One of my clients came to me the other day with what she thought was an insurmountable obstacle to reaching her goals. She and her husband own a business, and she does the bookkeeping – pays the bills, pays the employees, etc. She set a goal for her business to be prosperous and wrote several affirmations about how easy it was for them to attract paying customers, how easy it was to make payroll every month, and how wonderful it felt to be debt free. Yet every month when she sat at her desk to write checks to employees and creditors, she saw evidence that she was not making progress toward her goal. She asked me how it’s possible to have an ideal vision of your finances when you are constantly confronted with evidence that is far less than ideal. How can you be idealistic rather than realistic about your goals?
I thought back to a book I read a few years ago by Leslie Householder called Hidden Treasures. In it she tells of a time when her goals seemed very unrealistic when she looked at the evidence. She would analyze things over and over trying to figure out how to reach her goals, but she kept coming up empty. She explained her predicament to success author and coach Bob Proctor during a break in a seminar. He told her that she was not thinking when she was analyzing reality. Her mind was busy, but she was not thinking. Thinking is creating a new thought. In Hidden Treasures, Householder teaches that to change reality we have to spend time and energy creating our ideal circumstances in our minds and then holding those thoughts. We must feel gratitude for what we want as though we already have it. When we put our thoughts on the higher vibration of our goals instead of wallowing in our current reality, the universe goes to work to bring us evidence of success.
In the case of my client who has to look at a real bank account every month and pay her bills with real money, it may seem hard to hold onto the thought that she is debt free and that her business is flourishing. But the more time she spends picturing her ideal life with gratitude and joy, and the less time she spends fretting, worrying, analyzing, and recycling thoughts of lack, the sooner she will bring her dreams into reality. If you have ever been stuck in a “reality rut” and found yourself recycling a negative picture of your life based on the evidence you see, try creating a new, bigger, more amazing thought of how you imagine your life could be. And then HOLD THAT THOUGHT!