Episode 032 – This Is Why Law of Attraction Isn’t Working (And How To Fix It)

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

If you’ve got some limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck, I’m about to share with you a powerful distinction to more effectively manage them and create the changes you’re looking for in your life.  Whether it’s feeling like you don’t have enough money and are looking to attract more abundance in your life, you find yourself in persistent cycles of health challenges, you’ve hit the upper limit of growing your business – whatever it is – there’s a key reason why you haven’t been able to shift certain beliefs, and why you may have been able to change certain beliefs but your experience of reality hasn’t fully caught up.

The Cause & Effect Of A Changed Mind

First, let’s establish a foundation.  Whatever you want to create or change in your life – whether it’s more money, a better job, or a more loving partner – is an effect of ONE thing – a changed mind.  Most of us have been lured into thinking that we can control our external reality and use quick-fix, magic pill strategies to do so, but they too are the effect of our ability to change our thoughts and transform our beliefs.  This is basic behavioral psychology – nothing new age or “woo woo”.

What happens for most of us is that we get locked into a psycho-cybernetic loop, where our experiences occur as the results of our beliefs and serve to reinforce the very belief that created them.  In other words, if we believe money is hard to make, we will experience scarcity around money, which will cause us to not have as much money as we want, perpetuating the belief that money is not easy to come by.

The Belief “Bounce Back”

If you follow along with work, we’ve got various tools for transforming your limiting beliefs in the simplest, practical, and sustainable ways possible.  That said, I acknowledge that some limiting beliefs are more deeply rooted than others, and some beliefs have a tendency to “bounce back” even after we think we’ve transformed them.

It’s not uncommon for someone to change a belief – for example: going from money is hard to make to money comes easily to me – find new evidence for that belief (like finding a $100 bill on the ground or having an unexpected refund check show up in the mail), and hold conviction for that new belief for a few days or a week or two.  But then, life shows up in opposition to the new belief – an unexpected bill arrives or you get denied a raise at your job – and you find yourself right back in the experience and energy of that old, limiting belief that you thought you had shifted.

The result of this “bounce back” is that you begin refocusing on finding evidence for the old, limiting belief.  You start vibrating a frequency that attracts more of the circumstances and situations that you want to avoid.  You begin having negative emotions about the old thoughts associated with the limiting belief, so you engage in the same old habits and experience the same old results.

The Time Lapse Of Belief Change

So why does this happen?   Well, a lapse occurs where you’re still living in the old reality, produced by the old limiting beliefs, and you haven’t yet transitioned into the new reality.  Neville Goddard would say that this “time delay” is a period where you have to stay loyal to the new beliefs (decisions) when this transition is taking place.  Abraham Hicks would say that you have to realize the present moment is old news.  

So whatever you’re experiencing in the aftermath of this belief “bounce back” – whether it’s in your job, business, relationship, financial state, health, etc. – it’s important to realize that the present moment is a materialization of what you were thinking in the past.  In other words, when you change your thinking and transform your beliefs, you’re still going to experience a reality that’s produced by your old thoughts and old beliefs.  It’s a natural mechanism of how belief change works.

How To Avoid The Psycho-Cybernetic Loop

So what can you do in the interim?  It might seem counterintuitive, but the best thing you can do is simply ignore your current circumstances because your circumstances will only serve to provide evidence for your old limiting beliefs and perpetuate the psycho-cybernetic loop.

You just have to be aware that this transition is going to take place and that new evidence is going to pop up that’s going to support your old limiting belief because of this time delay.  I don’t necessarily have a specific timeline, but I’d say that 30 days is an effective window.  If you can hold onto a new belief for a period of 30 days and ignore the evidence of your current situation, you can navigate through to the other side.

This makes sense both on a practical and scientific level if you stop to think about it.  Because when you change your thoughts, you’re building new neural networks and pruning out old neural networks in your brain.  Your brain consists of about 100 billion neurons and a quadrillion synaptic connections and within that neural matrix are the memories and patterns of thought you’ve always had.  

So like any habit you want to change, if you’re constantly expressing a specific thought or behaving in accordance to a certain belief, it takes time to chip away at the old habit and start forming a new one.  But as you change your habits of thought, the neural networks that support your old beliefs will start to die off.  As you focus on your new, empowered decisions and the evidence that supports them, you begin building new neural networks in your brain.  This is neuroplasticity at work.

Trusting The Intelligence Of Your Brain

Another way of looking at this is that your old habits of thought are still materializing themselves in your present moment, while your new decisions (beliefs) only start to exist in the future.  That future doesn’t have to be distant, but it’s the future nonetheless, given the time delay.

I see this as good news because we wouldn’t make it very far if our thoughts materialized instantly.  If every negative thought we had manifested in the moment we had them, our lives would be chaotic and unmanageable.  So it’s a good thing that this time delay is built into our internal operating system.  It’s almost like a confirmation check on a new piece of software that’s asking you: “Are you sure you want to create this change?”

This is our brain’s way of reaffirming that we do in fact want to hold onto this new period of thought for an extended period of time and to put off the vibration that will enable us to materialize its fruition into our reality.  My best advice?  Try it out for yourself.  Know that there’s a time delay between your old limiting beliefs and the new empowered reality you want to experience.  Ignore the evidence in the short term, stay loyal to your new beliefs, and trust that the change is occurring – it just takes a little time.