Nobody I know desired to attract COVID-19 into her/his life, and yet here it is. The famed Law of Attraction tells us that we all have the ability to pull into our lives whatever we focus on. Mahatma Gandhi noted, “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.” So why aren’t we inviting a beautiful state of love, joy, playfulness, gratitude, healing, positivity and an end to this pandemic, something we are all certainly centered on? We are longing for these, aren’t we?
Or are we instead too focused on a suffering state of negativity, gloom and doom, and irritability brought on by COVID-19. Conceivably we’re ensnared in the clouds of isolation, economic pressures, anger, resentment, fear, stress and confusion. Since the Law of Attraction suggests that our thoughts materialize into reality it is feasible according to this Law, that we are creating our own current disillusion. Wouldn’t that be incongruous and contradictory? We want to be free of this life-upending pandemic and yet our own thoughts are clinging to the very opposite of what we so strongly desire. Damn that Law of Attraction, right?!
A favorite North Star of mine comes from Clemson Barry, Ph.D.’s 2015 book, Sweet Success: Knowledge and Quick-Skills in Thirty Minutes, “I am too positive to be doubtful, too optimistic to be fearful and too determined to be defeated.”
There’s an interesting 2009 study, “MRI assessment of cortical thickness and functional activity changes in adolescent girls following three months of practice on a visual-spatial task” done by Richard Haier, Sherif Karama, Leonard Leyba and Rex Jung that may have some bearing on helping you imagine and hold in your mind’s eye the positive and declutter the negative—insuring you attract the best for yourself during, and after, this crisis.
These researchers followed teenage girls over three months who played the game of Tetris for about 1.5 hours each week. Their brains changed over this time, growing thicker and consuming less energy as they got better at playing Tetris. It was as if their brains went on autopilot, activating circuits more easily and more efficiently the more they played this game.
Imagine when it’s not playing Tetris, but thoughts, the same negative thoughts over and over throughout the day. According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts. There was another interesting study by Leahy in 2005 at Cornell University in which scientists found that, firstly 85% of what we worry about never happens. Secondly with the 15% of the worries that did happen, 79% of the subjects discovered that either they could handle the difficulty better than expected, or that the difficulty taught them a lesson worth learning. The conclusion is that 97% of our worries are baseless and result from an unfounded pessimistic perception.
Talk about brains in a negative autopilot mode! Imagine what that’s attracting and doing for you.
Can you realign this negative bias, refocus, and use your brain’s power for change to attract healthier, more positive patterns on autopilot? Yes. Here’s 5 ways of getting there:
- First we are going to Harvard University’s Business School and rely on a study, “A ‘Present’ For the Future: The Unexpected Value of Rediscovery,” done in 2014 by Ting Zhang, Tami Kim, Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino, and Michael Norton. In four studies they reported on, they found that we under-predict the amount of happiness that comes from seeing, in the present, the small, mundane experiences in our lives. So, the first tool to influence your brainpower to go on autopilot and fully attract the positive in your life is to stay present-focused on, tune into and scan for, at least three small daily things going right in your life.
- The next tool is to assure that we mind our inner and outer language to be sure they are aligned with who we want to be and what we want in our life. Remember that we choose our attitudes, our mindset, and nobody else is responsible for how we feel. This tool involves attending nonjudgmentally to what’s going on with you physically and mentally. Are the words you speak positive or negative? Are you talking yourself into defeat? Remember you can’t feed negative your self-talk, and have it result in victory. Does your self-talk power up or power down your feelings? Are all of your ideas expressed in the positive and not the negative?
- Who are you thanking every day? Watch for opportunities to be grateful to another and that’ll boost your brain’s plasticity in the right direction. Whether it’s someone who held the door open for you, did the morning coffee run, texted or called to see how your day went, be sure you don’t go to sleep without saying “thank you” to someone.
- The Tetris players saw everything in their daily lives in terms of those little Tetris blocks moving around on the screen in their minds. It’s time to be sure that your expectations are powerfully clear on your mind-screen since they set the limits on what you’ll achieve. Forget the idea of “just getting through this,” but rather keep your expectations on excelling, coming in first place and seeing much larger outcomes and bigger breaks than you’ve been used to. In other words, the fourth tool is to dream big!See the end of COVID-19 using cheerfulness, optimism, vibrating positivity, illuminating darkness and discovering delight.
- The last tool to attract all you want is to use the Magic Wand Question. If you had a magic wand, what life would you create for yourself? What would you do in the next 3, 6, and12 months, the next 5 years, 10 years and 25 years? If you can’t imagine it, you probably won’t achieve it. Keep that magic wand in front of you and watch the amazing results. The Law of Attraction teaches us that whatever we imagine and hold in our mind’s eye is achievable when we take action to get us where we genuinely want to be.
Be sure your Magic wand, your authentic expectations, your words, your gratitude, your focus are on where you are headed, where you want to go, and not on where you don’t want to go.