Inner180

Imagine that you won the lottery.  Go ahead.  Dream big.  No, even bigger.

How much is your ticket worth?  How will you feel when you win?  Get really comfortable and breathe the feeling of total financial freedom right down into your bones.

When I do this exercise with my Fearless About Finances class, many participants can’t imagine having so much money that they will never again worry about it.  Some of them stew about how big the lottery ticket is.  Some panic during this exercise, inextricably bound to their feelings of lack.  Who would I be, they seem to ask, without my identity being completely tied up in money fears and woes?  For these folks, life without financial fear is such an identity shift that they can scarcely dream about it.

Which is the whole point of the exercise.  Those who can break through, who can imagine the feeling state of giving up, forever, worries about money, discover something delicious.  That feeling state is available to us now.  Right in this moment, no matter what size our bank accounts are, no matter how many bills sit on our desks, no matter what the state of the economy is.

Worrying about money (or anything else) does not serve us.  It robs us of our creative juice, our intelligence, and our energy.  It does not bring us resources, financial or otherwise.  It is not a motivating force; it is draining, debilitating.

The feeling state of freedom, however, is energizing, inspiring, motivating, delicious.  And always available, no matter what is going on in the outside world.

Try it.  Let go of your worries about whether new clients will call, your employer will lay you off, your grant will be funded, the stock market will rebound before you retire.  Let go of the part of you that imagines that the wolf is at the door.  Just try it, temporarily.  (You can always re-conjure it up later, if you’d like.)

The Truth is this: both the delights of freedom and the shackles of worry are created inside us.  Right in our heads.  By our thoughts about the world, not from the events in the world.  If you can create worry and distress with your thoughts, you can also create freedom and inspiration with your thoughts.  And with light, free feelings, our hearts and minds and spirits are fully available and free to soar.

So imagine something wonderful, like, say a $35,000,000 winning ticket.  Get into how it feels and really relish it. After all, isn’t that the whole point of wanting a flourishing business, a relationship, a baby, a fabulous career, or whatever else you long for?  The happiness and satisfaction it will bring, right?  Just go there first, in your imagination, with your thoughts. Then feel what it brings and luxuriate in it.  The journey then becomes as extraordinarily fantabulous as the destination.  You won’t even need to buy a ticket.

I once met a woman who won the lottery.  Even though she’d already won about $500,000, she still bought lottery tickets regularly.  She told me it is very common among lottery winners to continue to play the lottery.  She absolutely knew she was lucky, and actually intended to win a second time.

My friend Kathy says she has great parking space luck.  Every time we go somewhere we park right by the front door of wherever we’re going.  She says this always happens.

I no longer think that this is random or coincidental or weird.  I think we create our luck.  We choose to allow it into our lives.  So how can we create more luck in our lives?  Try these suggestions:

Notice the luck you already have. Remember how you found that amazing jacket that fits perfectly, the last one in the store, the one that was on sale?  And how all of the traffic lights were lined up green as you drove downtown?  And how you sat next to someone at a luncheon who became your best client?  You are lucky already, aren’t you?   Now, just notice it more.

Believe that life happens for you, not to you. Even when circumstances are tough—you are laid off from work or your teenager is picked up by the police for violating your town’s curfew—know that this opens a doorway to something positive, something better for you.  Maybe it will be a more satisfying job or a chance to connect more deeply with your teen.  Whatever happens, allow it to be an opportunity to move forward, to allow something better, to grow.

Think like a lucky person. Our thoughts determine our feelings and from there we act in ways that bring us the results we get in life.  Lucky people think they are lucky, and act in ways that confirm it.

My friend Kathy has good-parking karma because she begins and ends her search with the best parking spaces in the lot.  She does this because she expects an opening there.  If she searched for a space in the back row, that’s where she’d find one, and that’s where she’d park.  And she would never think she was lucky.

Because they think they are lucky, lucky people feel lucky and act like they are lucky.  In other words, they make their luck.

So what would happen in your life if you thought you were lucky?  What if you expected life to be filled with wonder and magic and luck and great parking spots?  What thoughts would you think?  How would you feel if you believed that wonderful things would come your way, all day long?  Would you act differently?  Would you look for the best parking spaces in the lot?  Try it.  Then just notice what happens.

Unless you’re a bazillionairre, if you live in New York City, you ride the subway. Suzanne, New Yorker I coach, absolutely despised her commute.  She complained bitterly about the griminess, the overcrowding, the behavior of the other riders.  It was absolutely intolerable, she told me.

Her commute took 45 minutes each way.  That’s more than 32 hours every month, a long stretch of misery in a life. She considered moving closer to work, even changing jobs, but couldn’t come up with a practical solution to the problem.

I had an idea.  “Begin looking for beauty on the subway,” I suggested.  Suzanne laughed cynically and patiently explained to me—a non-New Yorker—what was patently obvious to anyone with two eyes, a nose, and a brain: the New York subway is a human cesspool during weekday rush hour.  It was impossible to appreciate anything about it, and there was certainly no beauty to be found there, she assured me.

But I insisted. “Send me an email every day, telling me of the glorious, beautiful, amazing things you find on the subway.”  Suzanne left our session muttering that I’d given her an impossible assignment.

But she gamely began looking.  With Suzanne’s permission, here are some of the things she found in the next few days:

“We went over the Manhattan Bridge, over the East River. Out in the distance,  beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, three aircraft were buzzing around each other in the air. They were blimps, and they looked like giant honeybees drunk on pollen, bobbling to and fro over the water.”

“A kid had a little glass jar between his feet. It was strangely shaped, like it had contained an exotic food item purchased at an ethnic market in Brooklyn. It was filled with beautiful, thick, cloudy pink juice. Guava? Papaya-passion fruit?”

“The woman across the train had enormous boobs and beautiful deep black skin. The whites of her eyes were so bright in comparison to her skin they looked like keyholes of light in the door of a dark room.”

“This morning I couldn’t count the people wearing shades on the train! I guess when you’re cool you’ve always got the sun in your face.”

“A garish McDonald’s ad greets me and encourages me to ‘Think Good Thoughts….’”

“Ikea’s yellow flags wave in the distance on the waterfront. I bought a carpet there on Saturday night, and the water this morning is the exact same color of that carpet, gorgeous peacock blue.”

“There is a comfy, casual feeling on the train this morning… many wearing their Friday office attire. One woman looks so comfortable in her outfit I want her to take it off and let me put it on!”

“The faces of buildings and all of the bridges, walls, boats, water, cable lines, roads, signs are layered upon each other like a box of toys thrown around a room during a child’s tantrum.”

“Without anyone speaking, I know I am in the midst of various exotic tongues; Spanish, Polish, Korean, Russian, Israeli, Vietnamese, Czech, Yiddish, Mandarin, Hebrew.…”

“What a gift to be able to look at humanity up close and personal, to look at all of our differences, beauty, ethnicities, blemishes, scars… where else would I be able to notice the super-fine quality of a stranger’s hair follicles, the way his hair grows out of his head in the same direction, the tone of the skin on his scalp, eight inches from my face on this packed train?”

Within two weeks, the subway had transformed.  Suzanne no longer rides in a cesspool teeming with the worst examples of humanity.  Her last email about the subway ended with these words, “Everywhere I turn, there is opportunity for joy.”

As  Marcel Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”

How about you?  Is there anything ugly, disgusting, intolerable in your life?  Can you see it with new eyes?

What if you had a time machine that transported you to a time when you were younger, healthier, and more vibrant? A Harvard psychology professor, Ellen Langer, wondered and created a study to find out.

She took a group of 75 year olds, and tested them for a bunch of typical signs of aging, like hearing, eyesight, flexibility, and so forth. Then she took them on a retreat where they were given one instruction: think and act like you did when you were 55 years old. The setting at the retreat helped create the right mood–the music, the magazines, and newspapers they saw and heard were all twenty years old.

Two weeks later, the participants were retested and their signs of aging had all improved, including a 10 per cent improvement in their eyesight! They looked younger, their joints were more flexible, and their posture straightened. Even their fingers, which typically shorten with age, actually lengthened.

Talk about creating your own reality! This story is so captivating, that it’s going to be made into a movie starring Jennifer Aniston.

How can you apply the lessons of this study to your life? What if you thought, acted, and felt like your life was full and rich, like your health was vibrant, and like your relationships were happy and loving? What would happen?

Try this exercise.  Think of an area of your life that you want to change. Climb into your personal time machine that transports you to a time, past or future, when you have or had what you want. Then think, act, and feel as though you have that improvement right now. Really feel it in your body. Use your imagination to visualize it. Journal about it. Touch it, smell it. Listen to the music that you would listen to if that life existed right now. Be grateful for having it. You’ll be amazed. Happy travels!

Karen was ecstatic. She was tired of being single and sent an email to an old boyfriend. He immediately returned the email and told her he was single, too. He wanted to see her. They spoke and made a date for the following weekend.

She was elated on our coaching call. “This might be it!” she told me breathlessly. “I wasn’t ready for him before, but this time I am. I’m so excited.”

I asked her to describe her excitement. “It’s the feeling of being loved,” she told me.

“Where did that feeling come from?” I asked.

“From his call,” she said.

“Oh, did he tell you he loves you on the phone call?” I asked.

“No.”

“So, where did the feeling of being loved come from?” I asked.

“From the possibility of this working out,” she said. “I’ve always been so bad at relationships before. Now I’m ready. He sounds really interested in me. This could be it!”

“So, really let that feeling you got from the phone call, of being loved intensify,” I suggested.  “Where is it in your body?”

“It’s in my heart,” she said.

“So where is the feeling coming from?” I asked her.

“Oh my gosh, it’s coming from inside me!” she exclaimed.

“Yes it is. And what changed to create that feeling?”

Just then, she got it. “My thoughts. My thoughts about myself changed.”

Yep. That’s it. That’s the secret formula. When Karen thought the possibility of being in a loving relationship was on the horizon, she felt good inside. She became happy and excited. Before that, life was ho-hum. She hadn’t seen this guy in years, and all that had happened was one phone call. The old boyfriend didn’t do that.  Karen did–she transformed the way she felt about herself.

So, as Karen discovered, being excited and feeling loved can be generated inside of us. Once we “get” this we can create it for ourselves, over and over, every day of our lives. We can just skip the middleman (in this case, the old boyfriend) and create the feeling of being loved and the excitement of looking forward to life within ourselves.

So next time you are feeling fabulous, really explore it. Get to know this place. What do you feel? Where do you feel it in your body? Describe it. Write it down. What thoughts are you having about yourself? Write them down. Memorize everything you can about this experience.

We don’t have to wait to find the right relationship or the right anything else to feel fabulous. And, as a bonus, when we’re excited to be alive, we can attract exactly what we want–like a great relationship!