There is a good reason to know what we don’t want, and to spend a bit of time really thinking about it. It’s what we know we don’t want that helps us to determine what we do want. And it’s a common mistake we all make.

All too often, though, we tend to focus on what we don’t want. And then we stop there.

In a recent post, we talked about the importance of your emotions in visualizing and creating.
And if your feelings are so critical (and they are), think for a moment how you feel when you start to list all the things you don’t want.

Do you feel great? Inspired? Happy?

Nope. If you pay close attention, you will probably notice yourself clenching up, getting anxious, and maybe even getting a bit depressed.

That’s because your emotions (and the universe) don’t really hear the word ‘No’ or ‘I don’t want to.” Instead, they respond to the rest of the sentence.

Let’s try one. Imagine you are going on a vacation to Tahiti on an airplane, and you have really been looking forward to meeting your friends there. It’s a cloudy, stormy day, and you want to create a safe, smooth trip.

Spend a few minutes on the following sentences, and pay attention to your feelings as you do so:

• I don’t want to have a bumpy, jolting ride, where the plane rises and falls thousands of feet at a time, tossed around by wind currents.

• I don’t want a plane full of airsick people. More importantly, I don’t want to get airsick.

• I certainly don’t want to crash. I hate flying in bad weather.

• I don’t want to have to turn around midway there and get diverted to another airport because of the weather.

• I don’t want to have major delays and miss my connecting flight to Tahiti. The next flight isn’t for four days, and I’ll miss half my vacation if that happens.

• I don’t want delays to cause my luggage to get left behind, so that I don’t have my clothes or snorkel gear for days.

I’ll bet as you were reading through those sentences about what you don’t want, you found yourself remembering past vacations where some of that did happen. Or maybe you found yourself easily coming up with more horrors that you don’t want to happen.

It’s the Law of Attraction acting on your thoughts. Whatever you think about attracts more thoughts of the same nature.

So now let’s fix what we created, and spend some time imagining what we do want.

Again, spend a few minutes on the following types of sentences, and pay attention to your feelings as you do so:

• I want a smooth flight with happy people around me.

• I want my connections to be good, and my flights to be early.

• I want to quickly have us fly above the clouds and our trip will be as smooth as silk.

• I imagine myself falling asleep on the plane and waking up refreshed and excited to be in Tahiti.

• I see myself making new friends on the plane, and having them tell me about wonderful places to visit in Tahiti that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

• I can already see my friends meeting me at the Tahiti airport, waving and smiling.

Did you notice a difference in your feelings when you read these sentences? Did you find yourself coming up with more great ‘wants’ for your list?

Amazing, wasn’t it. And informative.

So now, when you sit to visualize, or even just throughout your day, when you catch yourself focusing on what you don’t want, acknowledge your desires and quickly switch to imagining what you DO want instead. You will quickly find yourself creating more of what you really want in your life.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.