Change your thoughts, Change your destiny

Today, as I write this, I have just finished reading for the third time – The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, first published 1963. The title is a quote from this book. You can get it on Kindle on Amazon for free at the moment. I paid 49p… (Not an affiliate link) This post has taken a long time to write, more than 4 weeks, but I needed to think about it. A bit deeper than my usual posts. Normal service will be resumed shortly!

Is it True?

Can our subconscious really influence the outcome of something, even seemingly random events? Many people experience wonderful results through prayer and/or meditation. Joseph Murphy was a minister. Born and raised a Catholic, he emigrated from Ireland to the US, where eventually he became a minister in the Divine Science church. You can find his wikipedia entry here, rather than me regurgitating it all.

It is impossible to prove, but I do think there is something in it. We all know people who have the cares of the world on their shoulders, and others who seem to sail through life with no problems. I have been trying it out of recent months, and sometimes I am really positively surprised. It does make me more aware of things around me, and the number of times I have said recently

• that’s amazing
• I nearly missed that
• I was just thinking about you when the phone rang / text/ email arrived…

Taking it to its logical conclusion, the book suggests that you can positively influence the outcome of things in your life and around you. My friends and I often joke about it, but three of us usually travel together to a lapidary club on a Monday afternoon. I generally drive. We often say, well before we get there, engage right brain, I’m thinking of a parking space just along road x. It is surprising how often there is one available. (Now this is a busy street, where parking spaces are rare!) A simple example, but if it works for parking places, what else can it work for? I have mentioned it before, but many years ago I attended a Mindstore course and Jack Black effectively told all the attendees how to do this! I have used it a lot over the years, and I would say I am probably on a 90% success rate!

My elderly aunt, sadly no longer with us, called it ‘the fluence’. If we were stuck behind a slow moving vehicle on a narrow road, she would say, I’ll put the fluence on him, he’ll turn left shortly. The same lady, if she lost something, would say – I’ll ask the little people when I go to bed tonight. (She was Irish, and was referring to leprechauns.)  90% or more of the time it worked! I didn’t realise it at the time, but she was just putting her subconscious to work.

Joseph Murphy refers to many incidents in his book, and I have since heard many people refer to how they changed their lives, by imaging something to be true. I read in a Paul McKenna book, Change Your Life in 7 Days, that before he became rich and wealthy, he cut and pasted huge numbers onto his bank statement, and kept telling himself they were for real. Many different books in this sphere use examples from recent history using words like

• “I am where I am because I believe in all possibilities” Whoopi Goldberg. Source Brainy Quote
• “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it”
  Jesse Jackson – Source Brainy quote
• “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was”  Muhammed Ali Source USA Today
• “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” Albert Einstein Source Brainy Quotes

My own personal experience

I read Paul McKenna’s Change Your Life in 7 days in 2006.  I suspect I have forgotten 99% of it, but one thing has stayed with me all the time since. It was to do with increasing your personal wealth, and measuring how it changes. I paraphrase slightly, but it was more than 10 years and I have passed the book on elsewhere, so I can’t refer to it, but I have had a quick look on Amazon using the ‘Look Inside’ feature. He quotes the Law of Attraction as “What You Focus on consistently, you get more of in your life”. This I firmly believe to be true. Which totally ties in with the quote from Joseph Murphy “Change your Thoughts, Change Your Destiny!”

Now in his chapter on Day 6 – Creating Money, among many other things, he suggests working out your Net Worth. I did this, and I still use his spreadsheet – it is saved on my PC called ‘The McKenna Measure’. I have kept it updated every single year since, including through the crash in 2008/9. It has several measures within it. What are your Assets? What are your liabilities? If you lost your job, how many days could you live without selling your home Your magic number for Financial Independence, etc

Back in 2006, we had already paid off our mortgage, our younger son was to graduate within the year, so after that we would be unlikely to have to fund young adult living expenses (I hadn’t realised then that our younger son had plans to travel the world!) So back in that time, we could loosely live for 5 years without having to sell the house. However, what we hadn’t realised was that in just a few years, the power of a guaranteed pension would kick in. i.e. short of dying, that money will turn up in our bank accounts, come hell or high water. (UK state pension approximates to the Social Security pension in US. You can live off it, but it is hardly generous… ) Add that to a workplace pension, supplemented by a pension pot,  the power of guaranteed income (aka pension) had a great influence on our curve. Effectively, we now struggle to run out of money, even in 30 or 40 years, however you calculate the figures. We aren’t spenders, although our travel budget is pretty large (I resist the word excessive!) It is what we planned for, we enjoy it, so why not? Other people have loads of meals out, or buy ‘stuff’. We don’t. We look at the long picture. (Our waistlines definitely don’t need any more food, and we definitely don’t want any extra things in our house.)

Read biographies of famous people and they all say in some form of words – I had a dream, I focused on it day and night, I believed it would happen.

So Where Next?

I’m going to continue to use some of the techniques. I could say – why not? what harm will it do? However, for it to work, you really have to believe in it, and by saying why not, it can’t hurt, immediately afterwards, you are already suggesting to your subconscious that it’s not that important.

I am already working towards a couple of goals, and have been since the beginning of the year using these techniques. I don’t want to share what they are here, because they are very personal, but I will certainly know when my subconscious has done the business! I look forward to it.

Make up your own mind! As you will see from the comments below Mr 39 Months thinks this is a good way to go, you can read his post here

If you would like to pin this, and please do, just click the image below. The photograph is taken where Donegal nearly touches Northern Ireland at the top of Lough Foyle. The reason I chose this photograph was to remember the many Irish people who sailed through this very point, en route to a new life in America, many of my family among them. While sad to say goodbye to their families, they were all dreaming of a better life, in the land of opportunity!  They were focused on the opportunities that lay ahead. So many achieved far more than they hoped for then.