Take action – how this helps the Law of Attraction

Here is a true story which will prove that if you take action, towards your goal, it can lead to massive gains.

So there we were, my wife and I sitting in our back garden one Bank Holiday, dreaming about what we could do with the back end of the garden, which was an eyesore. We would love to build a little patio and flower bed. At that time we had lived in our house for 12 years and the job always seemed too large to tackle.

There was a mess of compost, discarded masonry and a concrete slab wall. We decided to brighten it up, with some trellising and climbing plants. It would hide the wall, at least. So in that moment of decision we jumped in to the car and went to our local garden centre, to buy some trellising and climbing plants.
I will tell you what happened next in a short while.

The Law of Attraction

I have read The Secret and many others books, which talk about the Law of Attraction. I also think that there is something in it, however, I don’t know how, it just seems to work. I’ve actually written a book called Is the Law of Attraction Real and Does it Work?. Basically, if you focus on the outcomes you want in life, they seem to manifest – eventually. Sometimes, though, no matter how much visualisation and visioning you do,  some goals seem so far away. Why is this?

I think I’ve found out, although this is no secret – it’s because we need to take Action.

Taking any action, no matter how small, consistently and whilst keeping your vision in mind, really does work. We should call it the Law of AttrAction.

What action should you take?

I’m here to tell you today that it doesn’t matter. Do something, anything, even if it is only a slight movement towards your goal. In another post, I told you about a great book by Al Seconda called the 15 Second Principle, in which the author tells us that even working for just 15 seconds per day on your goal will work miracles. How can this be? This is because it is so easy to do, the emotional part of the mind doesn’t perceive this as a threat and so you are less likely to procrastinate.

For example, maybe your goal is to write your own blog. If you committed to writing for 15 seconds a day, you soon be churning out regular books. I know because this is what I do. You see, once you get started, the Law of Inertia kicks in and you continue to work. You will be maintaining the habit and just like bad habits, good habits, once they are ingrained, are very hard to stop.
How else can you take action? What if the actions take longer than 15 seconds? For instance, renovating the house?

Breakdown the project into small parts. What is the next action that will move you forward? To test if it’s an action, write it and check if there is a verb in the sentence, for example:

Go to the X to get some Y
Phone X about Y.
Physically move X to the Y
Email Fred about Ted

In our renovation example, you would split this goal down to a smaller project first, such as: Decorating the spare room. A good first action would therefore be to: Go to the garden shed and take an inventory of the painting materials that you have.

Once you have done this you could plan action number 2, which could be: write a list of materials required for decorating the spare room.
Action 3 could be: put a date in the diary to go to the DIY centre to buy the remaining materials.

The Unschedule

Another method for overcoming procrastination is to use an Unschedule, as described by Neil Fiore in his book the Now Habit, which I recommend. Very simply the method involves blocking out your diary for the week. This would include all the fun things, appointments, commitments and things like exercise. What is left is the available time for projects. The idea is then to plan in your Project time and the reward you will get for doing it.

Sometimes the result of a goal is out of your control, for example becoming Prime Minister or winning gold medal at the Olympics. Focusing on the result, all the time, is a sure way for you to fail. When working towards these types of goal, successful people fall in love with the process of attaining it. They may have the ultimate goal in mind but their focus is on improving the day-to-day skills they require. The repeated actions become the focus not the final achievement.

An athlete will learn to derive happiness from the actual training. The Olympic Gold Medal maybe in the back of the mind but they will fall in love with the Dawn runs. In a similar way, an entrepreneur can fall in love with the process of prospecting for new clients, whilst the end business goals will be at the back of the mind.

So what happened next after the visit to the garden centre?

It didn’t take long to put up the trellising, so I decided to plant the climbers as well. As I dug a small hole for the second plant, the spade crashed against a stone about 10 cm down. So I adjusted a few cm back to see if I could dislodge it – crash, again I struck the stone. I moved back about 10 cm – crash. I thought, “Wow, this may be a flagstone”. As I removed the turf above, it was clear that it was a flagstone. Ok so I thought I would remove the turf bit by bit until I had uncovered the whole flag. But oh no – another flagstone, then another. After an hour of back breaking digging, I had indeed uncovered an intact patio, which the top soil had hid for at least 20 years. Over the next few weekends, I transformed the area into the patio and the flowerbed we had dreamed of.

So the next time you have a dream or goal, which seems just too big to start. Start anyway; you never know what you might uncover.