Habitual Wealth

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

- Stephen R. Covey

By loosening our identification with our limiting habits and replacing them with more empowering ones, we can manifest the life we want. In this article, I’ll share a powerful way to effortlessly change your habits.

Who am I? If you go into this question deeply, you realize that the you that you have been identifying with for most of your life is nothing but a collection of habitual thoughts and actions. Take them away and you are left with nothing. The self is just a mental construct. This is good news because if the self that we have been attaching to doesn’t exist beyond a self created thought structure, there is nothing about the self that is important to defend and maintain. Why not create a new self that has the potential to achieve way more?

The process of creating a more evolved self is somewhat like reverse engineering a piece of technology. When a company creates an invention, other companies will take it apart and figure out how it works. When they have an intimate knowledge of the function of all the parts, they can then construct their version of the invention. The point here is that the technology already exists. We just have to figure out how it works and apply that knowledge. In our case, the advanced technology we will model is ourselves in a more evolved state, and we will do this through the practice of visualization.

By experiencing life through the eyes of your more evolved self, you will get an understanding of the things that self does. Remember, the self is nothing more than a collection of habits, so pay particular attention to the habits that your more evolved self has.

Sit with your eyes closed and when you feel comfortable visualize yourself living your dream life. Make the vision as clear and emotionally rich as possible, using all five of your senses. Imagine doing the things that you would do in that life. What kind of house would you live in? What kind of vacations would you take? What kind of attitude would you have? Get as detailed as you can, and play the vision like a movie in your mind. The difference here is that you will want to experience this movie in first person perspective. It is very important to feel like this is really happening, like if you opened your eyes this vision would be the reality you see.

Do this exercise for about 10 minutes or so every day and you will start to imprint your visual memory with these images. The burned-in images from these visualizations will form the framework to build our new habits.

Once you begin to get familiar with this evolved self in detail, sit down and write out the habits that the more evolved self has. Make a list of the kinds of things you would do daily if you lived that dream life now. This list will become an action plan for you to follow to achieve that life you want. If you notice that your wealthy self exercises every morning, start exercising every morning. If your wealthy self follows their intuition more often, start doing that, too. The more you can match the habits of your wealthy self, the more you will start attracting the wealth you want into your life.

Our habits are the programming mechanism for our unconscious beliefs about what we can and cannot do. Because it is repeated over and over, a habit conditions our mind into believing things are so. This can have unfortunate consequences if it is unconscious. However, by consciously taking advantage of this process, we can program our mind to achieve anything and everything we dream of.