There are eight essential steps to manifesting money and start living your ideal life. Last week, I shared the first four steps. Below are the remaining steps.
Step 5: Practice being rich.
Have an “I am rich!” day. This activates the law of attraction and helps you manifest the ideal life you desire. The key is to start making your ideal life real. After designing your ideal life on paper, the next step is to design one ideal day. What would it look like when you wake up in the morning? What would you do, what would you eat? Who would you be with? What sort of work would you do, if any? How would you pass the time? Write everything down from the moment you wake up in the morning until you go to sleep at night. Again, the more details, the better. Include sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors. The goal here is to create a vivid picture of one ideal day. You can have a variety of ideal days –they don’t all have to be the same. After you create one ideal Monday, you might have a different ideal Tuesday. Some elements might stay the same, some might change for fun and variety. Go right ahead and design an entire ideal week, day by day. Use your imagination. There is no limit.
Once you’ve done that, the next step is to start making it real. Take one element of your ideal day and experience it.
One of my clients said her ideal morning was to sit on her deck overlooking her garden, eat a blueberry muffin and drink tea while writing in her journal. I asked her what was stopping her from doing that now. Nothing! She made a big batch of muffins, froze them and now has an ideal morning every day.
You may be surprised how much you can already do to make your life more ideal. Start with the perfect morning and evening routine. As soon as you start living elements of your ideal life, you’ve activated the laws of attraction because now your mind knows that your ideal life can actually come true. You have proven that you can live it now and so your beliefs start to shift from, “I’ll never have what I want” to “I can have what I want” to “I am living the dream now.” The trick is to start making it real and it doesn’t matter what you do.
Small steps work just fine, but to attract wealth you need to start to believe that you can be wealthy. Or, you can simply live a very rich, abundant, luxurious life with very little money. Remember, money is only the medium of exchange, not the end result you actually seek. But you ask, what about the FIRE community focusing on creating financial prosperity, working on achieving a specific sum of money so that they can retire early and stop work? They are focused on acquiring money for the sake of freedom. Or, so that they can do work that doesn’t pay well but that they enjoy, which is freedom to work as you wish. So ultimately, the emotional experience they are trying to create is freedom and for some it might be security. How can you create the experience of having more freedom in your life now?
When I was working at the bank, I felt restricted. I could only get promoted every year or two. I had set working hours and couldn’t choose who to work with. Once I left the bank and started my coaching company, I felt completely free. I could set my own hours, choose my clients, select my own team. There were no limits on how much money I could make or how quickly I could grow my business.
You don’t necessarily have to be financially free to feel free. It might simply be a matter of having a large cash reserve on hand and owning your own business. Don’t get me wrong, most financial planners will recommend that you set aside a minimum of 20% of your income to account for the day when you will no longer be physically or mentally able to work to generate an income. This is prudent financial management and essential to having a comfortable retirement at some point in the future. Social Security is only designed to supplement about one third of your income, so the remaining balance will be up to you.
I encourage everyone to get on the path to financial freedom as quickly as possible and have even created the Financial Freedom, Retire Early Course to help speed you on your way, but this doesn’t mean you must sacrifice your life enjoyment today. It is important not to feel deprived or create feelings of lack or scarcity. You want the opposite – to attract money you create feelings of abundance, the feeling that you have more than enough.
Step 6: Your beliefs determine your reality.
If you think you are poor, you’ll act like a poor person. So, if you want to be wealthy, start acting wealthy now. You need to bust through your limitations of what you think you deserve. Most of us have limitations or think at some level, we aren’t worthy or good enough to have this kind of wealth and abundance so we stop ourselves from having it. You are unconsciously blocking your own prosperity. The key to reverse this limited thinking is to challenge yourself by doing something you don’t think you deserve to do. Pick something that would make you feel rich — something a rich person would do that you’d like to have, too.
For example, I grew up doing daily household chores and always thought it would be great to be rich because then you could afford to hire a house cleaner. When I was living in a tiny NYC apartment and working hard to pay off my credit card debts, hiring a house cleaner seemed an absurd luxury. I definitely didn’t think it was something I should do, after all, any spare money should go straight to paying off the credit card, right? I lived in a tiny 600 square foot apartment that I should have been able to clean myself, being perfectly fit and able-bodied. But my first step to attracting wealth was hiring a house cleaner to come once a month to clean my little apartment. Yes, this felt naughty given my credit card debts, but it also felt incredibly great! I really felt rich that I could afford a cleaner, even if just once a month.
The point of this exercise is to do something that is a bit of stretch for you, but won’t break the bank. You need to start pushing your own mental limits of what is possible for you. Start living richly now, in small ways as you build up your “havingness” muscle in much the same way as you’d build up muscle by lifting weights in the gym. You don’t want to go for the heavy weights straight away as you’ll likely drop them on your foot or hurt yourself. You build up, bit by bit. So don’t rush out and buy that Ferrari on credit!
I needed to break through my poverty mindset. A few months after hiring a cleaner, I was promoted and the raise more than made up for the cost of the cleaner. That is how attracting money works. You must stretch what you believe is possible for yourself. Maybe your dream is to drive a Ferrari. Why not rent one for a day out? Get the experience you want now. If you think being wealthy is about having a closet full of designer shoes, go out and get one magnificent pair. In fact, why not attract that pair of shoes for free or little money? Do you have a friend who is clearing out her closet? Let her know you’ll be happy to be on the receiving end of any donations.
Start doing things that make you feel wealthy now, whether that is having that blueberry muffin on the deck or driving that red sports car. I’m not saying to spend with abandon, but rather to push the envelope a bit on what you think you deserve. This will help you expand your willingness to have. The other reason why it is so important to live richly now is that you may discover that what you imagine to be wonderful isn’t actually so wonderful after all.
I imagined that once we were wealthy, we could treat our friends for a fabulous restaurant dinner. On my 50th birthday I did just that. It cost nearly $1000 to treat a group of friends to dinner and drinks. While it was a lovely evening, I realized afterwards that I would have had just as much fun if we had all chipped in, which is the custom in the UK. It really made no difference that I had offered to pay. Afterwards I told my husband that I wouldn’t do it again. I’d rather have people over to my own house for dinner and treat them in a more personal way. Another time, when I was working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Long Island, I had the opportunity to drive their kids around in their family car– a Mercedes Benz. It was the fanciest car I had ever driven and I couldn’t believe they would let me drive it around NYC! In the end, I realized I wouldn’t buy one myself. The car ran on stinky diesel, was heavy and always needed some sort of minor repair that ended up being much more expensive than a normal car. It cured me of my desire to drive a luxury car. You may find that wanting a thing is more enjoyable than actually having it!
Step 7: Clear the clutter and make space for what you want.
If you want to attract better, more luxurious things into your life, the easiest way is to get rid of the old stuff. This never fails to activate the law of attraction simply because nature abhors a vacuum. And right now, minimalism is the hottest eco-friendly trend going. So get rid of the clutter and clear your space of anything that doesn’t give you joy. Fix anything that is broken. Mend anything that is torn or ripped. Donate excess clothes to charity. Clear your closets, tidy up and create the space for what you do want. This is the fastest and easiest way to attract new and better things, people and opportunities into your life. Clutter represents stuck energy. So if you want change, then clearing clutter is the first place to start. Read more on clearing clutter to activate the law of attraction here.
Step 8: Express your gratitude.
When we are grateful for what we have, even when it isn’t enough, we attract more of what we want.
Gratitude is another superpower that activates the law of attraction. When we are filled with joy and gratitude and love, it is very hard not to be irresistibly attractive. The secret is to focus on the things that you do have—your health, your friends, your family, your cozy blanket, your skills and talents, your guitar. We have so much and so often we lose sight of just how much we have. In fact, decluttering helps us see that we might even have too much and that is why we’ve lost sight of what we have –it’s at the bottom of a heap of stuff! As you start to sort through the junk, you realize that you have many precious things. And that things you once thought were precious may no longer be.
By focusing on what we have, the rich abundance in our lives, the more you attract.
To learn more about becoming irresistibly attractive, take the Coach Yourself to Success course online.
