See if this story sounds familiar. You want to enhance a part of your life. Maybe you want more money, or you want success with women, or you want to “overcome shyness” and have social success. Whatever it is, there is something you are currently doing that is causing you unhappiness, or something you would like to do that would bring you more enjoyment, and you want to make a change.
So you search for a solution and find some system. Chances are, you pay good money for this, because it’s important to you – you really want to change this part of your life. You buy this self-improvement system, you read it, or study the DVDs, and you have some success. Maybe you start making sales, or you make a connection with a beautiful woman. You find that the self-improvement system actually works and you notice some initial success.
Then what happens? You start worrying that you’ll “backslide.” That voice, or that feeling, comes up and warns you that you are going to end up back in the same place of failure and frustration you were in before.
And even though you do not want to fail, you find yourself focusing on that failure and noticing the ways in which you are “backsliding.” You have trouble replicating that feeling you had when you found your first success. The next time you try and use the new system, it does not work as well, or maybe you “freeze up,” and it does not work at all.
And the more you focus on the “setbacks,” the harder it gets. Soon you are looking at that first instance of success as your “high point,” your ideal, instead of the first step on your road to success. And you find yourself falling more and more into your old habits and ways of thinking. That “high point,” which you actually achieved, becomes unattainable.
Eventually, you write off that first taste of success as “beginners luck,” or a “fluke.” You accept that you have once again backslid into the old way of being that has not been serving you. You become more and more convinced that this is how you were meant to be – this is “who you are.” Eventually, you become convinced that the self-improvement system does not really work, or will not work for you, and you give up. Maybe you search desperately for another system, or you resign yourself to being the way you are and make excuses for your lack of success, like “only smart and well-connected people make money;” or “only guys who are rich, or tall, or have big muscles, get the attractive women.”
And you do one more thing – you see this as proof that “backsliding” is real, and that whatever it is you are trying to achieve simply cannot be learned, that it is impossible to have real, lasting change in the areas of your life that matter to you. You buy into the idea that our personalities and habits are “hard wired” into us and that there is nothing we can do about it.
The Science behind Backsliding and the Law of AttractionI am going to share with you some stone-cold facts. First, you are fully responsible for the results you are getting. Nobody else is responsible. Not the “guru,” not your parents or peers, not the media, not “society” or “human nature.” If you want to make your life better, the only person who can do that is you, and the only person who can stop you from making that change is you.
Second, every person has the ability to change their habits, thoughts, and behaviors. This is not some mystical, unattainable concept, but something that can be learned, practiced and repeated.
Third, there is no such thing as “backsliding.” There is nothing supernatural about people who have a success mentality versus those who do not. The fact is, we will go toward our destination, which is what we have chosen. Whether that is success or failure is up to you. You can learn to create success in your life just as you learned to create “backsliding” and failure.
You have probably heard of the “Law of Attraction.” Maybe you read “The Secret,” or a similar book that described how your intentions create your reality. And maybe, if you have suffered enough of those “backsliding” experiences, you have already convinced yourself the law of Attraction is a bunch of New Age BS concocted by hippies who smoked too many blunts. And I can relate, because I used to feel that way, too.
But I want to make clear for you that the “Law of Attraction” is not some mystical “woo-woo” spiritual thing. It is a scientifically-based observation of our mental patterns. And these patterns can be used for our benefit.
If I told you “think of a pink elephant.” You could close your eyes and think of a pink elephant. Now, if I told you “Whatever you do, do not think of a pink elephant,” what’s going to happen? Chances are, the first thing you will do is picture a pink elephant.
Maybe you have tried a version of this with your friends. At an inappropriate time, have you ever reminded your friend not to laugh? Or maybe someone did it to you. And what happens? The person usually ends up stifling (or not stifling) a laugh, causing themselves embarrassment.
Does this mean we are self-destructive? No. I will explain the facts later. But first, another example to prove my point. Have you ever gone car shopping and found a car you like, and then noticed everybody else on the road seemed to be driving the same car? Contrary to what some might say, the “universe” did not magically put those cars on the road. They were always there, you were just ignoring them up to that point.
The “Law of Attraction” is really your mind’s way of filtering out information. Our minds are bombarded with so much information, from outside images and our own thoughts generated within, that if we paid attention to every piece of information, we would go insane. So your unconscious mind has these filters that are programmed to sort out information and bring into consciousness those things we have asked our mind to look for.
It seems like we have no control over these filters, but in fact we have total control over them. The problem is, most of us have no clue how they actually work.The unconscious mind works a lot like a computer in that it is very literal. If you tell it to “go to hell,” it will follow your command. It also cannot distinguish between positive and negative requests. If you think “I do not want to backslide,” your unconscious mind will understand “backslide,” and go to work producing that result for you.
Another thing about these filters, the more you focus on something, and the more energy and emotion you direct toward that object of focus, the stronger the filter becomes. Emotions and energetic intensity “hard-wire” the internal filters. So if you have an intense experience, associated with a certain object, that becomes your filter. This is how phobias, addictions and habits are created. But it is also how star athletes make those impossible plays over and over again.
Because most of us do not understand that we have these filters, much less how they work, these filters end up being programmed by whatever comes in, which means we end up having filters set up by other people – our parents, our friends, advertisers, teachers, bosses, coworkers, our own experiences, and that ends up being how we literally perceive the world, and in the end how we are living in the world. We are literally living someone else’s life, and it feels very random and not what we actually want.
How these filters are set up, and what these filters are set on, literally create our reality. Again, because you are bombarded with millions of pieces of information a day, you have to ignore almost everything. And you do. In fact, right now there are large chunks of reality that you are not seeing, hearing or feeling. There are thoughts going on in your mind that are being ignored.
Take a moment and feel your clothing on your body. Feel every piece of clothing touching your body.
Feels weird, doesn’t it? Most of the time your mind is “filtering out” that sensation, even though it exists all the time. And then I asked your filters to focus on that feeling, and you felt it. This process is going on all the time, creating your reality.
So let’s go back to the “backsliding” story and see how this is nothing but an example of the science of the Law of Attraction.
You begin with a desire to improve yourself and you go to look for some skills to help you. When you first practice these new skills, your mind is open and positive, thinking about the success you want. Likely the information you are using to improve yourself is also creating positive filters in your mind, giving you instructions to have success.
So you learn a new skill and, with your filters opened toward success, you have some success with the new skill.Then a deeper part of your mind objects. There is a more intense filter set to “finding failure,” or “finding unhappiness,” or some other unhelpful setting, and it goes to work disproving your success, challenging the facts that point to your success.
Maybe you begin to feel doubt. Maybe you start thinking about how you do not want to backslide, which is interpreted in your mind as “I want to backslide.” It is not that your mind is trying to sabotage you, just that all the programming is backwards.
So instead of focusing intensely on the success, you focus on the failure which draws more and more of that failure into your thoughts and your life. Your mind comes up with reasons why your initial success was not real, just as you asked it to do; your mind comes up with ways to “make it not work,” because that is what you instructed it to do. You did not mean to, but you did.
Your unconscious only follows directions, it does not run the show. You do. You just need to figure out how to properly run things.This is the science of backsliding – you are not destined to failure, but you have inadvertently programmed your mind to create failure. And this process is working.