Program Yourself to Prosperity

Written by: Christopher Howard

One moment he had been struggling to sell eight cars; the next he changed his focus to doubling his sales and, as a result, he opened himself up to new possibilities and phenomenal results. The problem that people face in life is that they often accept the reality that they’ve been handed by families, friends, co-workers, society, the media, and so on. The reality that you accept is made up of a matrix of interacting belief systems that can either be useful to you or disempower you. Financial beliefs that can disempower you include convictions such as "It’s hard to make money," "You have to be born into wealth," or "You have to work for years to make real money as a sales professional." If you accept these kinds of realities, it can absolutely prevent you from reaching your full potential.

Before it was discovered that the world was round, it was a well-known "fact" that it was flat, and for all intents and purposes, it was. No one would think to sail around it, because it couldn’t be done, but the whole world changed when a few individuals changed their thinking. Your financial world is exactly the same. Both poverty and wealth exist, yet some people experience one and not the other. What differentiates those who have massive amounts of wealth from those who are completely broke is their thoughts, which determine their focus. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, we take in approximately two million bits of information per second through our sensory channels. If we were instantaneously aware of all that was happening around us, we would go insane from sensory overload. Therefore, the human nervous system deletes, distorts, and generalizes all of the information into manageable chunk sizes. Out of two million bits of information per second, you only process five to nine chunks. This means that, out of everything that is happening, you experience only a minute amount.

You can compare your experience of reality to surfing the Internet. Consider for a moment the amount of information available on the Web, a tremendous amount. Yet if you type into your search engine the word "poverty," your computer will ignore everything else and sort specifically for anything that meets your search word. In life, it’s the same way: you get what you look for. Think of your focus as being like a flashlight. If you were standing in a dark room with wealth in one corner and poverty in the other, your experience in life would be based upon where you’re pointing your flashlight at any given time. Do you have the flashlight of your focus on wealth, or on poverty?

In his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, author Robert Kiyosaki states that if you want to become rich, the only thing you need to do is to increase your financial vocabulary. This is true because, in order to increase your financial vocabulary, you have to shift your focus. You will have to begin reading different types of magazines, holding different types of conversations, and so on. Philosopher Ludwig Von Witkenstein once said, "Whereof one cannot speak, one cannot think." People who have wealth and abundance in their lives speak and think differently than those who don’t. The flashlight of their focus is on a different corner of the room.

When you change your focus, you can change your external finances—sometimes even instantaneously. A woman who was searching for answers recently explained to me that she really wanted to go into the school system and teach children how to live up to their full potential. But she told me in the same breath that she had no money at all to follow through on her grand
ideas.

I explained to her that ours is a totally abundant universe. There’s more than 13 trillion dollars circulating around the planet every day, just looking for someone to take care of it. I told her that there were plenty of people who wanted to give her money to support her project. About four weeks after later, I received a call from her. She was extremely excited, and explained to me that she had really taken what I said to heart. She had gone out and found tens of thousands of dollars available to her in grant money to fund her project. Her finances changed instantly the moment she changed her focus.

So the question becomes, "What are some of the things that I can do to change my focus and immediately take charge of my financial destiny?"

One of the first things you can do is to raise the level of importance of money in your life. Many people have the limiting belief that money isn’t important, or a belief that if you focus on money, you are somehow a bad person. These beliefs do nothing but hold you back. There are many wonderful people who do a lot of good for the planet, and who realize the importance of money as a tool for ameliorating their lives and the lives of others. In fact, the more you make, the more you can give back.

When people used to think the world was flat, the old maps of the world showed the "boundary conditions" — the edges of the world — and written all around those boundaries were the words "There Be Dragons." Or the maps would depict people falling off their ships and tumbling over the edge of the world. There weren’t really dragons there, and there weren’t really places where you might fall off the edge of the world. These weren’t the boundaries of the world, but they might as well have been, because they were boundary conditions of people’s thinking at the time.

Consider the beliefs that prevent you from focusing on wealth to be just like the boundary conditions of people’s thinking in Columbus’ time. Now I have a question for you: How satisfying will your life be ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, when you get out into the future and you’ve allowed your beliefs to keep you from living the life you deserve? Maybe now is the time to get some new beliefs about money, convictions that will empower you, such as the belief clearly held by John D. Rockefeller, who once said, "I believe that the power to make money is a gift from God."

When Columbus first set sail, he left knowing that the world was different than all of those around him believed it to be. He was absolutely convinced that he would find a faster route to the riches and spices of the Orient. These beliefs and convictions were the first step to success beyond even his own expectations.

How do you raise the level of importance of money in your life? Decide. Decide that money is important. It’s so important that you’re willing to do everything you can to learn about it: how to manage it, how to invest it, and how to multiply it. Before long, you’ll find yourself holding different conversations with people, reading different types of magazines, and spending your time in ways that enable you to increase your financial intelligence. When you shift your focus, it will be as if you’ve typed the word "wealth" into your search engine. Your experience of life will actually change, and new possibilities will present themselves to you.

A few weeks ago, my fiancée and I decided to purchase a new car, and we got our minds set on a make and model that we saw for the first time just a few days prior to making the decision. We had never noticed that make and model of car before, but the moment we made the decision to purchase it, we began to see the same type of car all over the place. Did the cars appear in circulation once we started looking for them, or were they always there and we just hadn’t noticed before?

Your financial world works in exactly the same way. Financial opportunities only present themselves once you’ve conditioned yourself to look for them. The difference between those who have massive amounts of wealth and those who live in poverty is what they are looking for. Because we often accept the reality we’ve been handed, we end up getting exactly what we expect out of life. This principle is especially true in the area of finances. If you want to make more money, then all you really need to do is change your thinking.

Christopher Howard is an internationally acclaimed expert in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Ericksonian Hypnosis. You can find out about his keynote speeches and seminars here. The information provided in this article is an example of the transformational ideas and tools you will learn in Chris Howard’s "Breakthrough to Success" weekend seminar. Register today!