“If you are not con­sciously choos­ing to live a life of abun­dance, wealth and health, than you are sub­con­sciously choos­ing to live a life of poor, un­healthy and lim­ited.”

Wal­lace Wat­tles said that and I’ve come to re­late, com­pre­hend and ad­here to that prin­ci­pal in my life and the lives of the clients, groups, or­ga­ni­za­tions and cor­po­ra­tions I work with. We can­not live a life of great­ness on the out­side un­til we learn how to come from the place of great­ness within. It just won’t work in re­verse.

What a great segue, from the “Free­dom from Strug­gle” ar­ti­cle in the Au­gust, Magic Hap­pens Mag­a­zine, to open­ing up great lev­els of ex­pan­sion in life! Al­most like I planned it that way. (lol) To be hon­est though, my monthly mes­sages come to me. I don’t go out seek­ing to find them. They show up in ex­am­ples or in­sights for me and all I have to do to re­ceive them is re­main open. Not al­ways an easy thing to do!

My hope for this month is that I can in­spire you to spend some time go­ing within, ac­knowl­edg­ing that gi­ant within you. That en­tity that holds all the power to cre­ate what­ever you would love to be, do, have, ex­pe­ri­ence, re­ceive and give in your life. In do­ing so, pick one area of your life that you would love to im­prove.

(Note: You can listen to the audio version of this article, look further down.)

Maybe it’s your health and well-be­ing. That yoga class, or mas­sage you keep putting off. Or maybe it’s that doc­tor or den­tist ap­point­ment that you just can’t seem to find the time for. Or maybe for you, it’s love re­la­tion­ship that you de­sire or that you crave more from your pre­sent re­la­tion­ship than your ex­pe­ri­enc­ing. Maybe it’s your work, and you just don’t feel the pas­sion in what your do­ing. Or it could pos­si­bly be your time and money free­dom. I had a CEO once tell me, “Joseph, make sure your al­ways plan­ning for your next ad­ven­ture.” What’s your next ad­ven­ture? Maybe it’s time you started plan­ning for it.

In or­der to bring about ex­pan­sion in your life, it’s an in­side out job. Noth­ing ful­fill­ing can hap­pen on the out­side, un­til the in­ner ex­pan­sion has taken place. And I’ve come to rec­og­nize that in­ner work is, in a large way, the ex­pan­sion of our par­a­digms, pat­terns and “Up­per Lim­its” ac­cord­ing to Gay Hen­dricks in his book: The Big Leap.

One of my fa­vorite quotes from Al­bert Ein­stein is:

“You cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it in the first place.”

One of the great­est blocks to a life that you would love, is your think­ing. Have you ever started out on an en­deavor with ex­cite­ment and pas­sion, only to find your thoughts min­i­miz­ing the pos­si­bil­ity, un­til there is­n’t much ex­cite­ment left? We have the can­did abil­ity to take our own dreams and vi­sions and squash them to smither­ines be­fore tak­ing a sin­gle ac­tion to bring­ing life to them.

That’s how so many peo­ple live their lives, with scraps of real love, real hap­pi­ness, real joy, real love for their life. And I find most peo­ple don’t even re­al­ize they are do­ing so.

I be­lieve I men­tioned last month that I bought my son, Joey a new car over the 4th of July. One of the agree­ments he and I had was that he would sell his cur­rent car, to cover a por­tion of the cost of the new car. He and I spend some time set­ting a vi­sion for how ef­fort­lessly the car would sell, to the per­fect per­son, who would love the ve­hi­cle.

While I was in the process of de­liv­er­ing the car to Michi­gan, Joey called me and very ex­cit­edly told me that “Some­one was com­ing to look at buy­ing his car!” He was re­ally lit up about it and how closely it matched the vi­sion he set for the sell­ing process. Then, in his very next sen­tence he stated, “but he is a me­chanic and will find any lit­tle fault in the car and only of­fered me 25% of what I’m ask­ing.” I’m not kid­ding you when I say, his ex­cite­ment went from 100 to 10 in less than a sec­ond.

I asked Joey to pause for a sec­ond and to look at the facts of his sit­u­a­tion.

FACT NUM­BER 1: He listed the car for sale

FACT NUM­BER 2: Some­one had enough in­ter­est to set up a time to look into pur­chas­ing the ve­hi­cle

FACT NUM­BER 3: the per­son go­ing to see the ve­hi­cle was a me­chanic

The rest of Joey’s min­i­miz­ing story was non-fact based and com­pletely made up by his imag­i­na­tion. Once he could see this, he un­der­stood how he was uti­liz­ing his imag­i­na­tion to cre­ate this down­graded po­ten­tial re­al­ity. We were able to work on the ini­tial vi­sion Joey cre­ated for sell­ing his car and I’m ex­cited to share with you that the me­chanic who came to look at the ve­hi­cle did pur­chase the car and a rea­son­able $200 re­duc­tion from ask­ing price.

So let me ask you, for this month, are you will­ing to ex­pand your life? To see what’s pos­si­ble be­yond what you’re cur­rently ex­pe­ri­enc­ing in your life?

If so, what area of your life could ap­ply you be­gin to “no­tice what your notic­ing” and when you re­al­ize the min­i­miz­ing process hap­pen­ing, break it down to the facts you have in front of you and then pur­posely bring your think­ing to the ex­panded vi­sion you would de­sire.

We are each cre­at­ing every day of our life. Are you go­ing to choose to con­sciously cre­ate, or sub­con­sciously? I hold a strong vi­sion you choose the first op­tion!

Bless­ings,

Joseph