Regarded by many as the "Father of Personal Development", Charles F. Haanel is the author of the book The Master Key System, originally published in 1912, as well as other books about improving the human condition and is now repackaged into the video "
The Secret
"
Here's how it works...
So let's look at the first principle, what most people think of now as The Secret—the idea that
what you place your attention on is manifested in reality. This is a solid, real, principle, but it isn't magic. Here's why this principle works—if, of course, you use the other two principles with it.
When you focus your attention on something you want to create or attract, several things happen. Your mind is a very powerful goal seeking mechanism. You just have to give it a goal, and it gets busy figuring out how to get it. When you focus on something, your mind takes it as an instruction to figure out how to create or attract whatever you've focused on. In fact, right now, you're already using that power. The problem isn't a lack of ability to manifest what you focus on, but rather a lack of conscious and intentional control over what you focus on.
In other words, most people focus their mind unconsciously and unintentionally. Their focus runs on autopilot. Your mind was pre-set to focus in a certain way during childhood, and now it just runs on automatic. Depending on what happened while you were growing up, your mind focuses a certain amount of the time on what you want, and a certain amount of the time on what you want to avoid. Either way, though, it attracts or creates it.
Here's how it works.
Now remember that this first principle works in conjunction with the other two—taking action, and making sure the action is of value to someone. So when you focus on something you want to create or attract, a number of things happen. First, you get ideas about what actions you could take. If you want to attract a glass of lemonade, you think about having it, and your mind immediately suggests that you to go to the kitchen, if you have some lemonade there, or take a trip to the supermarket to buy some, if you don't. Instantly, you get ideas about what action to take in order to make your idea a reality.
Turning wishes into lemonadeYou can probably see that sitting there visualizing lemonade without doing something about it is a belief in magic, and if that's all you do you're not going to get lemonade. Even if someone walks into the room just as you think of lemonade, and you ask them to get you some, you've still taken action. And, if by some coincidence you thought of lemonade and right then someone walked into the room and said, "I was wondering if you'd like some lemonade?" this is not happening because you thought about lemonade. A lot of magic-believers would like to think so, but you could sit there every day and think about lemonade, and it would be a long time before that method would work again.
Scientists have a name for this. It's called a coincidence.
People who believe in magic turn coincidences into evidence, but that doesn't make it so, and you can easily prove this to yourself by thinking of lemonade the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, and finding out what happens. What will happen is that no lemonade will manifest the next day, or the next, or the next, unless you get up out of your chair and take action to find some.
How to find all the resources you need
So the first thing that happens when you focus on getting something is that your mind generates ideas about how to get it, ideas about what actions you could take to get it. The second thing that happens is that you begin to notice resources you could use in getting what you want. You might notice people who could help you that you weren't noticing before. You might suddenly become aware of information, books, seminars, TV shows, or whatever, that previously you had not noticed.
Perhaps you've had the experience of wanting to learn about something and going to a bookstore. Suddenly you see all kinds books about the subject that you never noticed before, and would have just walked right by if you hadn't told your mind to notice them.
When you focus your attention on something, your mind develops a kind of radar that causes resources to wave little red flags at you, and to almost jump into your arms, or at least into your awareness. But again, you can see how this relates to taking action, because these resources you notice are useful only if you use them.
Okay, so far, by focusing on what you want, you've begun to develop some ideas about how to get it, and you've started noticing resources you could use. Next, focusing on what you want causes you to become motivated to act. Because you're thinking about what you want, and about how you'll feel when you get it—good, probably—you become motivated to do something, to take action.
You can be a high-quality personAnd, finally, focusing on what you want causes you to tap into or develop certain internal qualities that help you to get it, such things as courage, or persistence, or focus. Because you're focused on what you want, and are thinking about the benefits of having what you want and imagining how good it will feel, you're more likely to be persistent, to focus your attention, to be disciplined, to be self reliant, to take personal initiative, to use your imagination, and to be enthusiastic.
Those who focus on what they want develop all of these personal qualities, and, depending on what qualities are needed in order to create what you want, possibly others. And, the more and the longer you focus on what you want, and the more positive emotion you add, the more these qualities become part of your personality.
So focusing your mind in the way described in
The Secret causes you to have ideas, to notice people and resources that could help you, to become motivated to act, and to develop internal qualities that will help you act to get what you want.
You can see, then, how incredibly valuable focusing your attention on what you want can be. If you've ever wondered why some people seem to have so many ideas, how they seem to always find the resources they need or the people who can help them, how they stay motivated, and how they seem to have all these amazing personal qualities, now you know.
They did it by continually focusing their attention on what they want and then taking valuable action.
Ask the Magic QuestionNow here's a really easy way to focus your attention on what you want. I call it the Magic Question, but again, it really isn't magic. To focus your attention on something you want to create or attract, ask yourself, "How can I create X?" whatever X is, or "How can I get X?"
Sometimes, if you're in what seems to be a particularly bad situation, you might say, "Given that I'm in this situation, what can I do to get X?" For instance, if you just lost your job and you have a lot of debts, you might ask yourself, "Okay, given that I'm in this situation, what can I do right now to create a new job and create enough money to pay all these debts?"
When you ask this type of How Can I? question, it focuses your attention on what you want, and in doing so you enlist your mind in finding an answer—in other words, to figure out what you could actually DO to begin creating or attracting what you want.
Then, as you get ideas, you have to act on them. Sitting there wishing and hoping for a miracle, or hoping that a coincidence will slam into you is what NOT to do. Dr. Phil, if he were here, would be asking such a person, "How's that workin' for ya?" I know a lot of very successful people, including nearly every teacher who appears in
The Secret, and believe me, none of them sit around waiting for a miracle to land on them.
Now I'll admit that sometimes the results can look as if they are coming to a very successful person awfully darned easy and awfully darned quickly, but these results are still coming from action, preceded by focusing on what that person wanted.
My friend Gay Hendricks, along with his wife Katie, have been bestselling authors of books about relationships for over twenty years. Another friend, Jack Canfield, is also a bestselling author. Either one of them can pick up the phone, call a book publisher, tell them an idea for a book, and get a book deal instantly. If some other person wanted a book deal, it could take them years to make it happen. If their idea didn't have value, based on what the publisher wanted, they might never make it happen.
To someone who did not understand the principle of taking action and the principle of creating value, it might look like Gay or Jack made something happen as if by magic, without taking action. However, in this case the book deal happened quickly because of actions they'd previously taken.
In fact, Jack visited scores of publishers with the original Chicken Soup for the Soul book, and was almost ready to give up, when he finally found a publisher willing to print his book. But now, after selling well over 100 million books, he's already proven that he can create a bestselling book. He's already taken the action necessary to get a book publisher to send him a contract and a check. The same goes for Gay Hendricks.
Sometimes that makes it look as if little or no action is being taken in order to get a certain outcome.
Will the Wish Fairy give you a raise?Let's take this down to a more mundane example. If you work in an office, and your boss approaches you and offers you a better job in the company, with more pay, why does he do this? Is it magic? Is it because you've been sitting in your cubicle putting it out to the universe that you want a better job with more money? I doubt it. If your boss offers you such a promotion, I'll bet you anything it's because of past actions you've taken that have convinced your boss that you're worth the raise, and because he's pretty sure that your future actions will make it worth his while to give you new responsibilities and more money.
Now, let's look at the third principle, the idea that the action you take has to benefit someone, that your action has to create value.
Think of it this way. From time to time you give money to other people, right? You pay your electric bill, you pay your car payment, you give money to the supermarket, you give money to the clothing store, or the gas station. Why do you do this? Is it just because you like these people? Is it because they put it out to the universe that you would stop by and give them money?
Well, you might like them, and they probably did sit down and focus on how to get you and other customers to give them some of your money, but when it comes right down to it, you gave them money because they have something you want more than you want the money. Like everyone else, unless it's just because you love them, you give money to others if you get something valuable in return. What's more, you're the sole judge of whether what they have is valuable.
It doesn't matter who else thinks it's valuable—if you don't think it is, you don't give up your money for it.
The ONLY reason people will give you moneyOther than money you might give to someone just because you love them, this is the only reason why money changes hands. This means that if you want money, someone else is going to have to give it to you, and they're going to use the same criteria you use. If giving you money gets them something they want more than the money, they'll give you the money. In order to get more money, then, you have to figure out a way to create more benefit, more value. This is really the essence of the Law of Attraction. The amount of money you attract is equal to the value you provide.
This applies to more than money, of course. As the Beatles said in one of their songs, "the love you take is equal to the love you make." I'm only talking in terms of money because that's what most people think of when they think of The Secret and the Law of Attraction.
But whatever you want—love, respect, friends, or anything else—you'll receive it to the extent that you put out, through your actions, something of equivalent value. Be a good friend, and you'll have friends. Act in a way that invites respect, and you'll be respected. And so on.
The main point, though, is that for you to get something in this world, you have to give. As Emerson said, the universe's books are always balanced—which, by the way, also means that you can't fail to receive when you give, and if you have to wait, you build up interest, you might say, while you wait.
Now, some people struggle, at least partially, because they haven't found a way to offer very much value, so they don't make much money. If you're flipping burgers, it's probably because you don't have the skills that make you more valuable to someone else, which means others aren't willing to trade very much money for whatever you provide. The burger-flipper needs to be reliable enough to show up, smart enough to follow directions, and be able to get along with the other employees, but not much else is required.
It's also possible that you have something that would be of value to others, but you haven't found a way to let others know about it. In that case, you have a sales and marketing problem, and you need to find a way to convincingly let others know about the value you could provide for them.
The more valuable you are, the more money you makeBut there's a solution to this, and it isn't wishing and hoping. If you don't have a way to create very much value for others, you can always get more knowledge or more skills. I have people who work for me who know how to take orders over the phone and enter them into the computer, and they do it well.
However, a lot of people can do such a job, so it isn't a very lucrative job compared, for instance, to someone who knows how to manage people, or who knows how to run a computer network, or who knows how to create an advertisement that creates a lot of sales. Such people end up getting more money because they provide more value.
And, they can provide more value because they've paid the price to have those skills and that knowledge.So if you aren't making as much money as you want, you need to figure out a way to create more value, and you need to figure out a way to make sure people know you have this value. The value could be your ideas, it could be your labor, it could be a product you create or sell, or it could be a service you provide. If it has value, and if you can find a way to make sure people know about it, you'll make money equivalent to the value you provide.
And, of course, none of this will happen unless you take action, and you won't take action—or know what action to take—unless you begin by focusing your mind on what you want and asking yourself how you can get it.
But please don't think that you can just wish for something or "put it out to the universe," and then, without taking action or providing any value, expect to get it. In fact, let me clue you into another aspect of the Law of Attraction. If a random event brings you something, for which you haven't provided value—something you haven't paid the price to have—I hate to tell you this, but you still have to pay in some way.
If you win the lottery, you've received a bunch of money without having provided value in exchange. You know what happens to nearly all people who win millions in the lottery, don't you? That's right. They almost always lose all the money within a few years. Unless that person does something with the money that provides value to others, they'll find a way to lose it.
And, by the way, this is the way debt works, too. If you go into debt in order to have something before you've earned the money, you end up paying more for it.
There is a price for everything, and when you pay in advance the price is lower, and when you pay in arrears the price is higher. One of the big secrets to success is to find out what the price is for what you want and pay it, in full, as fast as possible. The price might be money, but it also could be time, experience, learning, work, or something else. Sometimes the price is a series of events that look like failures, but are really preparation for success. But whatever the price is, the faster you pay it, the better. This is what the second two principles are about.
Who wants $100,000?Okay, let's take an example to see how you could use these three principles to get what you want. Let's say that you do want more money, and you realize right away that you don't yet have a way to provide additional value to others, which is what would qualify you to receive more money. For that reason, no one is giving you money. What do you do?
The first thing to do is to use the first principle, the principle of focusing your attention on what you want.
"I want more money," you say. You ask yourself, "How can I get more money?" Notice that I'm using that "How can I?" question again. It's always a great question to ask because it focuses you on what you want.
It would be even better, though, if you were more specific. I might say, then, "I want to make $100,000 a year. How can I do that?" Or, I might say to myself, "Okay, how can I make $100,000 a year? Many other people do it, so I know it's doable. How could I do it?" I would keep asking myself this question, and I would focus my attention on discovering a way to do it.
Knowing the other two principles, I'd know that when I get an idea, I'm going to have to take action, and the action will have to benefit someone, so I'm keeping that in the back of my mind.
So, what happens? First, you start getting ideas. Right now, off the top of my head, I'm just going to share with you the ideas that come to me, as if I was the person wanting to make $100,000 a year. The first idea that comes to me is to see if I can find out who else is making $100,000 a year. What professions make that much?
Well, certainly a lot of people who have their own business make that much. A guy who owns a McDonald's makes more than that much for each store he owns. Someone who owns a couple of dry cleaning stores probably makes that much. I could probably go online and find through Google a whole list of types of jobs that make $100,000 a year.
People who sell certain products online, or through the mail, probably make that much. Certain professional speakers, or authors, make that much. Someone who sells real estate can make that much, or more, and so can insurance agents. So one idea that came to me was to check out who's actually making this kind of money, because that might give me ideas for how I could do it.
By finding this out, I could at least save myself from doing something that I think will make me a lot of money when in actual fact few if any people actually make that kind of money doing it.
For instance, I see a lot of people in certain MLM-type businesses, but rarely do I see anyone who even makes $1000 a month, let alone significant money. I'm not trying to bash MLMs in general, because some of them are great, and I'm not saying it isn't possible to make good money in MLM, but if you're looking for a way to make a lot of money, wouldn't it make sense to find someone who does make a lot of money in MLM?
If you want to start a business, do a little checking before you act and find out what other people in that business are making.
Daydreaming, or acting?Here's something else to keep in mind. If you sit around and focus your attention on something you want, but you're daydreaming, you aren't going to get it. Why? Because daydreaming is a kind of thinking that already has lack of action built into it. There's a huge difference between thinking about something when you're in wishing mode, and thinking about the same thing when you're in acting mode. If you want to create something, always do your thinking while in acting mode.
But let's get back to creating that $100,000 a year. I've already mentioned that focusing on how to do this gives you ideas. But it also causes you to notice resources you might use. You might, for instance, notice books about how to make more money. Or you might notice that someone has a seminar about how to make more money.
There are almost unlimited resources available about how to make money. You usually don't notice them because you haven't focused your attention on finding them. Then, of course, when you find them, you have to take action and use them. This is where most people fall down. There's a price to pay to get what you want in this world, and most people would rather not pay it.
Paying the price—and enjoying itThe people you see who are getting what they want in life are almost always those who have figured out how to enjoy paying the price, which of course makes it easy to pay. As I said earlier, this is the essence of the Law of Attraction—the price is just whatever you need to give in order to attract or create what you want.
That's why just sitting there hoping and wishing doesn't work. When you do that, the only thing you're putting out is an intention, which, while it's a good start, is of no value to anyone—unless you act on it.
The resources you begin to notice when you focus on what you want might also include people who could help you. And when you begin to spot such people, you have to keep in mind that if you want their help you have to make it worth their while to help you. This might mean paying them, but you could compensate them in many other ways. You could make them a partner. You could give them a feeling of being a good person who helps others. Or anything in between.
And, quite often, if people who have the ability to help you see that what you have has real merit, some of them will help you just to help you, because they understand the Law of Attraction and they know if they help you it will come back to them in some other way. Often the people who have really mastered the Law of Attraction have so much, and they create what they
want so effortlessly, that they just want to give back by helping others.
It never hurts to askIt never hurts to ask for help, even if you're not sure how to compensate the other person. But always start with the willingness to compensate them in some way, even if you don't yet know how. In fact, if you aren't sure, you could begin by saying, "I'm not sure how at this point to make it worth your while, but I sure could use your help." Ask, and see what happens, and always be open to compensating the other person in some way, even if you haven't yet figured out what it might be. In fact, be eager to compensate them.
Then, after you act, notice what happened. Evaluate your action. Your action was either successful or not, or something in between. Whatever happens, you'll get feedback. If your action worked, you might want to do more of it. If it didn't work, learn whatever you can from it, and then take another action based on what you learned. Keep acting, evaluating, and then acting again, until you create or attract whatever it is you're trying to get.
Even if you have to refine your actions many times, you're still benefiting because you're gaining wisdom. This is why successful people are so successful. They've acted, and received feedback, and acted again, and received more feedback, and have done this so many times that they've become wise. They've become experts. So be willing to pay the price to become an expert. All these little so-called failures are really tuition in the school of life, and the learning they bring is very valuable.
All the while you're doing this, of course, you're remaining focused on where you want to go and what you want to create, and you've already decided, in advance, that nothing is going to keep you from getting there. If you slip up, if what you're doing isn't working, if you fall on your face, you learn everything you can from what happened, and continue to focus on how to get where you want to go.
This constant focus on the end result, along with taking action, and always trying to think of how to create value for others, always, eventually, gets you there. The only way you can fail is if you're mistaken about the value of what you provide, or you quit before you get there. You might change your approach for getting there a number of times, based on what you learn, but you otherwise just keep focusing your attention on what you want and acting to get it.
The Secret ShortcutNow, would you like to know a huge shortcut to this process? I thought so. It's easy. Find other people who are already successfully doing what you want to do, or getting what you want to get. Then, find out what they're doing, and copy them. Also, while you're at it, find out how they're focusing their mind.
So far I've spoken about focusing your mind as if it was a pretty simple "one-size-fits-all" thing to do, but there are actually a number of important things to learn about how to focus your mind, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment.
For now, just know that it's very beneficial to find out what the person you're modeling believes about what they're doing, what they think is important about it, how they decide what to pay attention to and what to delete from their attention, and many other nuances about how they focus their attention.
And, then, of course, you want to find out what actions they've taken to create what you want to create. All of this you can copy, which gives you a huge head start. Then, as you gain wisdom through your own actions, you can add your own twist to what you learned from them.
How do you find these people?
First, just asking yourself that question—"How do I find people who are successfully doing what I want to do?" causes you to think of ways to find them. But just off the top of my head, I can think of a few ways. Again, you can use Google. You can find books they've written.
Ask other people if they know someone. You can look in the Yellow Pages. You can spot them in the newspaper. Many people are selling information on doing many of the typical things someone might want to know how to do, in the same way Harv Eker is teaching people how to make money.
How to get what you don't wantNow, let's talk about the other side of the coin. What happens when you focus on what you don't want? Actually, the process works the same way, except you end up getting what you don't want instead of what you do want. Whatever you focus on, you mind takes it as an instruction to create or attract it. And, as I said earlier, your mind is very good at creating or attracting whatever you focus on. If you focus on not being poor, for instance, your mind will get busy figuring out how you can be poor. If you focus on not being anxious, you're mind will figure out how to make you feel anxious. If you focus on not making a mistake, you'll make mistakes.
As if it wasn't bad enough that you create it, the other big penalty for focusing on what you don't want is that you get to feel bad. All bad feelings—anger, anxiety, fear, confusion, panic, depression, annoyance, shame, guilt, hopelessness, or anything else—come from focusing on what you don't want. This is the flip side of feeling good when you focus on what you want, especially if you're taking action, and that action has value.
When you focus on what you don't want, or what you're worried about, or what you're afraid of, or what you want to avoid, you put your mind to work creating it, and you feel bad. Both of these penalties obviously make focusing on what you don't want a bad idea. In fact, focusing on what you don't want is poison to your life.
But how does focusing on what you don't want affect the second principle, taking action? When you focus on what you don't want, one of two things happens. You might, as a result, not take any action, which is a kind of action, with its own results (or lack of results). If you're afraid of making a mistake, you might avoid acting, and the very failure to act is, in and of itself, a type of mistake. When you don't act, you always know what will happen. Nothing.
Or, you might, ironically, take an action, driven by your fear, that creates the very thing you don't want. Not wanting to make a mistake, you act in a way that creates mistakes. Not wanting to make a bad investment, you figure out a way to become attracted to bad or risky investments, or you fail to learn what you need to know to make an good decision.
Not wanting your business to fail, you are led to take the very actions that do make it fail.People focus on avoiding something they're afraid of or worried about, and (almost) as if by magic, they create it. The mind is ingenious in creating what you focus on, and it doesn't care whether it's what you want or what you don't want.
For this reason, it's crucial that you focus your mind consciously and intentionally. Your mind is always focusing on something. As I said earlier, it isn't that you can't manifest what you focus on, it's that you're very likely choosing what to focus on automatically, unconsciously. What you focus on is very often driven by past events, childhood decisions and traumas, that cause you to focus on what you don't want at least some of the time.
So The Secret is a wonderful thing. It works—especially if you add the second and third principles I've shared with you. But it's like electricity. You can light up a city with it, or electrocute yourself. You can only use The Secret to get what you want to the extent that you can consciously and intentionally direct your attention.
As long what you focus on is chosen without conscious intention, you're going to find yourself attracting and creating, at least some of the time, some things you don't want.
And some people are unfortunately attracting a lot of what they don't want, a lot of the time.But it doesn't have to be this way. You can develop the awareness and the ability to use it to intentionally direct your focus. You can turn off the autopilot. This is why Holosync is so powerful, because it increases your ability to be aware, to live consciously rather than automatically. As your awareness grows, you clearly see how your focus creates what happens in your life, and as you watch this happen it becomes more and more difficult to focus on what you don't want, and much easier to focus on what you do want.
It's not an accident that so few people are truly successful. Success, in whatever way you define it, flows directly from focusing on what you want, and then, as a result, taking action that is of value to the world. If you can't focus intentionally, though, this process becomes very difficult.
You can't focus on what you've deletedIt also becomes easier to implement
The Secret in your life if you better understand the focusing process. In this discussion I've treated focusing as a simple process, but it's actually a complex cognitive process. There are many steps, and they whiz by very quickly, mostly outside your awareness. For instance, you have dozens of mental filters that delete much of what comes in through your senses, then distorts (sometimes in a positive way, and sometimes in a negative way) what is left.
Why does this matter? Well, you can't focus on what has been deleted from your awareness. What if, for instance, you delete some—or even all—of the possibilities? Many people do this. When they look around, there are no possibilities! I correspond with people everyday who tell me that they see no possibilities, yet the same possibilities are actually available to them, as to anyone else. But because they've filtered them out, they aren't there.And this is just one of twenty-some filters people unconsciously use before they ever get to the part of the process where they focus on something.
People filter out possibilities, solutions, ideas, resources, ideas, kindnesses, love, what they could be grateful for, and all kinds of things. Many people filter things in such a way that all they see are problems and what is wrong. They have nothing left to focus on but what they don't want! Can you see how it would be valuable if you could consciously choose how to use these filters?
We unfortunately don't have room here to go through the entire process by which you focus your mind. However, even if you know nothing about this, other than to focus as much as possible on what you want—and you're willing to take action and to do whatever you can to make sure your actions are of value to others—you'll get results that are head and shoulders above those achieved by other people.
However, I invite you to consider the possibility that you could master this internal focusing process, by taking my online course, The Internal Map of Reality Expander. Those who master this process tap into a power that allows them to do or achieve anything they put their mind to. There's no reason why you couldn't be one of them.
You can find out more, and listen to a free preview lesson, by going to
www.centerpointe.com/life/preview.
I also invite you, if you aren't already doing so, to use Holosync audio technology to increase your conscious awareness (and to get all the other mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits it brings). You can get a free Holosync demo CD and a free Special Report at
http://www.centerpointe.com/.The Secret isn't a secret, and the Wish Fairy is a fraud
The Secret really isn't a secret. It's been around for thousands of years, and many people have taught it in many different forms. The only reason it can be referred to as a "
The Secret" is that very few people actually use it. It's been estimated that about 2% of people actually embrace the three principles I've described and commit themselves to using them consistently. Or, if they try to use the first principle, they skip the second two and insist on wishing and hoping and believing in magic, eternally waiting for the Wish Fairy to give them what they want.
I'm hoping that you'll be one of those who embrace these principles and actually use them. And I am here, along with my staff, to help you use the tools we've created to become happy, peaceful, and successful, and to create whatever you want in life.
