Whatever You Think About is What You Attract

Bob Proctor - Whatever you think about you will attract into your life.I wrote a post a little over a year ago about how your language will show you what you are attracting. For example, while you may affirm “I am debt free” you will likely not achieve that because the focus word in what you are saying is “debt,” so you will probably continue to attract debt. I want to spend some more time on this topic today.
I spend a fair amount of time on Facebook and I love to share positive, inspiring quotes. For example, Bob Proctor shared one of his quotes on Facebook this morning:

Whatever U think about, U will attract into your life. Not what U want, but what U are emotionally involved with. Click To Tweet
It’s a great quote and I agree with it completely. Whatever you think about is what you attract. It reminds you that what you spend the most time thinking about, and emotionally engaged with, is what you will attract into your experience. It also points out the problem that I have with a lot of the quotes and attempts at inspiring messages that I find on Facebook. The same goes for Twitter too. I just spend more time on Facebook so I notice it more there.
Here’s one that I saw this morning:

Where you deny your fears, other people will control you. Your fears are only ever based on a lie. Uncover it. Expose it to the light of truth and no lie that others tell will ever sway you again. – Chantal Herman

It’s a true statement. People attempt to control you through your fears and when you confront and accept your fears, those other people lose their control. It is an important thing to know, but it isn’t very inspiring in the form it is in because the focus is on the fears, lies and control. It could be turned around to put the attention on truth and freedom instead.

The Law of Attraction Is About How You Feel

The most important ingredient to the Law of Attraction is how you feel. The issue that I have with the previous quote is that after I read it I feel disempowered instead of empowered. I feel bummed out. I’m not left in a place of positive attraction.
It seems even worse for women. I see a lot of quotes from women meant to inspire other women but they all focus on struggle and suffering. I searched back through four days in my Facebook feed and couldn’t find a great example, which is good. Sometimes it’s a blessing when you can’t find what you’re looking for. Here’s a reasonable example that I found:

Mistakes make you a better person. Problems make you stronger.

I don’t think that this is true at all. We learn from our mistakes when we correct them and we become stronger when we overcome our challenges. It is the “correcting” and the “overcoming” that make us better and stronger. Still, I believe the person who shared it intended to inspire by sharing the message, but it puts the attention on the mistakes and problems, leaving the reader feeling weaker than before reading it.
A lot of these messages, especially the ones that target women, put all of your attention on your past, which cannot be changed. Maybe that’s not exactly true. You can’t change the events of the past but you can change your interpretation of them, which can have some benefit. Still, if the past is painful, you are much better off focusing on how much brighter today is than yesterday, and how much brighter tomorrow will be than today. Don’t bury the past and deny that it happened, just don’t let the energy of it control your present and future.

Attracting Success

As a blogger and network marketer, I follow a lot of small business and self-employed people on Facebook who post success quotes. A lot of them like to focus on failure, like this one:

Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something. – Morihei Ueshiba

And another one from a famous author that I enjoyed very much when I was younger:

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success. – C. S. Lewis

I remember first got into the self-help, Law of Attraction world. I watched The Secret and read several of the books by the great authors from the past. Wallace Wattles said in The Science of Getting Rich that

Things are not brought into being by thinking about their opposites. Studying and thinking about disease does not achieve health. Studying and thinking about sin does not promote righteousness. And no one ever got rich by studying poverty and thinking about poverty.

The same goes for success. I don’t think you can reach success by thinking about failure.
Maybe I should say this first, I don’t think that you have failed until you have decided to give up. A boxer doesn’t lose the match when he falls. He loses when he doesn’t get back up. A baseball player is considered successful when he bats above .300. That average means that he only hit the ball once out of every three times at bat.
Mistakes, obstacles, learning opportunities, those are all events that can make you and your business stronger once you decide to overcome them. They aren’t failures until you give up and quit. Maybe that’s just semantics, but we are talking about language and semantics are a part of that.
More important than the semantics, how do you feel after you read those quotes? They don’t feel very uplifting, the C. S. Lewis quote especially. It contains “fail” three times. It’s almost programming you through repetition to think and feel failure, which isn’t going to help you succeed.
If you want to be healthy you should think, feel and act healthy. If you want to be successful you should think, feel and act successful. If you have anything less in your mind or your energy, then you will get less. Like I said in that earlier language post, if I tell you “don’t think of an ice cream cone,” what did you think about? An ice cream cone. Likewise, if you are working toward a goal and you are told about “failure,” you’re going to be thinking about failure, not success.
Here’s a better quote that I found this morning:
Call me crazy, but I love to see people happy and succeeding. Life is a journey, not a competition. Click To Tweet

Now It’s Your Turn

So, what do you think? Do you agree with me, or is this just a pet peeve of mine? Read the quotes you see today and feel them. Which ones make you feel better, the ones that use positive words like happiness, health and success or the ones that talk about those things but use words like suffering, illness, and failure? Let me know what you come up with in the comment section below.
 

This entry was posted in Law of Attraction and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CommentLuv badge