There are a lot of get rich quick scams out there. There are probably enough to keep you studying for the rest of your life.

I’ve got the solution. Instead of get rich quick in six months, how bout get rich quick in five minutes! Yeah. That way you don’t have to work at all. You can just be rich.

There’s something wrong with a system that involves getting rich by doing nothing.

Let me give you a formula for understanding how wealth develops so you can use this knowledge to create your own financial well-being.

Wealth comes from giving people something of value. People who want something for nothing can occasionally find small pockets of wealth by capitalizing on loop-holes, but those sources are destined to dry up fast because the loophole violates the underlying principle by which wealth occurs for any person, business, or society.

Are there training programs that can give you valuable information on how to create value and reap high profits in return?

Yes, absolutely.

But anytime you find a system that promotes the development of wealth at other people’s expense, or by doing nothing at all, you are in for a rude awakening when the system collapses.

I’m going to offer you a better way, but first let me just mention one very clear example of a get rich quick scam that I recently came across.

I discovered a direct-sales company that sells a personal development audio series for well over a thousand dollars. The company gets people to sign up as sales people for the audio series. But, of course, you can’t sell something very well if you’ve never listened to it, so you have to buy the audio series first to get the right to sell the program. The business is set up to sell you on the idea that you can get rich by selling the program. You have to work very VERY hard to find any information about the product itself.

I did work hard, because I thought, “What in the world could they be selling that is worth so much?” What I discovered was a bunch of fluff that you can find in any twelve-dollar book on the “Law of Attraction,” plus weight loss and health information plus general financial advice. The panel of “experts” on the CD’s made me laugh. They had picked random people with questionable expertise. They had morbidly obese people on the same panel as those promising the get thin quick information that could change your life.

But here’s the surprising part. After analyzing the system, I am quite certain I could make several hundred thousand dollars per year selling their useless product. It wouldn’t last for long though, even if I was okay with getting rich by legally stealing from others. Looking into the background of the company, I discovered it had already been fined several million dollars by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) before shutting down and incorporating as a new business with the same basic product (just more expensive this time—probably to cover anticipated legal fees). The FTC fined it for being a version of a pyramid scam.

With pyramid scams, most people lose while a few people at the top of the pyramid win. Most MLM companies are pyramid scams, with a few exceptions. Even though this is a direct sales company, the system is built on the idea that so long as you are still a clueless outsider, you are a potential prospect.

The real issue the FTC looks at is whether you actually have a product that is the source of revenue rather than revenue coming from the “business opportunity.” Because the business opportunity itself adds no real-world value to anyone, it would eventually collapse when enough people discover that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

With so many people leading you astray and offering harmful advice about earning money, I thought I would add my voice to offer at least one small attempt at giving you sound information you can use.
The reason wealthy nations are wealthy relates to the stability of the government allowing free trade as well as resource availability (like oil, water, etc.). The free trade is the real source of wealth. It allows us to use specialization and technological advances to become more efficient in providing value to others.

If we all start out living on an isolated island, and we are all fisherman, we can advance as a society when one of us develops a net and uses the net to catch enough fish to let five of us go do something
else, like build nicer huts to live in. This is the basic example used by entrepreneur and economist, Paul Zane Pilzer. Each time we become more specialized and efficient, it could put someone else out of a job (like five fisherman). But if those five fisherman then go to work on something else, the society as a whole gets access to things they would not otherwise have…and wealth begins to develop. If we
were all still farmers, no one would have invented air conditioning, telephones, light bulbs, mosquito repellant, or medical treatments. Farmers are too busy farming to do all that on top of farming. We
had to develop more efficient farming technology before we could afford to have some people studying things like electricity. So the formula for wealth is efficiency and specialization.

How can you use this information to boost your own micro-economy and personal financial well-being?

The key is to align yourself with technological advances and the development of specialized skills that bring a high value to others relative to the cost for you to create that value.

In other words, you are looking for leverage.

You can leverage a medical degree (specialization) to earn more than you would get by working as a waitress. You can leverage technology by making your business or service more efficient (which allows you to serve more customers at the same or lower price and reap the financial reward).

So here’s the take-home message.

When you are looking for a way to earn more money, look for systems that incorporate some form of leverage (leveraging either technology or specialization) in service of the production of value for others. By thinking about what other people need or want and how you can give it to them more quickly or efficiently, you are aligning yourself with the forces of economic prosperity that will benefit all of us. You can learn more about how to use leverage in your personal and financial life in the Life Modification System. Go check it out and see if you can leverage that information toward a higher quality of life.

Dr. Todd Snyder

You wish don’t you? If there really was a “motivation pill,” you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t be
intrigued by the idea of improving your ability to motivate yourself if all you had to do was pop a vitamin
of some sort. But here you are reading this article, so I’ll reward you with something better than a
motivation pill.

I guess you could argue that there sort of are a few “pills” that boost motivation. Take a 100 mg caffeine
tablet for example. Most people are habitual caffeine consumers, meaning it has no effect anymore
since our bodies (really our brains) habituate rapidly to the drug known as caffeine. But for those of
you who are not in the “it doesn’t affect me like that” camp, a dose of caffeine can jump start a series
physical changes in the brain that culminate in feelings of heightened adrenaline. That adrenaline
makes you feel awake and makes you feel like burning energy. It temporarily reverses the instinct
to conserve energy that often interferes with motivation. Beyond the adrenaline changes like mild
increase in heart rate and blood pressure, caffeine also causes increased activation of the feel-good
neurotransmitter Dopamine. Increased dopamine availability in our brain makes everything feel a little
more rewarding.

Now back to sad reality. It only works like this if you use it once in a while (learn some cool tricks about
that in the Life Modification course). Caffeine cannot give you bursts of motivation day after day. At
best, it just turns off the headache and extra low motivation you have each morning when you are in
withdrawal from the drug. I’ll tell you what can boost your motivation day after day by creating the
exact same increase in adrenaline and a surge of dopamine.

It’s the ultimate energy tap. It’s your future! Your energy reserves are greatly controlled by what you
are unconsciously anticipating in the near and not-so-near future. You’ve known this since you were a
kid who couldn’t sleep the night before Christmas morning or the day before your family trip to Disney
World. I’m just pointing out how to use this knowledge that you already have.

How do you use it? You tap into imagery about the future that inspires you right before you need
to be motivated. Not motivated to work on your internet business or that business proposal? Try
basking in the sunshine of a couple grand in your pocket. What would you do with a bonus from your
own successful business if you gave yourself three grand to spend on something fun and frivolous to
celebrate a mile marker of financial success? Go on…imagine for a moment. It’s the imagining part
that activates those neurological processes that make motivation easier. The trick is being vivid in your
mental imagery (I like to call it your mental hologram) and timing it right (about five minutes before
you try to motivate yourself to do something that takes self-control). It’s always available to you and
it causes a gradual increase in your positive mood states instead of gradually becoming a point of
dependence like caffeine. Don’t “try it.” Do it! If you think, “Yeah…I’ll do it once and then forget to use
it again for a year…invest in yourself by looking into the Life Modification System. We fix that problem.

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]It’s a simple technique I discovered through trial and error during a year-long stint of counseling
college students at Baylor University. At LifeModification.com we focus a lot on achieving goals and
getting unusually high-level results, and that should include the social aspect of your life. Relationships
make life fun and meaningful. This article is about a simple method that makes it easier to build solid
relationships even when your nose is to the grindstone most of the day.

With getting things done, it is crucial to have blocks of time set aside. You are going to achieve far
more in an hour of focus on a task than you would in three segments of 20-minutes broken up across
three days. It’s the same number of minutes on task, but you end up losing momentum and having to
remember where you left off and all that. So with most goals, chunks of time trump bits of time. With
relationship building it’s actually the opposite.

When you are trying to build new relationships or strengthen burgeoning relationships, frequency
trumps quantity. Let me take you back to the college campus where I discovered this method. I
frequently met students who came into the counseling center because they felt like everyone was
having a rocking good time but them. They wondered why they were sitting alone in their dorm room
on a Friday night on a University campus with over twelve-thousand students. I had so many students
mention this as a bothersome problem that it struck me that if they only knew about each other, the
problem would be solved. But it’s not that simple. You don’t have a rocking good time with people
you just met. Unless you are particularly extraverted, you could enjoy the interaction but you wouldn’t
really truly and completely relax into the version of you that your best friend is used to seeing. That
takes time and the comfort of familiarity.

Here’s the secret in a nutshell. Frequency and familiarity developed at rapid speed when I had these
lonely students wander the University dorm rooms and stop in to say hello to a few people on a routine
basis. Ten minutes of saying hello and chatting about nothing twice per week led to rapid friendship
development. In contrast, going on a weekend ski-trip or hanging out all night with a group of people
had only mild impact on the specific problem we were targeting. The reason frequency works better
than mass exposure is because of how our minds identify friends. They are people who we have a
pleasant feeling about combined with a feeling of familiarity. Though dorky, the ten minutes of small
talk before moving on led to a feeling of familiarity. “Oh, hey Stu…check out this video game.” It was
a response that one of my clients reported as a pretty solid indication that his weekly Thursday night
drop-in had turned into a relaxed friendship.

You probably are not living in a college university right now, but you’re smart enough to figure out how
this concept applies to your friendships. Build frequency into your schedule. Plan to exercise with a
friend one day out of the week, or set up a weekly hour-long online competition with your sibling for
your favorite online collaborative video game. Short fifteen-minute phone calls twice per week (even
if ended abruptly with , “Well…gotta go”) will draw you closer to your sister than twice per year family
vacations. We start to feel like we can rely on someone when we have frequent, short contacts. It also
causes us to become “part of the story,” meaning you know what is unfolding in their lives (even the
little stuff) so you share in the experience of each other’s lives. It’s a simple method that works. I hope
you’ll use it to enrich your life.

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]“When you run naked in the snow, it automatically means you are running barefoot.”  She kept emphasizing this point as if I disagreed with her.  “Everyone is talking about the benefits of barefoot running for the development of better endurance.”  I kept wondering what this had to do with being naked.

Similarly, you may be wondering what being naked has to do with using short-term goals to rocket the speed of your success.  Almost nothing….unless you take note of an author’s first task in writing a good article: get the reader’s attention.

I sat down at my computer and stared at a blank screen for a moment, wondering how I could drive this point home about short-term goals.  I knew that you had heard the concept before, but I was betting you don’t apply the ideas in real life as much as you should.  Or should I say, “as much as you would…if you knew the benefits you would get if you did.”

But I digress.  I was telling you my fascinating story about staring at a blank word processor screen on my computer, trying to tackle the job of writing and interesting article that would get you to take action.  I thought, “Well, apply the idea of short-term goal setting to get the task going.”  That’s when I remembered that the first task is to grab someone’s attention, since they won’t get anything out of your article if they don’t read it.  The increased focus on that goal put my brain to work in a natural and seemingly automatic way.  As long as I stayed focused on creating a complete article with examples and interesting insights…nothing was coming.  See the difference?  Your brain needs focus, and I mean narrow focus, to do its job efficiently.

What if it’s a long-term goal that you’re trying to achieve?  Don’t be an idiot.  You already know the answer to that question.  Turn your long-term goal into a series of short-term goals.

Take my friend for example.  She wants to increase her endurance.  She wants to move from running 5k races to marathons.  You can’t accomplish that goal by sitting in front of a computer and assigning your brain a thinking task.  Rather, you have to get out there and run, day after day.

But when it’s a cold day outside and you want to get motivated to go take your training run, what should you do?

Well, the smaller the focus, the easier it is to motivate yourself (another advantage of short-term goals).  So focus on something small….really small, like walking to the closet to find your running shoes (or not, but at least put some clothes on).  This overcomes the brain’s natural tendency to balk at the overwhelming task of becoming motivated to go for a long run when you’re feeling comfortable and a little sleepy in your warm house.  Once you are dressed, don’t “go for a run.”  Instead,  just jog to that lamp post over there.

Once you get there you will have overcome another hurdle…starting.  It just gets easier from there.

What happens if she continues to follow this formula?  That’s right…in about five minutes she is no longer dreading the run because now she’s enjoying it.  As her adrenaline picks up and her core body temperature begins to rise it’s easy to feel good about life and the long-term goal she is pursuing.  Apply this idea to your own goals, both small and large.  Modify your approach just a little to get a big payoff in return.

Also, leave a comment below. I would love to hear what you think and how you’re applying this to your life!

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]I do what I want.  If I want to dance like a fool, I do it.  That’s not supposed to sound cool.  You would understand if you saw me dancing.  What is cool is why I dance like a fool.  It’s an awesome story, but it’s too long, so I’ll sum up my formula: I work my tail off to get the life I want…and as a result, I have the life I want.

So I get up mostmornings and tune Pandora radio to my own mix of wacky electronica, oldies, and inspirational movie music.  I dance around the living room with my five-year-old and my two-year-old.  They dance about as well as me, but it’s a rocking good time.  Probably the best ten minutes of bliss a person could feel.

So why am I writing this on a blog about personal achievement and rapid life modification?  It comes down to being hungry.  When you’re having a blast in life, you hunger for more.  When you hunger for more moments of joyful bliss, you are perfectly willing to work hard to get them.  If you get really good at enjoying life, it starts bleeding into your work-life too.  You get excited about working harder and faster because you are so excited about the resources your work will yield, resources you can bend to your will as you engineer more fun and adventure into your life.

Are you hungry?  Do you wake up excited for a day of all-out pursuit of the life you want?  If not, I challenge you to check for internal conflicts.  Why don’t you wake up hungry?  Stop and really think about that for a moment.  Is there a conflict between desire and fear of failure?  Is there a conflict between your adventurous side and your stability-seeking side?  Is there a conflict between your desire to sleep in and your desire to work out?  See, the trick to attaining peek energy states is to get as much of your mind as you can to align in the pursuit of a coherent set of goals, goals that are not in conflict with any of your major desires.

I always get excited when I start talking about one of these concepts that has the potential to explode your life into levels of effectiveness far beyond your wildest dreams.  I’m trying to reign in my enthusiasm so I can spell this out for you.  If you get really honest with yourself about what you want, you will find that many of your desires seem to conflict.  Think bigger.  As in sleeping in and working out because you only work five hours per day in your own business where you make more per month than you used to make per year.  Think bigger, as is in you make more money this year by adding adventurous side-jobs that simultaneously increase your financial stability.  What happens when you find ways to align all of your desires?  You get a sudden release of mental energy that allows you to work for those dreams like you never could have done without the alignment of your desires.  Work on this.  It’s worth the effort.  Get hungry for life.  Let your hunger become your ally.

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]In Back To the Future 2, people were flying cars in the year 2013.  I feel jipped!  That’s two years away and it seems the automakers are getting closer to bankruptcy than they are rolling out the first line of flying cars.  One thing they did get right was video conferencing with split screen view.

So 2011 seems new and exciting and all, but will it really pan out to be a year of awesome fun and personal success or just another year of the same old routine?  If you are not bursting at the seems with excitement for things to come in 2011, you must not be spending enough time at lifemodification.com!  Let us inspire you to be more than you thought you could be.  Let us challenge you to the thrill of accomplishing more, working harder, and having fun at the same time.  Life Modification is about whole-life modification, meaning we focus on win-win-win scenarios for your life.  A great example is mental training for learning to have fun while working.  That’s what I’m doing right now!  But I’m sort of cheating, because I already know what’s in store for Life Modification fans in 2011 and IT IS SUPER EXCITING!
Here’s to your 2011 being the best year ever!

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]Some people have been talking about the idea of “peak oil.”

The concept is basically that society may reach a point within the next decade where our global oil consumption continues to rise while the oil we can extract from the earth begins to flow more slowly, eventually tapering down to almost nothing.

The fear is that when we reach that point, the world economy will begin to react like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Some doom and gloom predictions include the possibility that the global economic melt-down will be so complete, anarchy will break out and governments will fail.

I personally do not believe things will get that bad even though it is certain that we will reach the point of “peak oil” within my lifetime.

My prediction is that we will be able to move our modern agriculture, transportation, and industrialized manufacturing to alternative forms of energy fast enough to avoid a total meltdown of modern society.

It’s just a question of how gradually we realize that we are getting to the bottom of the world’s oil.  As it gets depleted, gas prices will go so high that there will be a sudden powerful economic force to develop the infrastructure needed to switch over to renewable forms of energy.

The doomsday scenarios are based on the concept that we will not be able to change fast enough.

If something like a housing loan crises can affect the world economy so powerfully as it recently did, the idea is that the economic giants that have the power to fund massive changes in technology and infrastructure would crumble from the economic shockwave as the world realized our energy-sucking party was coming to an end.

I think we will be able to change fast enough because people underestimate the power of fear.

Fear can motivate people to take action in ways that go beyond many other motivators.

The people of Switzerland have already voted and put into action a plan to be 100% free of fossil fuels within ten years.  They are a conservative nation with an eye toward the future.

Their fear kicked in earlier than other countries like the United States.  When we are suddenly faced with the fear that our national economy may crumble, that same fear will motivate us to work like we did when this country was founded.

Suddenly no one will care if the elected official is a Democrat or Republican or something in between so long as they are taking sudden and drastic action to survive the economic shockwave of peak oil.

Fear will become our ally in survival.

Enough of the doomsday stuff.  How can you harness the motivating forces of fear in your life to bring about a better life?

First of all, you should know that people who honestly face their fears and make a plan to address them end up in a healthier mental state than those who simply try not to acknowledge the things they are afraid of.

You don’t want to dwell on fear all day long, but you do want to face it and make realistic plans for taking action to address it.

Taking action to avoid feared scenarios can actually eliminate most of the stress that comes from fear.

Like I said, I don’t believe our society will melt down to a point of anarchy that lasts for over a decade.  I think we are more resilient than that and I think when fear kicks in we will start to move faster than anyone could predict.

That said, I do have a small pang of fear when I imagine my kids looking to me for clean water and something to eat in the face of economic meltdown.  It’s not likely, but it’s just scary enough to give me a jolt of energy and a desire to do some basic preparation.

Here’s how I harness that fear:

There are very few wise actions I can take as “just in case” precautions, but I have found a few actions that make sense whether we end up facing a peak oil crisis or not.

One such action is staying in shape.

So when I’m feeling lazy and I don’t necessarily want to go for a jog, I leverage fear to get myself into action.  Exercise is critical for a health body, healthy mind, and peak productivity at work.

It also would be very important to be physically fit if I have to hike to the nearest stream every day to get clean water for my kids.  So I am harvesting a little bit of mostly useless fear to get myself to take action on something that will definitely matter in my life.

Selling my business and living in a log cabin in Northern Canada to practice the hunting and gathering lifestyle is another option.

The problem with that kind of reaction is that it reflects a fear-driven life instead of a possibility-driven life.  You don’t want to go too far with letting fear drive you.  You just want to dip into it just enough to get a little kick of energy that you can then apply to your most meaningful goals.

Starting a business to work toward financial independence?  Great!

Look for ways to dip into fear when you know you should be working, but the freedom of being your own boss tempts you toward useless procrastination in place of hard work.

Trying to beat a habit of responding with excessive anger to the people you love?

Dip into fear by thinking about what it would be like to lose the people you love without ever having beat that habit.

Don’t dwell on fear, but use it to your advantage.

We will be exploring other ways to benefit from survival skills training that can work for both an intact economy and a meltdown economy, so stay tuned as we add articles and information to the site.

Also, leave a comment below. I would love to chat with you!

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]Ever wonder why you don’t do the things you know you should do?

You know, like exercising when you said you would, or getting your taxes done early to avoid a last minute catastrophe, that kind of thing.

If you were asked to robotically program your actions in advance, you would certainly find your life improving rapidly.  This article explores one of the primary causes for not following though when the moment for action arrives.

Imagine a quality action film where the hero reaches a low point and then suddenly finds the strength to combat the enemy.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Rocky movie or Superman, they always find a way to put the hero in some sort of beat-up, seemingly hopeless situation before the final rise to heroic action.

Now imagine if you were watching such a movie, and instead of getting up to train for the big match, Rocky decides to have another cinnamon roll and look through catalogues.

How fast would you nix that flick?

At week six of putting on a pudgy pot belly and feeling sorry for himself, you’d probably lose interest in Rocky’s boxing career.

Excuses and procrastination don’t even sell a movie, so why would you want to live your actual life that way?

What kind of boring life do you get from trying to find the easy path of least resistance all the time?

What I’m getting at is one of the primary causes for not following through when the moment for action arrives.

I promise the point of this article is not to make you feel bad.

We all slip up, I’m just trying to give you some good intel for taking out one of the primary enemies in the battle against a boring life that doesn’t really reflect your true potential.

The reason you don’t take action when the moment comes is that your perspective has changed.  After reading this article, your perspective will be shifted slightly in the right direction.

If your work out buddy shows up at your door right now, you are more likely to go, simply because of the subtle perspective-shift I have initiated in your thinking through this article.

Your perspective is more on the side of, “Fight for the life you want!” and a little less on the side of, “What’s the point of trying hard?”

In fact, one of the most powerful changes you can make in your life starts with leveraging your mind to gather momentum and emotion-based power for taking action.

If you can expose yourself repeatedly to ideas and interactions that predispose you to the “Fight for the life you want” side of things, you won’t have to expend nearly as much energy on raw willpower when the moment of action arrives.

You will feel compelled to fight.  And what’s more, the fight will be enjoyable to you instead of wearing you down.  That’s because when you more fully shift your perspective to one side or the other of the internal debate, you reduce the inner turmoil that often holds you back when the moment comes to make a choice.

In other words, you often drain your energy without meaning to by holding some level of ongoing debate in your mind about whether taking action and pushing toward your goad is really worth it.

If you want to live a lukewarm life, floating along with everyone else who has no idea where they are going, be my guest.  If you like the life of choosing your actions based on what everyone else is doing, that crowed will welcome you into their circle of insecurity.

But if you really want to create a life that reflects your desires, adopt a mentality of certainty and end the internal civil war that is draining your energy.

Decide right now that you will postpone any further evaluation of whether pushing yourself toward your goal is worth it.

Postpone any further evaluation until you reach the goal.

Don’t let the momentary feeling of a cozy couch launch you into an internal debate about whether working out is really the way to go.

That is nothing but self-sabotage.

If that thought process arises, crush it instantly upon recognition and replace it with the thought, “My decision was already made.  I will not let this moment of weakness challenge my decision.”  Then take action.

Leave a comment below letting us know of your progress.

Dr. Todd Snyder

[tweetmeme]In my article debunking the Law of Attraction teachings, I showed you that quantum physics in no way suggests that our thoughts control the manifestation of our world through the known laws of physics or quantum mechanics.

That doesn’t mean our thoughts cannot change the world, it just means that there is no scientific proof that would suggest it (yet).

There is a reason why so many people are attracted to the ideas taught by Law of Attraction proponents.

One of the main reasons is that you start to feel pretty good as soon as you start to focus your mind in ways that generate positive emotions and hopeful thoughts about the future.

In this article, we are going to zero in on how to take the best of the Law of Attraction teachings and ditch all the meaningless babble that usually accompanies the teachings.

Long before I became a doctor of psychology and life modification coach, I was profoundly influenced by a book about the power of the unconscious mind.

It was one of those books that claims that all the universe is at the beck and call of your magical unconscious mind.  If only you could harness the magical power of the unconscious, suddenly everything you ever wanted would come true.

I was in high school and I had not yet developed the discerning wisdom of adulthood when I read the book.  Neither did I have my present level of understanding of the unconscious aspects of our minds (which I gained through my advanced training in psychology and my experience working with people who have mental disorders based on unconscious processes—like people with Dissociative Identity Disorder).

Nonetheless, I was skeptical enough of the claims of unlimited power that I had a hard time taking the author seriously.   But I kept thinking about the book after reading it.  I figured I had nothing to lose by giving it a try, and a lot to gain if it turned out to be true.

What happened next was quite astonishing to me.

To this day I marvel at the changes that happened in my life as I began to practice daily meditation on the hopeful anticipation of things I desired.

There was never a miraculous experience that could not be explained, but there were numerous surprises of good fortune that fell in place because of normal-life factors that I had not perceived in advance.

Despite these positive surprises, I continued to be skeptical.

At one point several years later, I actually decided I would put aside my disbelief if I could accomplish one more feat that I didn’t think to be very likely.

Ironically, it was a logic class I was taking in college.  My logic told me I only perceived uncanny events because I was looking for them.  But I had many positive experiences with visualization and focus on the goals that I wanted to achieve, so I decided I would try the method one more time and put aside my disbelief if it worked again.

Within a few days I found a good test.

My logic professor told me I had a B in his class and he showed me the numbers.   I realized I had a good opportunity to do a little test.  Based on the numbers he showed me, it would not be possible to bring my grade up to an “A,” even if I did very well on the final exam.  So logic would say I should not get an A in that class.

I resolved in my mind to accomplish an “A” nonetheless.  With purposefully generated hopeful anticipation of an “A,” I focused my mind on the desired outcome, frequently rehearsing my desire throughout the day.

After the exam, I met with my professor as he was wrapping up his lecture to another class.  I asked him how I did on the exam and he pulled out his materials and showed me that I had achieved an “A” on the exam and in the course as a whole.

I looked with an odd sense of disbelief.

I actually questioned my grade, saying I thought my grade was too low to be able to pull off an “A” in the course.  He looked amused as I explained to him why I couldn’t possibly have achieved an “A.”

He then politely showed me that I had one of the highest grades on the test and that my weekly quiz scores had brought my grade closer than I thought to the “A” range once he used a grading scale curve.

I had set out to test this magical focus thing one last time, with the idea that I would make up my mind after this experiment.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work.

The circumstances always seemed to conveniently explain my success, and I was hoping for some sort of unexplainable event.

Did God set up the world in such a way that our thoughts can control it?

He probably did.  But I doubt we will ever discover the mechanism by which that works using scientific methods of discovery.

For now, let’s focus on what we do know and go from there.

We do know that focusing the mind on a goal has a profound effect on our behavior.

The reticular activating system of our brain is responsible for determining what you notice and what you do not notice.  You notice your name being called but not all the other babble in a crowded room.

You see the same model of car you just bought all over town once you own one.

If you are focused on finding real estate to rent for the new company you are forming, you may hear your name mentioned in a crowded room and you might also hear someone several yards behind you telling their friend about a new property they are developing to rent out.

This only happens when you have “taught” your brain what to look for and what is important.

As I studied for that logic class exam, my brain had been “taught” to think the information I was reading was highly valuable and important.

It was my nightly meditation on the class and the grade that caused my unconscious processes to zero in on that information.

Since emotions are a huge determinant of what sinks into long-term memory, my study time was more efficient, aided by the emotions I connected to the class through my visualizations and meditation.

I also remembered to study because my goal was on my mind when my friend invited me to drive to St. Luis to see a professional soccer game.

I stayed home to study instead.  So the reticular activating system is one mechanism by which focused attention on a goal can make a difference.

But there’s more to it than that.

Another thing we know about rehearsing a goal with a positive expectation for success is that it puts our mind in solution-focused mode.

We act in ways that reflect an expectation of success.  This, more than anything else, is the power that is behind positive expectations for success.

It’s called creating your own luck.

Who do you think is more likely to get a job in a depressed economy, the guy who tries until the fifth interview yields nothing, or the guy who keeps trying without ceasing?

The guy who keeps trying only does so because he is convinced that the right job is out there and in the perfect timing it will be revealed to him.

He keeps looking and he doesn’t get depressed when things fall through because he knows that it was lucky that job didn’t work out because obviously it wasn’t the right one for his long-term success, otherwise he would have gotten it.

That’s the “grateful” mentality that I like about the Law of Attraction teachings.

Being grateful for what you have and hopeful for what’s to come causes you to not only enjoy the process of life as it unfolds, but it also causes you to create your own luck through persistence!

What can we learn from this?

Can we throw out the possibility that our minds somehow influence the unfolding events around us in metaphysical ways?

No.  We can’t.

But we can avoid the trap of blaming victims of bad circumstances.

We can avoid living in a naive La-La-land where everyone lives in an imaginary world they created, being God’s of their own world without ever realizing it till now.

Leave that behind and adopt this healthier alternative.

We may or may not be able to shift our circumstances in a metaphysical way, but it doesn’t hurt to try with an open mind.

The side benefits of adopting an expectation of success are so great that we really don’t lose anything even if there is no metaphysical effect cause by our thought focus.

We can shift our life and circumstances in a very powerful and direct way by choosing to purposefully adopt a focus on specific goals and an attitude of optimistic expectation for success.

With this foundation, you will be amazed at what you can do to transform your emotional world and your practical outer world.

Get to it!  Start Today!

Choose an attitude of joy right now, based on the expectation that your attitude itself will cause you to have a better life and circumstances that unfold to meet you as you reach for your goals.

Are you going to use this in your life? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Dr. Todd Snyder