I have been studying the power of the mind for the last thirteen years heavily but have been using it unconsciously for over twenty years looking back, as we all do. I by no means am a life coach or some self-proclaimed guru. My purpose is to document how the power of thought and faith can shape your world. I am avoiding the term manifestation as I think it is overused, and I associate it with writers and so-called teachers who have done nothing in their personal lives with this law other than to “teach” for profit. What I mean by this statement is I have witnessed within the last few years a rise in self-proclaimed gurus and a variety of YouTube channels and “coaching” websites. Since I am an avid reader and seeker of spiritual truth, I decided to delve into such media to review the content posted. I wanted to see if I could learn something I have not encountered before or, at the very least, a different viewpoint on specific techniques. I found a regurgitation and snippets of various authors’ lectures in a thumbnail followed by a video, again repeating the quote and how it was life-changing without really explaining what they did to change their lives. I decided to contact some of these personalities by email. I posed questions on how they applied the laws they tout and how they changed their lives for the better. Unequivocally most were in regular jobs until they became coaches. For me, it is a red flag. I consider someone a coach who has succeeded at a skill or has extensive training and or both. I digress, though, because the purpose of this article is to highlight my attitude and how I feel about this subject personally. My goal is to share my experience on how I found a power within that has had my back when I felt truly alone and in despair.
I will share some background on my life and how I use this power within us that is readily dismissed as a coincidence when positive results do occur because of our thoughts. I am born of first-generation parents from Europe who had the typical pragmatic approach to life with the typical cliché thinking that if you don’t study to be a doctor or lawyer, you will end up hustling like “we did,” so the lectures went. Regardless they were the best parents with the best intentions and hopes, and I am grateful to have had that. Nevertheless, this was the thought process within my household and the friends I grew up with, which I am sure many of you can relate to, in one variation or another. Regardless I had aspirations to work in entertainment as a director, actor, and film producer. I was addicted to movies; my best memories came from going to the movies on a Friday night. With that said, surprisingly, there was rarely any resistance to this pursuit with the caveat I still pursued an education. I got a bachelor’s degree in communications/Journalism with a double minor in theater and philosophy. During college, I sought some acting work, obtained an agent, booked a few commercials, got some extra work in various films, which secured my screen actors guild card. I lived in the Midwest at the time, and I was not getting the result I wanted through the agent I had. It was time to think of how I would make money and still pursue this goal. I knew a nine-to-five job wouldn’t work and that I had to be self-employed. I did what most normal aspiring artists would do in my situation and decided to go to law school to open my own office and work for myself, thereby controlling my hours and delegating tasks to be free.
I entered law school with the mindset that I would be self-employed with my dream still intact. The desire never left me, even though multiple rejections mounted. As far as my studies went, I did not find law school very difficult, as it was memorization and applying rules of law with common sense. The previous statement might seem overly simplistic, but I wanted to summarize the experience for the sake of brevity. I did not graduate in the ten percent or even top twenty-five percent as far as ranking went, regardless the goal was to be self-employed. I was pleased to be a B student ranking in the upper half of my class. I went through this process with childlike faith that this plan was full proof.
Once I graduated and passed the bar exam, it was time to execute. I decided to forego working for someone on a fixed schedule but rather open up shop next to an experienced attorney. At the same time, I focused on a practice area and marketing myself. I made a deal with a solo attorney to cover cases for him free of charge if he would walk me through my issues, teaching me all aspects of the practice, plus sharing my fee with him when a task became time-consuming. This relationship worked out well, and I was facing with building myself and my brand. Marketing myself was one of my first obstacles with having my faith tested, as everyone I went to for advice thought I would fail. For example, there were attorneys I knew who were in business for over five years and were making a certain amount of money at which I thought was feasible. The doubters always cited their years of experience, but somehow, I didn’t accept that because I knew if I learned one area very well and serviced the clients with personal service, I would succeed. My detractors would answer me that the competition built up a referral network with time, which was correct, and I could not compete with experience. What I did know to be true was that once I established an area of practice and a website, it was all about traffic and marketing. To make a long story short, I purchased a program called rapid weaver for mac at the time which was a drag and drop web builder. WordPress also existed at this time but was not as developed as today and was a bit more complex, so this was the perfect solution.
I was like a kid in a candy store. I was constantly building different sites for myself for every county in my state and every practice area. Within three months, I was booking double and sometimes more than triple than my competitors. My friends were shocked, and the attorney I shared office space with wanted me to build him a site which I agreed to do. There is so much more detail to this story that I could share, but the point here is that I acted as if it were impossible to fail, as Florence Scovel Shinn famously coined in her first book “The Game of Life and How To Play It,” which I read a few years later. I had this innocence and was naïve in many ways, and things seemed to somehow get out of my way for everything I believed I could do. As the years passed I started doubting and second guessing myself more. Still, thankfully my appetite for philosophy and metaphysics remained, I maintained a hunger for spiritual growth and answers.
The above summary of my background was before I read my first book that discussed the power of the mind, which was “The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace B. Wattles. I read that book after doubts crept in as I started getting a bit older and questioned if I was just lucky or did my focused thoughts set the wheels in motion to meet me at my desired destination? My answer is a resounding yes with absolute conviction. Since that time, I have had countless failures and successes in business, and my genuine desire as a teen still has not left my heart even though I have not achieved that to my satisfaction. I did make inroads, but I allowed life and people in my head by letting my guard down and forgetting about that innocent kid who thought he could do anything. I have since read every new thought author. I have been able to extrapolate the answer to shaping your life through intensely focused thoughts on specific objectives, as Napolean Hill described as a definite chief aim. There are countless heartbreaks and successes I have experienced, and I always managed to find help within when it was needed even though at the time, I thought it wasn’t what I wanted. I do not consider myself a good writer by any means and tend to write the way I feel and think, but I look forward to sharing and documenting various experiences and methods I have used for myself in the future. As Claude M. Bristol stated, there truly is magic in believing in his book of the same name, “The Magic of Believing.” Even though I am approaching middle age now and have not reached the finish line that I have strived for in more than one aspect of life, I genuinely feel a force that you can call by any name you wish and is always there for you. While I believe in success coaches for business and other disciplines, I have difficulty believing in anyone calling themselves a manifesting coach regarding a gift that all human beings possess!