Cash in a Flash: Fast Money in Slow Times - Mark Victor Hansen, Robert G. Allen (2009)
Part I. The First Key Ingredient: Wow Now
Chapter 7. CHANGE YOUR PAST AND ENVISION YOUR FUTURE: STEPPING-STONES FOR SUCCESS
The last few chapters have been about “voice work.” How you manage your voices has a direct effect on your feelings. If you feel down, it’s likely you have been talking to yourself using “down” words. If you want to feel up, learn to ask yourself empowering, uplifting questions. Speak to yourself and others using high-energy words. Learn to say the word wow.
Why spend so much time on this? We’ll soon be teaching you financial recipes that require strong, focused action. There will be no only time for hesitation decisiveness, worry confidence, or procrastination and action. Voice work helps sharpen the blade of your mind so you can cut to the chase and create some cash.
CHANGE YOUR PAST:
TURN YOUR OWS INTO WOWS
Some memories from our past are intense. We can still experience them today. We can taste, smell, feel, hear, and see them.
Some memories are far in the distance. We only observe them. We don’t feel them anymore. They don’t have the same intense impact they once did. We see them from perspective. We can take a god’s-eye view and learn from them.
Scan back over your past. Some of your memories were painful (dark). Some were exciting (light). Some lifted you. Some dragged you down. Some were heavy. Some were light. Uppers and downers.
Here is your assignment. Scan back over your memory and find three positive memories and three negative not so positive memories. Three light arrows and three dark arrows. Just write a word or two in the arrows above to remind you of each memory.
Look at your three positive memories. Remember them in “experience” mode. Make the memory even more intense. Crank up the feelings by remembering more details that you might have forgotten. Make it more real than you remember it. Intensify it. Enjoy it even more.
Look at your three negative not so positive memories. Why would you evaluate them in such a way? As we learned in previous chapters, your critical voice might be getting down on you for having done such a dumb not smartthing. Take the signal out of the memory, by turning that voice down.
Remember to ask yourself empowering questions. “What’s the matter with me?” is the wrong not the right kind of question. “What could I learn that would transform those painful challenging events into valuable lessons?” This is a more empowering question.
Don’t get sucked into a painful memory. See it from perspective. Watch yourself up there on the television screen going through a challenging experience. Notice how you handle the situation. Notice what you can learn from it. Don’t feel it.
If you do this faithfully, you might begin to notice that the less positive memories are turning from down to up—from dark to light. You might begin to wonder why you labeled them as less positive in the first place. How could something that caused you to grow so much and gain so much wisdom be labeled anything other than a fully positive, vibrantly up experience?
Some people say you can’t change your past. Oh, yes you can! You can remember your past successes even more vividly, more powerfully, more experientially. You can remember your so-called failures more successfully, with more wisdom and learning. By doing this, your past becomes a more powerful resource for you.
As a friend of ours, Clive Swersky, says, “You have to take your ows and turn them into wows.”
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE: THREE WAYS TO
MAKE YOUR DREAMS A REALITY
How do you think about your future? Is your future predominantly positive? Negative? Or neutral? Do you have hope for the future? Can you imagine a brighter day? By brightening the memories of your past, you can brighten your future. Your dreams are future memories. They are events in the future that haven’t occurred yet. Can your dreams of the future have an effect on your daily activities in the now? Absolutely!
Just as memories of the past can affect your present, future memories of planned events can make your life today more exciting. By transforming your past memories, you can change your past. For most people, however, the past contains painful experiences that create fear for the present and dread for the future. Look at the illustration below. Here is someone who has a few positive memories that they’re disconnected from and many intensely negative memories that they’re fully connected to. These fears ruin their past, infect their now, and destroy their future.
This is a fearful life: past, present, and future. The goal is to change the past by intensifying the positive memories and disconnecting from the not-so-positive memories. You don’t want the signal from intensely painful memories to bleed into now and infect the future, do you? When you think of your past, you want to remember it as a series of predominatly positive experiences. Yes, there were some bumps, but you learned from them and moved on. There will also be some bumps in the future, but you can handle them. This gives you peace in the now (Life was and is good) and hope for the future (Life will be good), as in the illustration on the next page.
In daily life, most people get disappointed very easily. They are hoping for good things to happen and expecting positive outcomes, and if instead they experience a temporary setback, they get quickly disappointed. Then they dwell on this disappointment by conjuring up sad pictures—images of themselves missing out on their dreams, failing to meet their obligations, making their friends and family unhappy.
To compound this, they have angry conversations with themselves: “How stupid!” They magnify it by asking themselves disempowering questions: “What’s the matter with me?” These thoughts send immediate signals to their body in the form of negative vibrations. Almost instantly they begin to feel the effects of these thoughts in the form of discouragement, disillusionment, and despair. This affects their now immediately and negatively impacts their future. The thought of succeeding is dampened with doubt. Their motivation is lessened. They just don’t feel like trying. They procrastinate—put it off until tomorrow, when they’ll feel better.
Well, if this has ever been your pattern, it’s time to fix it. You don’t have time for this kind of “stinking thinking,” as Zig Ziglar has often said. Like we learned in the last chapter, you can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought. You only have time for a positive environment. When a setback happens, it’s more empowering to be positively expecting it. Instead of being disappointed, you’re anticipating the positive lessons and the wisdom you’ll gain as a result of the setback. Setbacks are just stepping-stones to make you stronger.
You actually welcome a change in plans. Plan B is like a surprise present you get to unwrap. Your imaging process is positive. You’re looking for the good: “There’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.” Since you’re looking for it, you find it. You’re asking yourself more empowering questions: “Why would God love me enough to give me this growth experience? What could I learn from this to share with people who might be having this same experience?”
Skeptics call this Pollyanna thinking. They are sometimes right. At times, there is no good that comes from an experience other than the opportunity to exercise your positive-thinking muscles and strengthen the habit of constantly trying to find the good in everything.
This form of thinking infuses your experience with a sense of optimism. Life is basically good. People are predominantly good. This is one of the reasons why watching a lot of television is such a waste of precious time. How many episodes of Law & Order can you watch until you begin to form the attitude that life is basically bad and that people are predominantly evil? Watch the news and ask yourself, “Does the newscast generally portray the best of humanity or the worst?” Focus on activities that foster the best in yourself and others and you’ll begin to attract the best like a magnet.
There is always sufficiency. Start with the consciousness that there
is always enough, and you’ll find enough. If you start with the
consciousness that there is not enough, then you’ll find not-enoughness.
—MARK VICTOR HANSEN
So let’s create positive, powerful, impactful future memories. Here are three techniques.
VIRTUALIZE IT
The first technique we’ve already discussed in chapter 2. We call it virtualization. Imagine your most ideal lifestyle in all five senses! Step into your future dream and imagine what it feels like to experience this lifestyle. Feel it. Smell it. Taste it. Hear it. See it. Make your dreams more real than your fears.
Don’t Wait! Experience Your Dream Now
If your fears are overwhelming and intense, then they’ll blot out your dreams like an eclipse of the sun. Make sure your dreams are brighter than your fears. Step into your future dreams in all five senses. Imagine how good life could be if you stepped into your future dreams more often. How good could life be if you tamed your inner critical voices and learned to follow your true voice? How good could life be if whenever you experienced a bump in the road, you immediately looked for the positive in it and instantly learned from it? This kind of thinking would transform every bump into a stepping-stone for success.
This virtual place is a space of awareness, a place of total receiving.
How can you access your future dreams, brilliance, wisdom, love, joy, happiness, and infinite ability and capabilities? There’s only one way—virtualization.
Virtualization is a form of meditation where you go to a state of having something before you have it. It starts as an idea, concept, hunch, notion, hope, or dream. You cogitate, ruminate, meditate, and ponder it again and again in your heart. You feel it, touch it, taste it, and celebrate it.
Everything Starts as an Idea
Ideas start as fiction, become theory, and are then melded into fact.
Moneymaking ideas are deep-seated. You start to inwardly smile and joyously desire the next step or idea or dream that you want to come true.
Inside our minds we can orchestrate anything we want to be, do, or have. As we virtualize it, we five-sense it into reality. Your five inner senses need to embrace it completely, as though it was a true living reality, before it comes to be an actual truth.
For example, virtualize a situation where you write out and carry with you a $1 million check paid to yourself for excellent products, royalties, or services rendered.
You need to feel and touch it—that is, wear your ideal watch in your mind before you buy it, smell the new-car smell, hear the compliments before you achieve them. Taste the meals of celebration that you will enjoy. Hear the congratulations of those closest and most important to you, giving meaning and purpose to your accomplishments. Believe in its existence before whatever it is hardens into fact.
Your inner being is an exciting place to move, live, and be. It has the predictive values of all of your future experiences.
Your desire goes into your subconscious as an idea and gets transformed into a result. One idea goes in and the entire universe responds.
Your state of mind creates your state of result. Your state of heart creates your state of future. Your state of future is boundless.
Experience just how boundless it is by downloading the free e-book Say Hello to Riches at www.cashinaflashthebook.com/gift.
What positive images of your future are you creating in your mind, multiple times, every day?
Feeling Is the Virtualization
It is important to stress again that your heart and mind need to be in alignment for what you virtualize to come to fruition.
The only way for you to have the end result you desire is if you are brimming with self-worth, so your creative mind is thrilled that you are going to have more wealth.
So the question becomes, do you have a high enough self-worth to create a high future value?
It is time for you to destroy the old model of trying to meet outrageous standards and believing you are not good enough. Who set those standards, anyway?
Get comfortable and try this virtualization now: As you read these words, experience voices, visions, and vibrations in all five senses. Don’t just read these words, FEEL these words.
I am happy.
I am joyful.
I am blessed.
I am a blessing to myself, all others, and the planet.
I am healthy physically, mentally, and spiritually.
I know that I have an inner and outer self.
I can easily see my outer self by looking in a mirror.
I can see my inner self by breathing deeply and going quietly within.
I love working on my inner self.
I know the road to my self-improvement and development is always under construction. I am on an exciting, never-ending journey that delights me.
I feel good inside and it shows up outside. My face ultimately reflects and radiates the truths that I have held deep within my inner being.
I am elated and thankful to do my personal inner work.
I love decorating my inner mind—my “home entertainment center”—with images that are good, true, lovely, noble, and of high report.
I live in the assumptions of my wishes fulfilled.
I have fixity of thought and feeling. I know that my words and vibrations shall not return to me void and shall accomplish the missions where I send them. I dream it and it comes to pass.
My imagination is my looking glass.
It is our goal to instill in you a strong sense of self so that no matter what you may encounter in your future, especially your financial future, you can handle it with ease.
In summary, the first visioning technique for creating powerful future memories is virtualization. The second technique is to megasize your dream.
MEGASIZE IT
Ponder this powerful quote from Arnold J. Toynbee:
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
Create a vision that is over the top. Don’t aim for a realistic goal; aim “at some more ambitious goal beyond it.” Make your dream bigger than life. Don’t just supersize it, megasize it!
Warning: Objects in Mirror Are Larger Than They Appear
Since we live in a world where the predominant messaging is negative, we need to overcompensate for this negativity. The little sign on the side mirror of your car reads: Warning: objects in mirror are larger than they appear. Most media reports paint the world in a negative light. Warning: objects in the news appear worse than they really are.
You need to paint your world not just in a positive light but in a brilliantly positive light—almost too bright. Learn to make things much better than they appear to be in all the mirrors of your life—your rear-view mirror, your near-view mirror, and your peer-view mirror. Past, present, and future.
For example, our first book, The One Minute Millionaire, was a huge success. But right from the first brainstorm, we envisioned our book ultimately being made into a feature-length movie. The probability of any book being made into a movie is highly unlikely. One in a million.
We megasized our movie vision by writing an imaginary future article for the Hollywood Reporter, one of the major media outlets for the movie industry. Before a word of our book had been written, and before a sentence of the screenplay had been put on paper, we went into the future in our imagination and wrote the following fictional report on what we envisioned:
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
The One Minute Millionaire Makes Movie History #1 Movie in America Completely Sold Out Thirty Days BEFORE It Opens
If you want the hottest ticket in America, you’re too late. You’ll have to wait for at least another four weeks. The One Minute Millionaire is already sold out for each showing of its five-day opening week, with over ten million tickets presold to movie-goers nationwide.
For the first time in movie history, there will be no lines forming in front of movie theaters to purchase tickets for the release of a new movie. The tickets have all been sold. This is good news to studio executives, who usually spend the last few days before the launch of a major movie in frenetic strategy meetings or in nervous group hand-wringing sessions. Not so with this movie. Just like the title suggests, the money is already in the bank gathering interest. It is a guaranteed winner no matter what promotional magic competing studios try to pull out of their hat.
What made all of this possible was a completely new marketing model for promoting a blockbuster movie. Advance tickets to the new movie have been in presale for almost a year and the success of this innovative campaign has exceeded all… (see Millionaire on page 76)
What sets this imaginary newspaper article apart is its wildly improbable outcome. In crafting this story, we purposely aimed far beyond what anyone could realistically expect.
We went for the wow.
We’ve shopped our movie idea to most Hollywood studios through dozens of dead-end meetings, yet we never lost touch with our ultimate goal: The One Minute Millionaire as a hugely successful movie in theaters around the world reaching ten million people on the very first opening day. After eight years, our constant enthusiasm has finally paid off. We’ve landed a major movie deal with an award-winning production house. The screenplay for The One Minute Millionaire is finally complete, and as you read these words, the money is being raised to manifest our dream. It’s happening! Wow!
For the promotion for this book, we see ourselves on the cover of Time magazine for having helped get America out of the most crippling “repression” since the Depression of 1929.
Our hero, Sir Winston Churchill, said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” To maintain enthusiasm in the face of failure, you need to create a vision big enough to be enthusiastic about—to be worth the risk of failure. By challenging you to aim for a more ambitious goal, our intention is to make the goal of financial freedom appear less difficult.
HABITUALIZE IT
The first step to create a wow future vision is to virtualize it. The next step is to megasize it. The final step is to habitualize it. Step into your vision several times a day and imagine how good it could be. As you go to bed tonight, wander through your dream home and your dream lifestyle. What kind of art is on the walls? What kind of enlightened activities resonate around your life? Keep this clearly in your mind, especially as you encounter negative people or circumstances.
MAKE A HABIT OF SUCCESS THINKING
Repetition is the mother of learning. If you really want your dream, drive it deep into your mind and heart. Every day, step into your dream and make it more real than your fears—over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
If you do not see great riches in your imagination, you will never see them in your bank balance.
—NAPOLEON HILL
Every day, as you move through this negative world and the “realists” that surround you, you will be tempted to abandon enthusiasm for your ultimate dream lifestyle. Expect it. Expect resistance. People don’t like such positive thinking. It makes them uncomfortable. It’s not realistic, they say. It’s even ridiculous.
Whenever you experience the skeptics’ stare, just remember that they are seeing your dreams through walls of their own fear. Since their fears are more real than their dreams, all they can see is fear. And that’s all they ever get—fear!
Do you want their fears or your dreams?
Stop. Ask yourself that last question one more time until you really get it.
Do you want their fears or do you really, really, really want your dreams?
Smile as skeptics tell you what might go wrong. Agree that they might have a point, but keep bringing your wow into the now and nothing can stop you.
Whatever you focus on, you manifest. If you focus on your fear, fear will expand in your life. Fear will grow. Fear will find a place in your home. Don’t let fear into your home. The home of your body is a sacred temple. Don’t let fear into the temple of your body. Focus on your fortune and your fortune will expand. Focus on your blessings and your blessings will expand. Focus only on what you want. If you focus on what you don’t want, what you don’t want will sprout up all around you. So the key is to focus intensely on what you want. Be convinced that you’re going to get it. Have a burning desire to get it and it will begin to be attracted to you like a magnet.
Virtualize. Megasize. Habitualize.
And you will realize your fortune. It awaits you in your thought escrow, requiring the requisite stimulus—your feeling that you deserve to have it. You merely need to vibrate at that level of accepting your desired outcomes and ultimately and inevitably it will be yours.
As your wax on/wax off assignment, we challenge you to write a newspaper story or magazine article about your future success. Imagine you’re a reporter chronicling your success in a positive news story. Take off your realistic thinking hat and stretch your imagination to wild extremes. How can you succeed beyond your wildest dreams if you haven’t thought of what those wild dreams might be?