Personal Growth

The Top 3 Ways People Fail at Using the Law of Attraction

Thought, backed by strong desire, has the tendency to transmute itself into its physical equivalent.

-Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

The Law of Attraction explains that you attract into your life whatever you think about. With the recent popularity of The Secret , and resurgence of books such as Think and Grow Rich , there has been a lot of new attention focused on The Law of Attraction. Science has also started providing new evidence to support The Law of Attraction- neurologists have found that simply thinking changes the brain. Recent books, such as Evolve Your Brain , explain the science behind The Law of Attraction in great detail:

The more we think the same thoughts, which produce the same chemicals, causing the body to have the same feelings, the more we become physically modified by our thoughts.

-Joe Dispenza, Evolve Your Brain

Unfortunately, the popularity of the Law of Attraction has also made available a lot of new material on the subject that is either 1) dumbed down for the masses, or 2) inaccurate. Clay Collins wrote and excellent post about this. The inaccurate information about the Law of Attraction leads to frustration when people try to manifest their intention and fail. In my own experience in manifesting my intentions, I’ve found three failures/mistakes that inhibited “the secret” from working:

3 Ways to Fail at Manifesting Your Intention

1) Not accepting your present reality

So long as we cannot accept what we are at any moment, we cannot change. Put yourself on the side of reality versus trying to fight reality.

-Nathaniel Branden, Honoring the Self

Before you can even begin to manifest your intention using the Law of Attraction, you must first accept your current reality, your current emotions, and your current life in its entirety. When you have a perfect vision of what you want to manifest in your life, but don’t accept your present, that is a recipe for disaster. You must fully accept and validate yourself and all of your emotions, with the goal of achieving your vision.

2) Basing your intention on a false belief

If you are basing your intention on a false belief, such as believing that more money will make you significantly happier, you will fail at manifesting. You may enjoy imagining how happy you will be after manifesting on your completely unrealistic, false belief. But your imagination is as far as the manifestation will go if it is based on a false belief.

3) No energy/emotion in what you are trying to manifest

Steve Pavlina wrote a great article about this, which explains, “Great content + no energy = an intention that won’t manifest anything but frustration.” For example, if you recite or meditate on your intention each day, but have no emotion attached to it, you won’t see results.

This also ties in with the #2 way of failing to manifest (basing your intention on a false belief), because if you are trying to manifest an intention based on a false belief, there’s only so much energy/emotion you will put into manifesting before you realize you are fooling yourself.