Episode 141 – The Law of Attraction Step You’re Ignoring

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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.

Have you ever felt like you’re doing everything right—affirmations, mindset work, vision boards—yet your life keeps looping the same problems over and over, like some kind of spiritual Groundhog Day? Maybe you make more money, but then it slips away. Your health improves, only to collapse again. If this sounds familiar, you’re not crazy, and you’re not broken. What you’re experiencing is a hidden law of creation that almost no one talks about. Until you understand it, you’ll keep taking two steps forward and two steps back.

I want to share this law with you, because when I finally understood it, everything about my journey changed. It’s the linchpin between temporary change and permanent transformation.

The Illusion of Failure

Most of us know the basics of creating reality: set a vision, align your beliefs, live into the new story you want for your life. And often, when you do this, things really do begin to shift. You feel inspired. You take new actions. You even see signs of progress. And then, suddenly, something old reappears—a bill you weren’t expecting, a health flare-up, an old fear, or a familiar setback. And instantly, the mind declares: See? Nothing really changed. This doesn’t work for me.

But here’s the truth: those setbacks aren’t signs of failure. They’re simply echoes of your old reality still reverberating through the present.

I know this firsthand. In my early days of recovery, I would string together weeks or even months of sobriety, feeling strong, inspired, full of vision. And then out of nowhere, the urge to drink would resurface with brutal intensity. I’d think, I guess nothing has changed. I’m doomed to relapse forever. What I didn’t yet understand was that those urges were not evidence of failure. They were echoes of my old reality—my old neural pathways, my old survival codes—still firing as they dissolved. It wasn’t relapse; it was residue. And the more I stayed loyal to my decision, the weaker those echoes became, until eventually they disappeared.

Living in Two Realities

The best way I know to describe this is that you’re living in two realities at once. The moment you make a new decision, the future begins to organize around it. New people arrive. New opportunities appear. New energy flows. But at the same time, your old decisions and old beliefs are still echoing. They still have momentum. And for a while, both realities coexist.

This is why, when you start creating wealth, unexpected bills show up. When you start creating health, old symptoms flare. When you start creating love, old fears of abandonment resurface. It’s not that your new decision isn’t working—it’s that your old decisions are still dissolving.

Neville Goddard, one of the great teachers of imagination and manifestation, said it this way: you must stay loyal to your new decision. Even when the old reality screams, gnashes its teeth, and demands your attention, your job is to stay faithful to the vision you’ve chosen.

The Story of Orpheus

Greek mythology offers a powerful metaphor for this. Orpheus, a hero, descends into the underworld to rescue his beloved, Persephone. Hades, ruler of the underworld, grants one condition: Orpheus must not look back as they ascend. If he does, he will lose her forever. And so they climb. Behind him, Orpheus hears screams, monsters, gnashing teeth. He fears Persephone is in danger. At the last moment, almost at the surface, he looks back—and she vanishes, condemned to the underworld.

This is the same dynamic in our own lives. When you make a new decision, your old reality screams. It throws every monster it can in your path. And if you “look back”—if you give credence to the evidence of the old—you pull yourself back into it. But if you stay faithful, if you refuse to let the monsters distract you, you emerge into the new.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to “look back.” In business, after scaling to more than $7 million a year, contraction hit. Algorithms changed, ads slowed, expenses ballooned, and I found myself staring at numbers that didn’t make sense. Every voice of the old reality shouted: See? It was all temporary. You’re failing. This doesn’t work. And I’ll be honest: some days, I believed those voices. I looked back. But on the days I stayed faithful, on the days I trusted the process, I found myself carried through the underworld into a stronger, more sustainable reality.

The Calentado of Creation

My wife, Carol, is Colombian, and there’s a dish in her culture called calentado. It’s a kind of leftover soup—you take everything from the fridge, throw it in a pot, and heat it up. The result is a mix of old and new, blended together.

That’s exactly what the creative process feels like. When you first make a new decision, life becomes a kind of calentado. You have the old ingredients—old beliefs, old habits, old circumstances—still present. But you also have new ingredients—new thoughts, new opportunities, new people. And for a while, it’s all mixed together. The temptation is to judge the dish too soon. But if you stay with it, the new ingredients eventually dominate the flavor.

Think about when you first decide for health. You may buy the green juice, hit the gym, feel full of energy—and then wake up the next morning with a headache, craving sugar. That doesn’t mean the health isn’t working. It means the calentado is still cooking. Both the old and the new are present. But if you stay with it, if you stay loyal to the decision, the flavor changes. Your body recalibrates. The new becomes the dominant reality.

The Gift of Delay

At first, this delay can feel frustrating. Why doesn’t change happen instantly? But thank God it doesn’t. Imagine if every thought you had manifested immediately. A passing fear would destroy you. A fleeting judgment would wipe out a relationship. Instant manifestation would be chaos. The delay is a mercy. It gives us space to refine, recalibrate, and align. It lets us practice choosing again and again until the new reality becomes stable.

When I was still learning this, I used to get so frustrated. I would set a vision for more abundance, and instead of checks arriving, bills arrived. I’d think, What am I doing wrong? But eventually I realized that the bills weren’t punishment—they were opportunities to practice faith. They were the echoes of my old scarcity reality, and the delay was giving me time to strengthen my trust muscles. Without that delay, I wouldn’t have built the capacity to hold real wealth when it arrived.

Setbacks as Fine-Tuning

In my own life, I’ve lived this again and again. When Carol and I scaled our coaching business to over $7 million, everything looked incredible on the outside. But then came contraction. Algorithms changed. Costs rose. We burned out. At first, I thought we had failed. But looking back, I see it differently. The contraction wasn’t a punishment—it was fine-tuning. It forced us to release old beliefs, to trust God more deeply, to build a more sustainable way of living and leading. Without that contraction, we couldn’t have expanded again.

The same thing has happened in relationships. When Carol and I hit rough patches, my old reality screamed: You’re going to end up alone. You’ll never get this right. But those moments of friction weren’t the end—they were echoes of old wounds still dissolving. They were invitations to stay faithful to the decision I had already made: to love her, to grow with her, to shut the back door and make the marriage work. The friction was fine-tuning. And on the other side, we found more intimacy, more connection, more joy.

This is true for every area of life. The setbacks you face are not glitches in the system—they are adjustments. They reveal the parts of you that still need healing, the beliefs that still need shifting, the skills that still need strengthening. They aren’t there to destroy you. They’re there to prepare you.

The Patience Most of Us Resist

Here’s the hardest part for most of us: time. We live in an instant gratification culture. We want miracles on demand—wealth in a week, health in a month, love by Friday night. But real creation doesn’t work that way. It takes consistency. It takes loyalty to the vision. It takes patience.

Yes, breakthroughs can happen quickly. I’ve seen people meet their soulmate within weeks of deciding for love. I’ve seen businesses explode in a single year. But the deeper transformation—the kind that endures—unfolds over time. Neural pathways must be rewired. Nervous systems must be retrained. Old echoes must fade. And that takes longer than our culture likes to admit.

When I look back at my own journey, I see that the most miraculous transformations didn’t come overnight. They came over years of choosing again and again. Years of staying loyal even when the evidence seemed to contradict the vision. Years of trusting that the echoes of the old didn’t mean failure—they meant transition.

Why This Law Matters

So let me bring this all together. The reason you feel like you’re looping, like you’re taking two steps forward and one step back, is not because you’re broken. It’s because you’re living in two realities at once. The old is echoing even as the new is emerging. And your job is not to panic when the old shows up, but to remember: what’s coming is going. These echoes are the final waves of a reality that’s already dying.

The key is to stay loyal. Stay loyal to the decision you’ve made. Stay loyal to the vision you’ve chosen. Stay loyal to the God who planted the desire in you in the first place. Because when you do, the echoes fade, the old dissolves, and the new becomes your only reality.

Keep Moving Forward

Wherever you are right now—whether you’re facing setbacks in money, health, relationships, or purpose—don’t lose faith. The monsters may be screaming. The bills may be piling. The symptoms may be flaring. But none of that means you’re failing. It means you’re transitioning. It means you’re walking through the underworld. It means you’re almost to the surface.

Stay faithful. Don’t look back. Trust the process. Because the life you’ve chosen—the life God has already whispered to your soul—is on its way. And if you stay loyal, nothing can stop it from becoming real.