’m procrastinating or getting sidetracked I need to stop and remind myself to do this exercise.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about what I think is the most important step in the process – even more important than deciding and believing – taking action.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Can Using the Law of Attraction Help My Business? Part 2 – Knowing What You Want
Posted by: | CommentsThere are four key steps to consciously using the Law of Attraction in your life and business: desire, belief and expectation, action, and receiving.
Desire
At first glance desire is easy. We know what we want – don’t we?
Not always.
Sometimes we think we should want certain things – things society or our mother have told us are appropriate. Other times we want things by default – everyone wants a million dollars, right?
Goals need to align with our values
When we think about what we want – in business we call this goal setting – we need to get really clear about what is truly important to us. In February I wrote a post about identifying our values. Sometimes we set goals that go against our values. When we do that, we have trouble achieving them – attracting them if you will.
While researching my book I interviewed a woman who has a small but a successful consulting practice. She gets to live in her small town, work with clients she likes and spend time with her family. She’s happy with her business and her life. But she wasn’t always this content.
A few years earlier she’d been working with a coach and had set a goal for growing her business. She had big plans. She was going after large corporate clients. It would mean prestige, money and travel. She’d have to take on staff. She’d be going somewhere.
Then one day she paused. She had started her business because she’d been in the corporate world and hated it. She hated the culture, the politics, the workload, the big city.
These big plans for growing her business taking her in a direction she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to work with big corporate clients – she liked the smaller clients she had. She didn’t want to travel – she liked being home with her family. She didn’t want to hire staff – she liked flying solo. She didn’t need the big bucks her plan would lead to – she earned enough to be satisfied.
So she scrapped her big plans and continued running her small consulting firm and enjoying her life.
The point is she had made a goal that went against what she valued. Luckily, she recognized this before going to far along the wrong path.
Life’s a struggle when our goals aren’t in sync with our values
A lot of people who aren’t as in touch with what they value don’t pause; they don’t have a moment where they realize they have the wrong goals. They keep heading in the wrong direction, but their goals are not in sync with their values. When this happens, things are a struggle.
Let’s use me as an example. When I first started out in business, I was a copywriter – I wrote marketing and sales materials for businesses (I still do). My role models where successful direct mail copywriters. You know, that stuff that comes in an envelope with ten pages of emotional writing telling you how you’re life will be transformed if you will just buy this product. I was working to be just like them.
The problem was, I hate doing that kind of writing. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with it. The people who do it are just fine people. It’s just not my thing.
So here I was working hard to attract more clients to give me copywriting work that I didn’t really want to do. Is it any wonder that I wasn’t getting anywhere? My business was a struggle. I found it hard to get motivated to write my own marketing materials – and I’m a writer!
And all this time I had written a purpose (or mission) statement for my business that read: “To use my writing and speaking skills to tell stories that excite, inspire and teach people.” I had it, but my goals didn’t match it or my values.
But when I began listening to my purpose statement and started making changes in my business plans, things became a lot easier.
Now I’m attracting clients I like and work that excites me. Speaking and teaching opportunities are falling in my lap. Before, I was having trouble getting motivated. Now I’m leaping out of bed at 4 or 5 am to start work.
All because my goals are aligned with my values and purpose.
So if you want to use the Law of Attraction to improve your business and achieve your goals, you’d better make sure your goals are aligned with your values.
But I’m not finished with goals.
Goals must be clear, detailed and specific
In order to use the Law of Attraction effectively, you need to make your goals clear, detailed and specific.
Remember in my previous post how I mentioned the Cheryl Richardson exercise I used to find my first post-baby full time job? I didn’t just say, “I want a job”. I wrote out very specific details about the type of job I wanted. I could almost picture the place I would be working. And it was very close to what I got.
That’s what you need to do.
Whatever your goal, make it specific. Don’t just say I want to increase revenue. Say, “I want to increase revenue this quarter by 25%.” Then get specific. What products are you going to sell more of? Put dollar values beside each one.
Whatever your goal, you need to be able to see it, taste it, feel it.
Why is this important?
I think that a lot of the time, we have opportunities in front of us. They’re there all the time. They’re coming out of the woodwork.
We just don’t see them.
We don’t recognize opportunities for what they are. It’s just like when you’re walking down the street, late for a meeting. You can walk right past your best friend because you’re thinking about something else.
By having clear – and written – goals, we recognize opportunities for what they are. When someone comes along and says, “the symphony is looking for a full time manager,” we don’t walk away because we’re not a musician and had never considered that even musicians need administrative and marketing help. We say, “gee, that job is exactly what I wanted. I’ll apply right way!”
Tomorrow I’ll write about the next step: belief and expectation. And I promise, it’s not airy fairy, woo woo stuff. I’ll have some very practical ways to put this step of the Law of Attraction to work.
Andrea J. Stenberg
