My Favorite Story

It seems that whenever I read about using law of attraction principles to increase my prosperity, I read things like, "I tripled my income in 3 months!" Or, "I earned $40,000 in 20 minutes". Or even, "I doubled my income in less than 1 year!".

These statements are exciting, and draw us in. My experiences so far however, have not been like that. I am beginning to think that if those statements are true, it would be very enlightening to examine those individuals lives for the 2-5 years previous to those 3 months, or 20 minutes, or 1 year.

Learning these principles take time. Don't get discouraged if you start changing your way of thinking and don't experience such rapid results. Trust that you are on the path. I have found, however, that the further down the path I get, the more accelerated the results become. Things start to come together quickly.

The examples mentioned above can be misleading because the law of attraction always works in the simplest and easiest ways. You will have results that come without drama or fanfare most of the time. But you will have results.

So I wanted to get personal and share my favorite example of how simply and logically applying the law of attraction in your life can get you results.

Laser Focus
I had read in a post from Leslie Householder at http://thoughtsalive.com/ that when we are using visualization to achieve our goals, it helps if we can narrow it down to one or two goals at a time, giving each of those goals a 'laser focus'.

I decided that my top two financial goals were to acquire food storage and 6 months cash reserves. I figured to get the food storage and the cash reserves would mean I would need to save around $20,000. It was October, and I set the goal to be reached in 1 years time.

I am a trusting and optimistic person by nature and began my visualizations with laser focus just like Leslie taught. If nothing changed in our situation, I figured it would take about 5 years to reach that goal. I fully expected that within the next year we would be the happy recipients of some amazing landfall of money. Maybe my husband would get a new job with a huge increase. I had all sorts of exciting scenarios playing out as possibilities in my mind.

Much to my surprise and delight, we reached our goal, but there were no dramatic changes in our income, in fact there was hardly a change at all. Three unexpected things happened.

Spending Changes
For years I had been in charge of most of our finances. I recorded expenses, watched the budget, etc. But about a month after I started my laser focus visualizations, my husband took a sudden interest in the details of our 'accounts payable'. Over about 3 full Saturdays, he sat down with our online banking account and recorded every penny that had been spent the previous 3 months. He showed me the results and we made a revised budget. We planned out the next year more realistically based on his work.

His vigilance continued and for the next 5 months, he checked our accounts every night, recorded our expenses, and consulted with me (the spender of money in the family) on where we were at and how much money was left. I loved having someone help me keep track. It was motivating to know he'd be checking every night and we were a team with our goals. He would say things like, "if we don't spend anything else this week, we'll reach our savings goal." (Which was code for, "if you don't spend anything else this week, we'll reach our savings goal!") I would get excited and be careful not to spend anything else that week.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, we saved at least 10% each of those months, significantly increasing our savings account. It was exciting and I learned a lot from him about controlling spending, something he's very good at. It is interesting to note here, that I had said nothing to him about my visualizations.

Food Storage
The summer before I set this goal, gas prices had risen to an unprecedented amount. They fell in the fall, but over the winter everyone predicted that food would follow in the price increase in the spring. We had been hesitant before this time to fork out the lump sum to buy a lot of food storage at once. But after listening to the predictions, we decided it would be wise to get our food storage as soon as possible. I just wasn't sure how we'd come up with the money.

My husband looked at our budget and suggested that this year when he got one of his 2 extra checks, instead of using it to go on a family vacation like we normally did, we'd use it to buy our food storage instead, and do some inexpensive camping that summer for family vacations. So that March we bought rice, wheat, beans, flour, sugar, and many other staples for food storage.

It was a dream come true. Just like I had visualized, I would go down into my storage room and stare at all my shelves full of food. Knowing that I could feed my family no matter what gave me so much peace!

New information
So now we had food storage and lots more savings, and it had only been 6 months. I figured we still had a long way to go for our cash reserves to be complete. But then one day my husband, still tracking expenses religiously, got curious about exactly how much cash we would need to survive for 6 months of unemployment.

He got more detailed than I ever had and thought of a few things I had not considered. Unemployment checks, for one. An old IRA from my teaching job years ago that I had forgotten, for another. By the time he was done with his spreadsheet, guess how many months of cash reserves we had? 5 months. Over the next 6 months we continued to save and by the time we reached the year mark for my goal, we didn't have $20,000 in savings, but we had 6 months cash reserves and food storage. How amazing is that?

It might be simpler than you think
So, what I learned is that we don't have to know the 'how' in order to visualize where we want to be. If I would have asked myself how I was going to get an extra $20,000 in one year and started obsessing about that, I might never have put the energy and hope into visualizing my goal. Now I have the peace of mind of knowing that I have cash reserves and food storage. And I always chuckle when I think of how simply it came to pass! I love it!