Belief and Gratitude

Before we go on to the next law of success, I want to spend a little more time on belief and gratitude -- these two things can make all the difference in your success! Belief and gratitude speed up the creation process; doubt and fear reverse the creation process.

Belief.
To speed up the creation process, we need to increase the level of belief in our dream, getting rid of all doubt and fear. It helps to have a huge goal that drives and excites us (we will talk about how important that excitement is in a later post)! But when it comes to taking inspired action steps towards accomplishing that goal, it works better to break it up into small, believable steps.

Stephen R. Covey put it this way: "...there is no shortcut. If I am at day two (to use the analogy of the six days of creation) and desire to move to day six, I must go through days three, four, and five. If I pretend to be at day six in order to impress others, eventually I will be found out... I must move through each of the intervening steps. If I try to push too hard or to go too fast in order to shortcut the process, I may... drop back to day one." (The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations, p.14-15)

Your dream should be so big that you have no idea how you will ever accomplish it! Your goals, on the other hand, should be broken down into believable steps, each step building on the previous step.

For example, your dream may be to be a millionaire. Maybe you've never made more than $40,000 per year in your life. The thought of $1,000,000 totally excites you, but you have no idea how to get $1,000,000 (or you would already have it). If your goal is to make $1,000,000 it will be totally frustrating because you don't know how to do it. But you could probably think of ways to increase your income from $40,000 per year to $50,000 per year. Once you are on track to do that, then you can probably find ways to increase to $75,000 per year. Then $100,00 per year. Then once you have seen success in making these leaps, you can start taking bigger leaps! These leaps don't have to take a year -- for some people each of these steps may take a couple of weeks, and for others they may take at least a year.

Always ask open-ended questions while you are going through this process. Using the example above, let's suppose you have never made more than $40,000 per year, and you would like to increase that to $50,000 per year. If you ask a yes/no question like: "Is it possible for me to make $50,000 per year?" then you will go into an analytical mode and you will calculate that you have never made more than $40,000 per year. Your conclusion will be that "No," you can't make $50,000 per year.

Try asking a question like this instead: "How can I make $50,000 per year?" or "What can I do do increase my income by $10,000 per year?" Instead of going into analytical mode, this type of question will take you into creation mode where you start creating solutions and ways to accomplish your goal!

Gratitude.
Gratitude works with belief to speed up the creation process. I have unsuccessfully tried keeping gratitude journals in the past. Then I heard someone speak about a journal they kept where every day they recorded how God's hand had blessed them that day. I started doing this, and it completely transformed my life! I found that acknowledging God's hand in my life every day increased my awareness of how rich and blessed my life already was. This new awareness and knowledge automatically increased the amount of gratitude I was feeling!

Gratitude is a very high vibration (we will talk about the Law of Vibration in a later post), and when we are in a state of gratitude we automatically attract great things to us! When the right teachers and situations are finding us, we are able to more quickly and easily accomplish our dreams!