Summary: (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/wp-content/uploads/marty_lefkoe_headshots_053_2-01_edit_235-150x150.jpg)If you are a reader of my weekly blog, you probably are interested primarily in * personal/spiritual growth, by which I mean improving the quality of your life and/or becoming more spiritual, * achieving more success, by which I mean earning more money or having an abundance of wealth in your life. Negative, limiting beliefs are a barrier to both goals, but I usually tend to write more about the first goal. Today I want to focus more on the second one. (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/wp-content/uploads/bigstock_Money_5164563-150x150.jpg)Over the weekend I read a book by Joe Vitale, a friend of mine and one of the people I love spending time with at our twice-a-year Transformational Leadership Council meetings. Because he has written a lot about the Law of Attraction and was one of the teachers in The Secret, I expected his book, Attract Money Now, to focus mainly on how to attract money merely by having positive emotions about abundance. As I’ve written before, I think there is something to the Law of Attraction, but I don’t think that merely focusing on something, with emotion, is enough to have it show up in your life. So I was pleasantly surprised. I not only enjoyed reading the short (160 pages) book, I think it just might be the best book I’ve ever read on exactly what you need to do to create abundance in your life. The first step is getting rid of negative, limiting beliefs As you might imagine, if I liked the book so much Joe must talk of the importance of beliefs, which he does. The first of the seven steps to financial abundance that he describes is “Alter How You Think.” He writes, “Limiting beliefs are like thieves in the night. The first step to attracting money is to change your thoughts and address these underlying limiting beliefs.” (Emphasis added.) Although he doesn’t mention the Lefkoe Belief Process in that chapter, he does list my work as a reference in the back of the book. By the way, one of the reasons we no longer promote a package of abundance beliefs is that getting rid of limiting beliefs is necessary, but not sufficient, to achieving abundance in your life. We like to guarantee results and we couldn’t guarantee that you would increase your wealth merely by eliminating the five beliefs in the package, so we withdrew it. We now provide it only on request and after explaining that it doesn’t carry a guarantee like our other automated programs. Joe also recognizes that eliminating beliefs is not enough, so he presents six other crucial steps. One of these other steps explains that one way to change your mindset about money is to give without any expectation of return. Such action implies a mindset of abundance. Being afraid to give implies a mindset of scarcity. And your mindset is crucial to achieving financial abundance. In Step 4 Joe points out the importance of asking for help, both from the universe and from specific people. He urges people to form or join a Mastermind Group, which is a group of several people with varying backgrounds who meet regularly to support each other. In fact, he was so convincing that I decided that I would either join one or form one of my own by the end of this month. Why “adding” emotion to your images of the future is important The way he described another one of the steps gave me an insight I had never had before. He, like so many others, talks about the importance of imagining the desired result and making it as emotionally real as possible. When others have told me this before, it sounded a little “airy fairy” and I couldn’t see why adding emotion to a vision would help make it come true. But Joe makes the point that “You are telling your mind to pay attention to the avenues and opportunities that will help you meet these goals. Does this mean these opportunities don’t exist. No.
