My friend Trish is going through a tough time. This isn’t your ordinary tough time, like going through a break up or screwing up at work. Trish is going though some scary stuff, the stuff that makes people stay up late into the night worrying.
How scary, you ask? Well, at the moment, she’s homeless, jobless, and living out of her car with a child, eating one meal a day. (You can read more about her on this blog post)
Not to say anything about people who live in their car. There are many, many car and van dwellers who have chosen to live in their vehicles to sustain a life of travel and adventure. And also to give a middle finger to social norms and expectations.
Trish, on the other hand, is not one of them. She didn't choose to live in her car, but the choice sort of befell on her. One day, she found herself broke, depressed and lost.
So her answer to this situation? To visualize her way into manifesting a job and a home.
One time, I saw a homeless guy at a diner with about a hundred or so lottery tickets spread out in front of him. He was carefully arranging his tickets in neat little rows, concentrating and visualizing his winnings with such a force that only the utterly desperate can do.
If you’re smiling right now after reading that, you’re guilty of doing something similar, but in your own version.
Am I right? Well, I sure am guilty of it!
Talking about visualizations takes me back to when I first got bitten by the bug. During my own financial funk, I was in a dark place, desperate to find some answers. At that point in my life, I was convinced that the secret to success was apparent to everyone but me.
And it was during this time I watched the inspirational film, “The Secret,” and became enchanted by the power of visualizations.
Needless to say, I was blown away by the idea and was filled to the bream with ecstatic hope, the kind you would get when you trip and find a stack of hundred dollars right in front of you smack in the middle of the street. This was it, this was the answer. If Rhonda Byrnes dug herself out of her own rut by visualizing, so can I, right?
Of course, over the years, I’ve come to realize the disappointing truth, that it’s not as simple as “The Secret” makes it sound to be. You can’t just think of something and have it pop into your reality. Although the film did an awesome job of introducing the idea of manifestation and how it begins in the nonphysical realm, it portrays somewhat of an incomplete process.
I understand conscious manifestation a bit more now than I did at that time. It requires spiritual understanding, you see. But many people are misled on the process of manifestation, and so they charge through life believing that they will be magically lifted out of their dire situation by the power of their thoughts alone.
Yes, visualization might be part of it, but definitely not in the way “The Secret” portrays it to be.
Epiphany #2: If you want something, you can’t simply want it. You have to BECOME it.
In esoteric terms, you manifest by bringing the frequency of what you want into the present.
I’m going to be throwing around terms like energy, frequency, and vibration throughout this whole blog post, so just a little warning: if you don’t believe that everything is energy, and that everything has its own frequency, then the rest of this blog post might be lost on you. But if you believe this, please read on.
As I was saying, whether you’re conscious of it or not, how we manifest is by bringing the frequency of what you want into your present reality.
Let’s say, you want to make lots of money someday. Inspired by the film “The Secret,” you lay in bed at night, visualizing your future self as someone who is successful and has lots of money. But the next day, you go about your day knowing full well just how broke you are, feeling like an incompetent loser, worrying about how to make rent at the end of the month.
Well, in this state, success isn’t going to manifest. You’ll be manifesting what you actually believe, which is that you’re broke and incompetent. More situations will manifest in your reality validating these two beliefs.
It’s not about the thoughts or visualizations you force yourself to hold in your mind. It’s about the beliefs that are rooted deep within you.
Your beliefs cause you to exude a certain vibration or frequency. If you believe you are incompetent and lack money, then your beliefs will cause you to exude the frequency of lack. You spending ten minutes a day visualizing a different reality meanwhile knowing in the back of your mind that this dreamed-up reality is not actually real, well, it just isn’t going to work.
If you want to be competent, you need to bring the frequency of competency into the present, into the NOW, not the future. Bottom line, you need to change the frequency you are currently exuding.
So you’re saying, “Rei, really, whada heck does that mean? Give it to me in concrete terms.”
It means that you must do anything and everything that makes you feel like a competent person NOW. Not “someday I will be competent,” but “I am competent now.”
Many people take classes thinking, “If I learn this, I will become a skilled, competent person someday, and make lots of money.” The only problem with this is that it’s not going to work if you’re taking the course while believing that the act of learning will “cure” you of the painful problem at hand, which is that you lack skills.
Even after you’ve finished taking the class, you’ll be desperate to take more classes, because you’d feel that taking only one, two, three, or however many classes aren’t enough. So you’d be addicted to take more and more, hoping that all this learning will make you feel confident one day.
This won’t work, because you’re concentrated on filling a lack, a lack that you believe to exist. Essentially, you’re bringing to the present a frequency of lack, frequency of incompetence.
You should approach anything and everything, including learning a new skill, while feeling competent already, that is, feeling the emotion of what you want to be in the present moment.
Instead of trying to remedy a lack, approach it as you already being what you want to be. BE what you want to have NOW.
I know you’ve most likely heard this before, but let me give you an illustration that’ll hopefully make things clearer.
So, how do I BE something when I know I’m not that yet?
So you’re thinking, “I can’t psyche myself into thinking that I’m successful when I’m clearly not. Would you like me to deny my current reality and pretend it’s not happening?”
No, that’s not going to work.
If you do this, you’re going to be exuding a frequency of resistance, suppression, and denial.
We’re not aiming to deny our reality, but merely change our belief about it by changing our frame of mind.
What you want to aim for is to do anything and everything that’s going to make you feel competent, that’s going to make you feel successful. Whatever that is.
If you usually feel proud after cleaning your whole house, do it. Make the bed, do the laundry, vacuum, etc., all the while feeling proud that the house is getting clean.
If you feel like a competent person while reading and comprehending a book that is hard to understand, go for it. Feel how your mind is analyzing and comprehending the information you’re taking in from the book. Feel proud of yourself.
If you feel accomplished after checking off all the items on your to-do list, hey, get on it. Write down every little task that needs to get done, even ones that don’t necessarily need to be written down, like making breakfast, taking the dog for a walk, etc. And as you check off each item, enjoy the feeling of accomplishment.
These are all frequencies of success. And by you doing these things, you would be bringing in the frequency of success into your current reality.
Getting your success-frequency fix in wherever and whenever, even in little tasks, is extremely important.
After a few days, you’ll see that you’ve changed your belief about yourself, which in turn, would change your belief about your current situation. You’ll start to change your perception of your current reality, and view things as half-full rather than half-empty.
Now with this I-know-how-to-be-successful vibration and mindset, set the intention toward making money. Here comes the important part: with that vibration and intention, act according to how you're inspired, or in other words, what excites you. You can't just feel good and think nice thoughts. You have to ACT and participate in the creation of your reality. Rest assured, however, the action you perform won't be strained because it won't be filled with resistance or dogged effort.
And so in this way, as you exude out a different frequency and act from it, your physical reality will change so that it matches your frequency.
How do I bring in a frequency of success?
I thought about all the incidents that left me feeling competent and proud, and found out that I can classify them into two cases.
Case number one, I felt the most competent when I helped someone in need.
Case number two, I felt the most competent when I had overcome certain challenges that I initially thought was impossible.
Let me tell you a story about Trish.
Trish had been putting off writing her resume because she was frozen with fear that, once she got going, it would be self evident that she was unemployable. For fifteen years, she was at home raising her child, so she didn’t believe she had any marketable skills. Every time she would sit down to write her resume, she would feel so discouraged and depressed that she would give up shortly after.
She would use all the excuse in the world not to finish writing her resume. Stuck in her mind, she believed that writing her resume was an impossible feat.
During this time, my roommate came home flustered after getting a traffic ticket for running a red light. She wanted to contest the ticket, so she asked Trish to help her write a statement, since Trish was good with words.
As Trish was helping out my roommate, Trish started to realize how competent she actually was. She saw that she was good at organizing and breaking down a daunting project into smaller tasks. She saw that she was good at doing research on appropriate format and legal terminology. And she saw that she was actually good at communicating effectively through writing. She felt proud of herself and felt that she had underestimated her skills, realizing she wasn’t as unskilled and as incompetent as her mind made her to be.
At the end, Trish felt so good about herself that she was able to move onto writing her resume, which she had previously thought was an impossible feat.
What Trish did here was to bring the frequency of competency into the present by using the various talents she had to help someone in need, even though it wasn’t related to her job search. And with the momentum, she was able to move onto writing her resume.
When you help someone, you realize that you are not without tricks, that you are not without talent. So you realize you have more than you thought you had.
When you overcome challenges, you feel powerful. You realize that you are not as weak and helpless as you thought to be.
You see, those are the feelings you want feel.
Those are the feelings you want to bring into the now.
Those feelings will set hold in your mind as you approach other challenges, and it will in turn pervade into other areas of your life, such as your job or business. You’ll find yourself doing one task after another successfully and with confidence, and you’ll see yourself manifesting all things you associate with success.
This is how you manifest success. You BE it.
In my next blog post, I’ll talk about how to cultivate a habit of success.
Enjoy reading the series on "Five Steps to Getting Out of Financial Funk":
- Five Steps to Get Out of Financial Funk (1 of 5)
- Financial Funk Series: Does Visualization Work? (2 of 5)
- Financial Funk Series: Create a Habit of Success (3 of 5)
- Financial Funk Series: Do What You're Passionate About (4 of 5)
- Financial Funk: Importance of Setting Intentions Day to Day (5 of 5)