“Read it”, he said, “it’s incredible, really inspiring!”

“Is it the same Paul Hawken who visited Findhorn in the seventies and wrote The Magic of Findhorn?” I said.

And indeed it is.  That book is out of print, but at the time it was famous for telling the world about the enormous vegetables being grown at Findhorn at the time, which led to the huge community expansion that happened in those years.  Paul has since then written 6 other books, the latest being Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No-one Saw It Coming. But what has all this to do with RichThinkers and your business or project?

Read the commencement address and you will see that this is the current context out of which we are all operating our businesses or projects, charities or non-profits, whatever is your passion. Paul expresses it beautifully; starkly yes, but with immense grace, as he speaks to young people about to make their way in the world.   Which is what you reading this site are doing too.  Making your way, contributing from your heart and soul, caring about people and our planet, wanting to run your business in an ethical way that gives back to the planet, not just taking.

Here’s a quote:

“Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done”.

Wow.  This is such a great example of rich thinking. Here’s another:

“At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth, we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich”.

And Rich Thinking is just that — being rich right now, in this instant, in your heart; and radiating that to others through your daily acitivities, your services, your organisation or however you channel your particular passion.  Read the address and answer his two questions at the end — let your inner riches be known to you, and spill them out into the world.

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

What’s all this about twenty two seconds?  He tells a story about a young Maths student trying to work out an algebra problem.  Where most students would spend anything from thirty seconds to five minutes trying to solve a problem, this young woman spends twenty two minutes before she solves the problem. The others, taking less time, give up.

This reminds me of my approach to doing crosswords, versus my husband’s.  He will spend a long time, in fact, however long it takes, to solve all the clues.  Whereas I just don’t bother; if the answer doesn’t ‘come to me’ in a few minutes, I just stop doing the crossword, no matter if it isn’t finished.

The point of all this is to highlight how important is persistence, and taking the time needed to achieve what you are trying to achieve, be it solving an algebraic problem, a crossword puzzle, or a business challenge.

I know for myself that when something doesn’t change quickly, I am tempted to float away to something else, and think ‘oh well that hasn’t worked, never mind’.  When clearly it would behove me to put more time and energy into having the problem be solved.

This applies particularly to the use of positive affirmations — I know it’s easy to give up on them after just a few days when nothing much has changed. But it really does work to persist with them, or your visualisations, or whatever inner work you are doing.

My favourite method is to commit to doing them for a few days, and then check in and choose to re-commit for another few days. That way everything is broken down into more manageable pieces, I don’t get overwhelmed, and success is made more and more likely. Try it and see!

The term Law of Attraction, or LOA, is a bit like the word God. One person may mean one thing when they use it, and another may mean something quite different. So what does it mean in a RichThinkers context?

Actually, I’m not keen on using that term simply for that reason above. But as it is used a lot, it also attracts people who think they know what is meant by it (or puts them off for the same reason!) So it’s important that you know how it’s used on my website and in my work. My current understanding of this concept is based on the sayings ‘you reap what you sow’, ‘you are what you think’, ‘like attracts like’, and ‘what you think about, you bring about’.

But it’s much too easy to ascribe this to circumstances at a very crude level. Which is when you get people indignantly saying things like ‘How can you possibly say I attracted that car crash?’ or ‘I most certainly did not attract these awful business partners’ or ‘I feel really guilty because I attracted this illness’. This is not useful to think like this, and unfortunately this is the level at which this idea can often be used. At best it is erroneous thinking, at worst it is cruel and insensitive.

How I work with this concept currently (and I’m always learning!) is that what is important is how I respond to the circumstances. How do I set my sails, given the way the wind is blowing, rather than sitting and wondering why I have found myself in a situation where the wind is blowing in the opposite way to which I wanted. So when a recent colleague found herself with a challenging client, instead of berating herself for having ‘attracted’ this situation, she looked instead for where she could learn something about herself in it. The client was not happy about the service being provided. My colleague, determined to turn this apparent negative situation into a positive, told the client how grateful she was about this feedback, and spent time focusing on the result she DID want to create for her client. She didn’t let herself fall into feeling bad, blaming the client, or worrying about what she had ‘attracted’. She simply brought her energies to focus on what she did want instead of what she didn’t want, and in that, found a new inspiration to bring to the situation, which the client loved. Result – everyone got what they wanted.

So, within the situation you’re in, you can focus on all the negative feelings you have about it, or you can see if you can find something good in it. Consequently, your experience of the form can be quite different from what the form appears to look like. When you say you want something, like more money, what works is instead of focusing on the money itself, ask yourself ‘Who would I be if I had more money?’ How would I experience yourself? What would I feel like? Then you begin to get to the essence of what that money really means to you. And if you discover that having the money means you would feel more confident, freer, and more independent – well, you can find ways to create those feelings immediately in yourself, whether or not you have more money. Then, out of that space, you will find having more money loses it’s importance. And out of that space, it often happens that more turns up with ease and grace; and even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter so much, because you are already having the experience you said you wanted.

For instance, a recent client of mine wanted to make a trip abroad to New Zealand. She was quite passionate about going, for various family reasons, and although she had no spare money, and little income, she was quite clear in her vision. She practiced many of the tools you can find on this site, including projecting herself forward in time, and being in the good feeling space she anticipated being in while visiting her family. Despite lots of obstacles, with the regular and consistent application of these tools over a period of 6 months, she found the money by various means (not the least finding an unusually cheap flight only available on the one day she happened to be googling flights!) I’ve just come off the phone from hearing about her time there.

So law of attraction, depending on how you view it, just like many other things, can be a very powerful tool in your life, let alone your business. It all depends on how you think and feel about it!

]]> http://www.richthinkers.co.uk/2010/05/richthinking-is-it-the-law-of-attraction/feed/ 0 http://www.richthinkers.co.uk/2010/04/inspiration-from-seth-godin-marketing-whizz/ http://www.richthinkers.co.uk/2010/04/inspiration-from-seth-godin-marketing-whizz/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:58:50 +0000 jane http://www.richthinkers.co.uk/?p=3405 Being inspired by marketing expert Seth Godin,  here’s a few thoughts about making choices. In these days of the information age, we are inundated by choice, sometimes overwhelmingly so.  How do you choose between which blog to follow, which spiritual teacher, which marketing maven?  Of course, it’s largely down to intuition in the end (so long as you know and trust your intuition) but here’s another way of thinking about choice:  what you expose yourself to in the form of the choice you make, you will find dictates what happens in your life.  So:

Expose yourself to spiritual teachings, and you’ll become a spiritual guide

Expose yourself to how to make money fast, and you’ll want to do it too

Expose yourself to worry (more...)

When I was working as a counsellor and psychotherapist the answer to ‘why’ was always interesting to my clients. They wanted to know ‘why’ they were the way the were.  But over time I realised that many people would get stuck with the answer to ‘why’, as if that in itself could heal them.  And of course for some of them it did.  But very often the answer to ‘why’ simply wasn’t enough to have them change their learned behaviour and move on.  That’s why I liked Louise Hay’s work so much, she focused very practically on what to do when you knew why you were the way you were.

Einstein was famously quoted as saying: ”If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes to formulate the right question, because as soon as I have identified the right question, I can solve the problem in less than five minutes”.

So take time to formulate your question in order to receive the answer you really want to get.