Positive Doing
Let's stay positive here and move with this theme I started to look at how thinking in a positive way can equate into many improvements in a person's life.
It might seem like all this positive attitude stuff is more like a daydreamer's wonted custom to sit in an easy chair and dream of all the things they want without any of them actually materializing, there is more to it.
Just thinking is not enough, obviously, because without action nothing of any consequence will happen. So this post is about the next stage of using a positive mental attitude to your advantage by turning thoughts into action.
In other words, if you want something, you're going to have to DO something to get it.
Positive Action
In my last post on positive thinking, I looked at how getting rid of as many negative influences as possible can really help to turn your life around and allow you to really make big improvements in the way things are for you. Well, wanting or desiring something is the first step in acquiring it, but taking the appropriate action in order to create the right situation to receive it is the next.
I want to take a leaf out of author Raymond Holliwell's teachings here and say that to desire a thing without expecting to get it is just idle wishing or daydreaming. You'll just waste a lot of mental energy in thinking positive thoughts about what you want without doing anything to bring it into form.
However, when you expect a thing to happen, then circumstances seem to swing into action to make it a reality. Here's an example of working this theory backwards.
Have you ever heard people who have just suffered a misfortune to utter the words, "It's just as I expected" or "I knew that would happen" or "I expected that"?
When you expect a bad thing to happen, doesn't just come right up and happen? That's that Law of Attraction working to your detriment. Do you want to know why it works so well when you attract something you really don't want, yet when you try to wish for something you do want, it rarely ever comes to you?
It's all about the emotive force behind the desire-expectation sent out mentally into the ether. When there's something you really don't want, you put a lot of emotion behind it. How about this scenario to illustrate this power.
You're late for an appointment and you're driving down the road approaching a set of traffic lights. You really don't want them to turn red and there's a lot of frustration energy going behind that thought because you are expecting the light to change to red even though you really don't want it to. Guess what happens? It turns red!
That happens a lot in everyone's lives. Me too. More times than I can count. But not so much these days. Why? I learned to slow down my pace and to stop thinking about things I do not want, while focusing on the things I do want.
When "The Secret" first arrived and I saw the movie and read the book, I was fascinated by David Schirmer's account of how he lined up parking spaces. Here in Fuengirola, especially during the tourist season, it can get almost impossible to find a parking space in the centre of town. I couldn't wait to give that a shot and was amazed at that more often than not, a parking space would be available near to where I wanted to be! The damn trick works!
It has worked on many aspects of my life ever since, although there is still a very long way to go. I still catch myself getting frustrated at the odd situation that is out of my control, like maybe hitting a traffic jam where there shouldn't be one. The initial anger wells up like it always used to, but now I can pull myself up and put a halt to it. It's a cool trick and one that works very well. I simply take control of my thoughts and say to myself "NEXT!" I might have to do it two or three times until a happier thought squeezes the anger out, but out it goes and I relax.
If I'm stuck in traffic (let's face it, a traffic jam down here ion the Costa del Sol is a mere line of a few cars compared to the humdingers I used to have to suffer on the M25 around London, or worse, in town itself) I just take a few deep breaths and start thinking about how nice it is to be able to take a short break from driving and take a look out the windows to admire the scenery.
We have some damn fine scenery down here! That's usually soon followed by a sudden freeing up of the traffic and I'm on my way again. Calmer and more relaxed than most of the other drivers stuck there!
That technique, and using my thoughts to think about the things I do want and avoiding thinking about the things I do not want are all positive action. It's all mental, but it's still action of sorts, because it takes effort to do it and has measurable results.
Positive Physical Action
With many situations in life, taking positive mental action to bring about an internal change that is conducive to a more healthy, calmer and more stress-free life is a great breakthrough in working towards a better way of life.
However, there are situations that also require some form of physical action to bring certain things into physical form. Take earning money as one example that will be on most people's minds right now.
You can rock in your chair all day and dream about winning the lottery and all your problems will be solved, but come on! Is it really going to happen?
The chances are astronomical! Why put all your mental energy into something like that, when you can use it much more constructively to make yourself enough money so that you have no more financial worries? That would be a little like winning a smaller but still substantial lottery, wouldn't it?
Well, this can happen and I know for a fact, because I'm living proof it works. When I first read "The Secret," I was broke.
Working as a musician in a gigging band didn't exactly bring me in a fortune and while it was enough to feed me, it didn't stretch to much more besides that. By this time, I had moved in with my partner on the coast and left the mountain farm to be used as an occasional retreat.
That meant I needed to have some income to help pay the bills and living expenses. I applied for a bunch of really crap jobs and did some things I would never have done in other circumstances.
Like telesales, selling vacation plans which are frowned upon by many as being little better than timeshare. I worked as a removal guy for a haulage company and was lucky not to put my back out permanently on one occasion. I worked as a gardener and then as a builder's labourer.
I worked as a house painter and often found myself up on scaffold four storeys up in a strong wind. Not for the faint hearted! The only decent job I ever did (that paid a decent wage too) was as a short spell as an IT consultant for a small vacation company.
That's where I leaned a lot about the modern way of building websites, a little php and mysql programming and linux hosting.
I found out later that I only got the job because the boss thought I was very confident and very pushy! In fact, I was going through a "positive phase" and was a little out of character. But it didn't last and I believe one of the reasons it didn't last is because my confidence waned and I became less positive and even more negative.
That was all before I got hold of "The Secret" and started to see where I had been going wrong all those years. And I mean all my life up to that point! It had all been driven by negativity and a thought process that was toxic and self destructive. Like most people!
So back to the physical doing bit.
I knew I had to break out of the place where I was taking crap jobs just to make money to help pay bills. But changing life habits, especially mental ones is bloody hard!
It was and still is hard, although now I'm a lot better at it. It started to happen after I decided to have a go at writing a book. I had tried this a few times before and never managed to get past the first few chapters before giving up.
This time I had some money in the bank left over from that IT job so I was good for a few months and so I wanted to try this. I also started looking at the Internet to see if there were ways to make money online.
I got several chapters written but again, I gave up! I found some ideas online and started to pursue them. But nothing seemed to be much use and there were (and still are) a lot of scammers out there who will take your money and deliver little more than thin air.
I was several months and not much in the way of productivity before I read "The Secret" and started to put some of the ideas into practice.
It wasn't long before I suddenly found ways of making decent money by writing paid posts on blogs. It was 2007 and it had become very fashionable for SEO's to be buying links for their client's websites. It was a time of very good money and it enabled me to buy some domains and set up some websites for myself.
I was much more positive in my thoughts and really believed that there was a way to sustain this online income. The way came from an unlikely source. Don't they always?
I was contacted by one of the companies that were brokering links who were looking for content writers to write a lot of reviews on online casinos. I sent in an example of my writing and even though there were probably hundreds of applicants, I got the gig.
It was about this time that Google were stomping on people writing those paid links blog posts anyway, so as that door closed, the online casino door opened.
I wrote a huge number of articles for the company's affiliate website and that led on to writing for another branch of the same company that runs an online ecommerce program that is very successful. I don't think it's appropriate to name names here, suffice it to say the guys are in Australia and I say a silent "thank you" to them every day.
That's not just for the long term writing gig they gave me, but the opportunity that income gave me to branch out into learning and practicing SEO with my own ever growing stable of websites.
Other unusual things have happened along my own online journey to self sufficiency. Meeting up with certain people online has been an incredible part of it as each has been instrumental in getting me to think of things or change my mind on ideas for better ones that have resulted in more income for me.
I give something back by running my forum at thehonestway.com for free and helping anyone who wants to learn how to do what I do. That forum has attracted a great group of people, some more knowledgeable than me in certain areas and all coming together to create a mix of ideas and solutions that is pretty explosive.
This has all happened because, instead of sitting on my arse bemoaning my lot, I got up off that arse (well, actually I sat down on that arse at my computer, but you know what I mean!) and took some risks, worked damned hard to learn and then put into practice what I learned and for the last few years I have made a decent enough income online to not have to worry about anything of a financial nature.
This stuff works and it works for anyone willing to make it work for them. It doesn't stop with "The Secret" but that's where it just happened to start for me.
There's a ton of information on this idea of positive thinking and self improvement out there and I'm busily studying this not only because I know it works but because I want to make sure it sticks in my mind and I never forget any of it. I have two books that right now I'm reading and re-reading.
One is Raymond Holliwell's "Working With the Law" and the other is Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich."
These books are not so much about making money (although it's a part of it) but about personal growth. I learned about them through Bob Proctor's teachings and in fact I have some audio files of Bob and Mary Morrissey that I spend a half hour listening to every day.
They are so inspirational and the information in there and those two books combined is just mind blowingly powerful. Not just because it's fascinating stuff, but because I know it works!
So if you're stuck in a rut, be it a physical one or a mental one (hint: physical ruts are caused by mental ruts) then you might want to check out those authors or get hold of Bob Proctor's stuff.
You might dismiss it as bunk, but if you set aside your critical mind and allow yourself to try and stop questioning it all and just accept it for what it is, your life can change for the better too. In fact, I'm going to be monumentally cheeky here and actually give you a live link to where you can buy one of those books online:
(Link removed by admin)
What have you got to lose? Whoa, that's negative.
"NEXT!"
Better: "What have I got to gain?"
This article was originally posted on: Sat, 19 Nov 2011
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