You Can’t Cheat the Law of Attraction: How to Change Your Thoughts

November 14, 2007

In some cases, cheating is okay. Cheating on a diet from time to time, say one day a week, has been shown to actually go a long way in promoting fat loss. This is, of course, assuming that your cheat days don’t turn into cheat weeks, at which point you’re only hurting your body more. So often people ruin their diets by cheating too often and saying things like, ?this one doesn’t count.? The truth is that it always counts and not just in diets. If you’re wondering why the law of attraction just hasn’t been working for you, it may be because you’re trying to cheat. How do you cheat the law of attraction? By assuming that certain thoughts don’t count. If someone cuts you off in traffic and you respond angrily, that thought counts. If you look in the mirror and think, I hate my body!, that thought counts, too. If you spend hours each day wallowing in negativity only to surface for a few minutes of wishful thinking, is it any wonder you’re not getting the result you want? No one said it was going to be easy . . . actually, I take that back, a lot of people say it’s easy, but they’re lying. Attraction and creation are easy, it’s changing the way you think that’s the difficult part. So if you think you can cheat the system with a few well-timed affirmations, think again.

If you want to start making your intentions work for you, you’ve got to start making them a part of your life all the time. Period, end of story. There is no cheating when it comes to intention manifestation. Every thought, even the idle ones, count and the more of them you have the harder they are going to be to change.

Changing Your Belief Momentum

Beliefs are nothing but habitual thoughts; they hold no more weight than any other thought you’ve ever had. They are stronger only because you have repeated them to yourself to the point at which they have now become habitual. They are on autopilot and are difficult to undo. All habits are like this, whether it’s smoking or exercising, they all have a kind of inertia about them.

Think back to your high school physics class, back then you learned about inertia, which is the tendency for an object at rest to stay at rest or an object in motion to remain in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. This is the way habits, including beliefs, work. Once you put forth the initial effort to move them forward, they will continue on with little or no effort on your part. This also means that any negative or limiting beliefs you already have, must be stopped by force. Think of your beliefs like a snowball rolling down a hill. The more it rolls the bigger it gets and the faster it will go. At a certain point, the ball is so big and moving so fast it takes a tremendous amount of force to stop it and move it back up the hill. If this snowball effect is applied to positive thoughts they will soon turn into powerful beliefs. If, on the other hand, the effect is applied to negative thought, they will become dangerous and limiting fears.

Curbing the momentum of this habitual snowball isn’t easy and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something you don’t want. It’s hard, but not at all impossible or even terribly time consuming. A little dedicated work every single day can bring about drastic changes. If you remember that beliefs are only thoughts that have been repeated, the solution is clear; continuously repeat a new thought until it becomes a belief. Harder than it sounds, though always effective, this method requires serious dedication to continue telling yourself something that may not seem true.

Changing EVERY Thought

Remember that you are always creating. Your creative thoughts aren’t limited to your happy moments. Every second of every day, you are creating what is coming next. If you’ve ever wondered why bad days just keep getting worse, this is why, because emotionally charged thoughts snowball very quickly. You can think of your thoughts like bricks that get stacked on top of each other and reach closer and closer to whatever goal is being achieved. Thoughts that are full of high emotions will be larger bricks, stacking up faster than those thoughts that are not charged with emotion, what we would call idle thoughts. Though they don’t ?stack up? very quickly, idle thoughts are still creative.

What all this means for you is that to truly start to create your life with any cognitive choice, you must manually choose every thought that comes into your awareness. You may dislike this idea, saying that it is inconvenient to monitor your thoughts all the time and while this may be true, it is also beneficial. What’s a little inconvenience if it means truly changing the way you live your life? You’ll spend a good bit of time changing your negative thoughts into more positive ones, but only at first. Once you become used to doing this on a regular basis, it will no longer be a conscious action. Soon, you won’t have to think about creating positive thought because they will become your default habit.

To get to this point, you must change every single negative thought. Why do you have to change all of them? Why can’t you just change a few? Because to make an exception will ruin the habit you’re trying to make. Training your mind is no different than training a pet or small child, which are practically the same anyway. You must be consistent in your training. To let some actions slide by unnoticed while other get the boot, just isn’t a consistent training routine. When undertaking a project as big as changing the way your brain works, you have got to be stern and consistent. Teach it right from wrong every single time and cut it no slack. As Alton Brown would say, ?Your patience will be rewarded.?

How to Change Negative Thoughts into Positive Thoughts.

1.Immediate Response ? bad thoughts are like alcohol, the longer they sit, the stronger they get. If you let them sit for too long in your mind without taking some sort of action against them they’ll only be harder to wipe out of your head when you finally get fed up with them. To get rid of them easily, get rid of them immediately. Just remember that what may seem innocuous and harmless at first, can soon turn into a whirlwind of bad feelings. When they pop into your head, pop them back out without giving them the slightest chance to set down roots.

2.The Presidential Approach ? I love Aaron Sorkin and therefore, I love the West Wing and Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett. In the show, Bartlett’s most commonly uttered phrase is ?What’s next?? The President is always moving on to something new when he’s sufficiently satisfied with something old. When the matter is settled, the President simply says, ?What’s next?? and when Bartlett asks ?What’s next?? by God, everyone moves on to what’s next. You can use this method to dispel negative thoughts. When they crop up and you want to turn them into something more positive, send them away with a very curt, ?What’s next?? And make sure that you say or think those words with the force and might of the President of the United States. When you dismiss those thoughts, they are dismissed with no more arguments. End of story. What’s next?

3.Play Ahead of the Curve ? you can spend your life playing catch-up if you let it be that way. You can spend most of your time running after things that have already occurred and complaining about what can never be changed. Instead of dwelling on what isn’t working in your life or all of the unfair things that have happened to you, start trying to play ahead of the curve. Start looking only at what can be changed and what has hope for the future. We all have regrets, move beyond them and find what you can do now, always looking for what is actionable. If it isn’t actionable, it cannot yield forward momentum and, therefore, isn’t worth your time. Never look backward for too long, there isn’t anything that can be done to help you back then. Help yourself now by finding actions to take instead of excuses to make.

At the end of the day, every thought you have is working toward creating your future and there are no ?cheat thoughts? that you can slip through the cracks. When you fantasize about doing something cruel to that jerk in traffic, you’re actively creating. When you constantly worry about not having enough money, you are actively pursuing a future for yourself. Be wary of what you are bringing into your consciousness. Start thinking of your negative, unhappy thoughts like a virus; they must be killed quickly, or they’ll infect every healthy cell in your body. Stop them quickly and turn them into something that makes you happier. You are always creating. The question is, are you creating what you really want, or what you fear the most?

Posted in Being Proactive, Creativity, Emotions, Fear, Happiness, Law of Attraction, Metaphysics, Self Improvement, The Mind