We’ve already looked at desire. But wanting something with all your soul, with every fiber of your being, is not enough.

You have to believe you can achieve it.

You really have to believe that you can have it. And believe it without a shadow of doubt.

Lack of belief is almost always the cause when a man or woman cannot manifest what they desire. 

So let’s look at this in more detail.

Back in 1937, when Napoleon Hill originally published his book Think And Grow Rich, everybody wanted an explanation of how manifestation changes thought to reality. In other words, everyone wanted to know how the formula for the Law Of Attraction, which is set out below, actually works.

Desire + Belief + Expectancy + Action = Manifestation

So Napoleon Hill offered an explanation. He said: “When faith [by which he meant belief] is blended with the vibration of thought, the subconscious mind instantly picks up the vibration, translates it into its spiritual equivalent, and transmits it to the Infinite Intelligence, as in the case of prayer.”

You can see immediately that this doesn’t really explain the phenomenon of manifestation.

Is there some way of explaining the process which makes more sense to us nowadays?

The fact that matter and energy are the same thing is probably the closest we can come to an explanation of how the Law of Attraction actually works.

That explanation might look something like this: any thought which passes through the brain is simply an energetic process, and that energy can be converted to a material form in the real world.

That conversion depends on you sending your thoughts out to the world with enough energy behind them. Excitement, joy, passion, anger – any powerful emotion can energize the process enough for manifestation to “switch on”.

But, you might say, this isn’t really an explanation either! Sure. But that’s the essential mystery about getting what you want: we don’t  have to know how it works. The Law Of Attraction and the process of manifestation are gifted to us as part of our existence.

Just think about that for a moment.

Simply because you are a human being, living on this planet, you have the power to achieve anything you want.

You can get financial wealth in abundance beyond imagining, joyous relationships that will make your heart sing, any lifestyle you might be dreaming of, and the presence and power to change the world for the better. And the first and most important limit on what you can achieve is what you believe to be true about yourself.

Indeed, you can get anything. Provided, of course, that you want it badly enough, and you totally believe that it will manifest for you.

You Must Believe In Yourself For Laws Of Attraction To Work!

When The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s book about manifestation, was published, it sold millions of copies. And it attracted a load of criticism, mostly along the lines of “It doesn’t work!” Here’s one woman’s reaction to the ideas in The Secret – written, of course, for sensationalism, to fill a space on her blog,  but amusing in a way nonetheless…

Given my skepticism, how could I make myself believe in The Secret enough to give it a fair test?  Clearly, The Secret is drivel, but why should that stop me from sincerely throwing myself into seeing if it worked? I am already deeply susceptible to superstition and seeing signs—if I find a penny (faceup only), I pick it up knowing something good will happen to me. As self-absorbed as I already am, I loved the permission the book gave to sink deeper into a Jacuzzi of megalomania. As The Secret points out: “You are the master of the Universe. You are the heir to the kingdom. You are the perfection of Life.” Just as I’d always suspected!

So, I vowed to follow Byrne’s simple rules for abundance and see what happened.  The book encourages one to start big: “It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars.” But I thought starting with the million-dollar manifestation was like saying, “I love you” on a first date; I didn’t want to scare the universe into not taking my calls. I came up with three things I thought the universe would find reasonable: a kitchen floor, unclogged sinuses, and a new desk.

Clearly, the author of this piece does not believe in eternal Laws Of Attraction, or manifestation.

But why does she attack something she doesn’t believe in? Could it be that her belief system tells her she knows better than the rest of us about this subject? Perhaps she believes this is all about getting “something for nothing” – and you’re  a fool if you believe that’s possible, aren’t you? Because we all know you can’t get something for nothing! (Don’t we?)* 

Well, yes. That’s about the long and short of it. You see, what you get in life is controlled almost entirely by what you believe is possible FOR YOU.

I mentioned in another post how my first target for financial success was to earn $500,000 in six months. Yet as soon as I started working towards that, I realized I just didn’t believe it was possible FOR ME. (Of course there are some men and women who make that in a day. But did I believe it was possible for me? No. Time to reassess!)

When I readjusted my objective to $375,000 in six months, the target immediately became something I could fully accept and believe in. I knew it was possible FOR ME to achieve it.

Video: An interesting way of overcoming challenges about your belief systems around manifesting money!

So….what beliefs do you hold about yourself which might stop you getting what you want?

These beliefs come from your family, your culture, your care-givers, your teachers, and many other places too. You may not even know you’re subconsciously holding them. Here are some common examples of limiting beliefs.

• “The Rich get richer and The Poor get poorer.” (Oh yeah? Which group are you in?)
• “That’s not for the likes of us.” (If you believe this, then you’ll never get it – no matter what “That” happens to be for you. )
• “Rich people are all bastards.”
• “Money is the root of all evil.”
• “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
• “The virtuous poor. They built the world.”
• “It’s sinful to accumulate money rather than spread it around.”
• “I am powerless.” (Which usually appears in speech and thought as “I can’t do it.” “There’s no point trying.” “I give up.”)
• “I am unattractive.”
• “No-one will ever want me.”
• “I have to settle for second best.”
• “He / she is too good for me.”
• “I will never be rich / happy / loved.”
• “I just can’t love right.”
• “I’m bad.”
• “I’m not good enough.”
• “Whatever I do goes wrong.”
• “I never get what I want.”
• “No one listens to me.”
• “Capitalism is evil.”
• *Why not ask a child at Christmas if it’s possible to get something for nothing? What does their belief system tell them?

And so on. Not a single one of these statements, or any other you might make, is an objective truth. They are all opinions based on experience, teaching and learning.

Yet they – and millions of other beliefs like them – will stop you getting what you want. And I mean, they will STOP YOU TOTALLY.

Because, when you hold beliefs like these, you never stand a chance of being successful. (Whoa! That might just be my belief system talking. It might not be true, you know. But it’s true for me because I believe it.)

So….watcha gonna do? Believe me, you have to do something. You can only succeed with a success consciousness.

You might want to work on eliminating faulty beliefs. You might want to surround yourself with people who support you and believe in you. People who have the same objectives as you. A Master Mind Group. (This idea is explained in another post.)

You might wish to get some effective therapy that can change your faulty, limiting, and unhealthy beliefs and put some positive ones in their place. I recommend shadow work. There’s nothing like it for quickly finding and replacing the beliefs which are holding you back.

There are plenty more beliefs which hold people back from being successful. Read more about them here.

Limiting Belief #1: “I have no need of success, because I’m doing OK just the way I am. So I’m not going to even try to achieve great wealth / superb relationships / significant personal goals / anything.”

There are many variations on this theme, including a poverty-consciousness one that goes something like this: “I don’t need a lot of money to live perfectly happily, so why should I even try and be successful?”

Of course, this can seem very convincing. It justifies why you are not successful now, and why you don’t need to be successful in the future, but the truth is rather different.

Beliefs like this are all about the fear of failure.

Failure – why are we so scared of it? Because, as children, we are scorned for failure, by just about everyone. To fail becomes a shameful event. In fact, the majority of people experience failure as so painful that they never even try.

Would you like to know the truth?

It is your destiny to be successful, wealthy, abundant, or whatever you want to be.

And the only person who can break you out of this (or any other limiting belief) is YOU. That’s because your mind will find endless ways to justify the status quo.

What you have to do is find something powerful enough, desirable enough, sweet enough, that the very idea of achieving it gives you the energy to overcome your mind’s fear of failure and destroy all the “what-ifs” that your mind will come up with as it blocks your path to success.

So you want to be rich? Great! There are unlimited resources available to you. And what your mind can conceive and believe, you can achieve.

In any case, you should always keep in mind that you are designed to be successful.

You do NOT, in fact, need a reason to achieve success – because you are meant for success. Being successful (however you define it) is your natural state.

But if your belief system tells you that you need a reason to be successful,  think of it this way: why do you want to be rich?

What is the powerful motivation that means you will do whatever it takes to be wealthy?

What, in short, is your driving force for being wealthy?

To put it another way, what will you do when you are hugely successful, have tens of thousands (or millions) of dollars at your disposal, and are well-known throughout the world?

How will you put this success, money, and fame to the best use of all?

Maybe your answer to this question is the thing you need to strive for to achieve your highest potential.

Examples of positive beliefs that will serve you better that poverty consciousness:

• “I succeed simply because I can.”
• “Success and achievement are my birthright.”
• “Now I am successful, I can achieve my highest goals and fulfilling dreams and I can work for the highest good of all of the Earth and the people and living beings on it.”

Read about several more powerful limiting beliefs in the post immediately below this one.

Sidebar: matter and energy.

From Louis Dietvorst:

Albert Einstein knew: “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And Wes Nisker knew when he said: “The fact of the matter is that matter is no longer a fact.” Or what about Max Planck: “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

So Energy is really what we should be knowing all about. Matter matters less. Energy matters more. Everything is Energy. Even a solid rock. The atoms inside are still vibrating, keeping the rock together. A book you read is Energy….This blog you are reading is Energy…. Our thoughts and feelings are Energy. So everything is Energy. And it is with this Energy that we create our world. Nothing more, nothing less. If you think about it deeply, it’s in fact very simple. Energy creates. And since thoughts are Energy, thoughts create. And if you amplify the frequency of your Energy, the structure of matter will also change….

You don’t yet believe all of this? It doesn’t Matter. Because as a Matter of fact, Matter doesn’t really exist. But Energy does.