Do you remember when the book The Secret came out? I was in high school when I remember the craze. Every time I checked the book out of the library for a patron I really just wanted to know what the secret was. One of my friends read it and loved it and tried to explain. But I didn’t get it. It sounded like magical mumbo jumbo and this from the girl who would do nearly anything to believe in magic.
Eventually, I read it. Well, I read the beginning of it. Enough to get the gist. Ish. You’ll have to excuse my memory here because the gist I recall is that your thoughts translate into reality.
I took this very literally. I remember driving around parking lots thinking I will find an open spot right in front. I will. I will. And then get really pissed off when I don’t find one.
I had a thought, didn’t I? Where’s my reality?
(I actually still do this. Sometimes it works).
I don’t know if the parking spot test came directly from the book. It might have. I stopped reading the book and moved on.
Ten years later I obsess over professional development/self-improvement books and the thread of those early ideas I so easily wrote off as “magical mumbo jumbo” show up again and again. From entrepreneurs and writers and change agents and coaches and people who have tapped into their purpose.
What you focus on matters. What you believe in will be. Your thoughts are your reality. The vision boarding and mirror affirmations and meditation and goal setting don’t seem so crazy.
I just read You Are A Badass At Making Money, for example, and it’s a whole book about changing your mindset towards money. Not a step by step investment guide or how to make a business grow. Just a talking to about what happens when you focus on a goal and do the work.
I know … really, Natalie? You just read a whole book on how to think of yourself as rich so you’ll get rich? That’s not how it works.
Maybe. But I think the point of a lot of these books (I’m reading Grit by Angela Duckworth now) is to pass on behaviors and stories about what works for people. Money or writing or anything else, I do think there’s some magic to believing in something. It’s what you do with the magic that gets you where you want to go.
The counter is the jinx mindset which says If I want something too badly, I’ll never get it. I’ve jinxed it. Sometimes I believe in that too. But what’s the action there? Never want anything? Never believe you can achieve what you want? That’s not a life I’m interested in.
I’ll gamble on my magical mumbo jumbo, thank you very much.
With Love,
Natalie