Part 3:
Internalizing and Fueling Your Transformation
It’s now time to start implementing your mind maps.
First, you need to make sure what’s within you—and what fuels you—is aligned with the magnetic character you want to become. There are a number of ways by which you can create such an alignment.
Self-Parenting
When you’re a true adult human being, you have the full power of motivating yourself. It’s a little like secretly being your own parent. (Yep, regardless of age, our inner child will never go away, and will always need a parent!) Here’s how:
• Repeat the important aspects of your mind map to yourself in your head, like a mantra—or like a mother reminding her child what’s good.
• Don’t imagine you can control you, all by your lonely self!
Purposely place yourself in an environment that will naturally push you to be who you want to be—much like a father of old would choose a suitable place where he could raise children among people who have the same values.
• Every kid needs an “idol” or hero, a person he or she admires, who’ll be a “benchmark” or the embodiment of what he or she wants to be like. This is still true when we’re adults; we need such heroes or archetypes to mirror the very type of person we want to be. So pick someone worthy to be your hero. Have an image of that person (or persons, if it’s more than one) tucked away where your mind maps are. Some of these heroes should also have a certain physical attractiveness or poise you’d like to have or emulate. This way, you can have a tangible image of the sort of person you want to be, and the physical body you want to have.
• Make sure your circle of friends is made of good people who love and support of you, and don’t judge you. When you are around this group they make you feel good about where you are now, and where you are going. And most important: you need friends with a great sense of humor. Being in this supportive circle will help you develop a lighthearted, humorous side, and create a really funny person everyone else wants to be around with.
Internalizing the new you
Once your inner parent has succeeded in giving you the right environment and role models, it’s time to internalize the “new you”.
You have to imagine you already are the “new you”, TODAY. This is much better than simply thinking, “Yes, SOMEDAY soon, I will be that new me…” Instead of placing such a goal in the future, (“not yet, but soon”), you force yourself to think that you ARE that person NOW, thus forcing the goal psychologically closer to your reality.
And when you have the desire behind the belief, almost anything is possible.
Internalize the thought that you have the power to make yourself attractive in an instant. This is the first step. It takes plenty of practice, but you must believe that you already are as attractive as described in your mind maps, so you’ll be forced to act accordingly.
• So how would you physically move, if your body already was in the shape and appearance of the “new you”? How does it feel? (If you have to, close your eyes and imagine the change, then move around.) What would your health be like—can you imagine how strong your heart, limbs and muscles would be? Can you imagine how flexible you’d be, and how well you’d run and dance, or lift heavy objects?
• Stare hard in the mirror, and try to imagine how you’d actually really, really look like as the new you. Would you stand differently, and have a different sort of poise?
• Aside from achieving physical attractiveness, imagine that the rest of the goals in your mind map (e.g. financial stability, successful career, etc.) have also been achieved, today. How do you feel inside? Happy, rested or relaxed, content, and at peace? Giggly and exuberant?
• How would such achievements change the way you physically stand, sit, walk, greet and talk with other people? How would you smile and laugh?
• With such drastic changes, imagine deeply how you’d behave in every situation you can think of. How would you carry yourself, and talk? How would you deal with trouble and stress? How do you plan out your life from then on?
• Would your tastes change? What would your clothing, accessories and hairstyle be? What would your home look like? What sort of food would you eat, what sort of regular exercise and medical check-ups would you be having?
• How would you treat the people in your life? How would you treat your family and friends? (Would your friends be the same bunch, and no one else? Or would you have more friends?)
• What sort of new people would suddenly be attracted to the new you? How would you feel, finding them popping up into your life just like that? How would you talk to them, and start relationships?
Practice the new you
But all that inner work—the self-parenting and internalization—won’t bear fruit, if you don’t start practicing what you can immediately.
As you imagine deeply how you’d look and feel as the new you, try your best to actually enact some aspects of what you imagine. This way, you can really see the transformation unfold each day. (Extra motivation for you!) Here are a few examples:
• Actually start moving (i.e. walking, standing) like you already are the new you. For instance, if you’re overweight and envision a slimmer self, try your best to subtly change the way you stand and walk into that of a lighter person.
• You may not be able to wear all of the clothes you envision you’d end up wearing later on today. But you just might be able to wear a few pieces—like shoes, jacket or jewelry—that would go very well with the new you. As an extra dare, go buy or prepare one new piece of clothing in the size and style that would suit the new you, and put it in your closet. As you slowly implement all the changes necessary for your transformation, try it out in your room with each passing day. (And give yourself a treat on the day you do fit into it.)
• So what diet and exercise would the new you be on? Be on it starting today...because you already are that person! And keep to it!
• How would the new you treat your family and friends? Do it now.
• How would you be like at work? What practices that the new you is supposed to do, that you can do now? Do it now!
Practice meeting your true love
Finding your soul mate is like any job: you need to psych yourself up to be ready for that kind of situation. You need to constantly envision how you’ll behave as your magnetic self when you meet someone you’re very attracted to.
To start, I have one special exercise for you: What would you do, and how would you feel, if the true love of your life appeared right now, for five whole minutes? Write down every action you take during those five minutes. (You have only one minute to write all that down.)
Now, let’s reflect on what you wrote down and “experienced”. Ask yourself the following questions:
• What did your true love look like? What was your true love wearing? Did they appear more attractive than you? Would people say, “How did that guy/girl end up with you?” (Or would they say “Man, they are an attractive couple”?)
• What was the first thing your true love said to you, which made you know he / she was the one? What positive, attractive character and personality traits did he / she have?
• Did you say anything to this person, or were you too thrown off by the sudden appearance? Did you feel clumsy? How did you approach one another?
• Were you happy with your own appearance? Why?
While the whole exercise was merely overactive daydreaming, your answers to the questions above tell a lot about how you see yourself today—and how close (or far!) you are from achieving your “people-magnet” state.
Remember this, like attracts like. If you don’t start seeing yourself as sexy (or at least consider your hidden sexiness easily uncovered), no one else will. You need to send out the right signals to the world around you first, before the right person zeroes in on you.
You can practice “meeting” your soul mate in your mind every now and then to check how positively you see yourself. Try to imagine how a real conversation might occur with this person, and how you’d behave as the new magnetic you.
On the average, people who do these internalizing exercises while putting into practice many of the aspects their new selves, start seeing noticeable changes their appearance within 3-4 months. (There are even those whose transformation occurs in less than a month!) This further boosts their self- confidence, and their general mental and emotional health. Let this happen to you!
Fuel your transformation with spiritual health
Once you’ve taken these first few steps to changing yourself from within, you’ll have to back it up with spirituality.
What is spirituality? It is how you find deeper meaning behind every person, event or act that occurs in your life. If you are a spiritual person, you don’t see life as a random set of events haphazardly thrown together. Rather, you see all things exist because of a unifying reason.
And because the universe is ordered, your positive transformation is your right and duty to other people. Nobody should tell you you’re being unreasonable or selfish by wanting to be a more attractive person. You are a priceless being, and you are supposed to be attractive. The world needs more people with beautiful character.
You also believe that you are meant to find true love. You deserve to be with a person as good and admirable as he or she can possibly be—you are not supposed to settle with “just anyone” because it isn’t right.
You will also persevere in your work to transform yourself into a magnetic character, no matter what obstacle you face, because you believe you must.
If you believe in a higher power or in a loving God, you also have an advantage because you can draw inner strength to persevere.
It is difficult to believe in your own uniqueness and value if you do not have spirituality. If you aren’t spiritual, sooner or later in your life, you will begin to question what all that hard work is for. At the first sign of trouble, you might even begin to despair and lose hope. For, if everything in the universe is just a bunch of random events with no purpose, why would you be special enough to matter to anyone else? Reflection and journal writing
It is because of spirituality that part of changing yourself into a powerful, attractive person involves reflection and journal-writing. It is a way for you to meditate and strengthen your spirituality.
A journal is a good outlet for you to write down your everyday thoughts and memories. When you reflect on your life, you will need the help of a journal to see what you were thinking of months or years ago, and see how far you’ve come. (People who kept personal diaries or journals from years past can judge themselves well, and even retrieve forgotten memories.) This is why I encourage you to keep a private journal or diary, and fill it up with your thoughts.
Your journal writing, just like your spirituality, naturally reflects who you are as a person. So it can be as spare, colorful or lengthy as you want it to be.
In case you’re trying journal writing for the first time, and don’t quite know what to put on the first page, below are a number of things you can reflect on. You can then start writing your own first thoughts, and continue from there for several more entries:
• “I already have, within me, the subtle power to attract the people I want to myself. The warmth of my sincerity, unique personality, depth of character, and the poise I adopt, can already generate this power today.”
• “For the next three months, I will put an effort to imagine myself as the ‘new me’. That belief in my attractive power will naturally spur me to take care of my health and appearance, and to act like a good and attractive person. At the end of three months, I—and everyone else—will begin to see changes in me.”
• There is power in putting pen to paper. What I write can become truth. If I say I will become attractive, the words fly off the paper and back into my mind and heart, transforming me. It will bring me one step closer to finding my one true love.
There are other things you can write about; it doesn’t have to be completely profound. Go ahead, be like a teenager and don’t be shy about writing whatever it is that preoccupies your mind:
• Who is the object of your desire? Have you met this person, or is this someone that you have created in your mind?
• Could your soul mate be a blend of actual people you’ve met in your life, whom you wish could be combined into one? Or perhaps, even be an improvement over all of them? If such a person existed, how would this person see you?
• What is it about who you are, how you look, and what you can offer, which should make your soul mate fall in love with you? Are you at peace with yourself, and everything you’ve ever done in your life? Do you believe that you are good enough for the person that you are trying to attract? Or will this fantasy stay as such—just a fantasy?
• Are you happy in your job? Or do you prefer to be doing something else? If so, write whatever else you wish you could be doing. How probable is it for you to actually fulfill these wishes?
• Do you like your current home? Why?
• Are your friends a positive influence on you? Do your spirits naturally lift up when you talk to them? Why (or why not)? What sort of friends would you wish to have? How would you find them, test them, and keep them?
• Is your body weight where you want it to be? What can you do to bring it closer to where it ought to be? More importantly, when do you plan to begin working on it?
• What do you spend most of your time doing? Why?
• What do you think about all of time? Why?
Fuel your transformation with money
You might be thinking, wait a minute—why is there talk of money here?
And why not? Transforming yourself into the new, magnetic you doesn’t necessarily mean spending thousands of dollars—but yes, it does mean managing your finances in a smarter way.
Money isn’t the root cause of evil; it’s merely the means to an end: self-realization. (It’s when you actually love money that real trouble begins.) In reality, you really do need some money to do what you need to do and fulfill your maps. Without money, transforming into an attractive person does get a whole lot harder.
So, how much money or wealth should you have? Ideally you should have enough to:
• Take good care of yourself today, without accumulating debt
• Grow your savings for further plans (e.g. marriage, own business or non-profit organization, added education, or retirement)
These are the two main viewpoints by which your financial status should be analyzed. From there, you can create an overall financial plan for yourself, one that can maximize your limited money flow and time to achieve your goals in life. Such a financial plan can be broken down as follows:
1. How you earn money. You need to be in a job or line of work that you’re happy to be working in, and which will provide you the needed income to live and live out at least most of your dreams.
2. How you manage your time and the other resources. It’s not just cold cash or credit that eventually defines your wealth. You also need to consider your health, how much time you have, your abilities, work experience and knowledge, your personal relationships, your network of business people or contacts, and even your store of ideas, in order to assess how much power you have to improve life. How does money help you manage your time and these resources, and vice versa?
3. How you track and reduce your daily spending. No matter who you are and what stage you are in life, even if you’ve got money to burn, you should always control your spending. It’s all the more important to use as little of your money as you can if you’ve got a limited amount. You need to use your money wisely and save what you can for use in achieving your goals.
4. How you manage big but needed purchases. Large purchases like a new car, a home of your own (real estate), or a big expensive college education, fall under this category. These purchases fall into only two categories, which you need to remember: purchases that accumulate value, and those that merely depreciate, no matter what you do.
5. How to get out of debt, or stay out of debt. This is related to No. 4, but deserves a little section on its own.
Having debts, and getting rid of them for good, is one of the most difficult things to achieve in life. But you need rid yourself of bad debt, and the habits that make you accumulate them, for these will give you no end of trouble in life. You don’t need that kind of negativity!
6. How you invest what you’ve earned and saved. It’s not enough to simply stash away the money you haven’t used. How do you grow your money? Where should you invest it?
7. How you protect yourself. Under this category are your insurance purchases. This also includes what your medical care is, how you use your employee benefits (if you’re employed), how you build your pension, how you pay taxes and make use of any of your country’s tax incentives or breaks.
If you have control over your finances, you can allot a budget for your transformation (i.e. for health expenses, exercises, hobbies, travels, education, etc.). The money you set aside can easily fuel you towards success.