Hi there and G’day from sunny Australia…Byron Bay to be exact.

This morning I woke up and thought what a good idea it would be to really practise what I preach! (Yes, I know that we are quoted as saying that we use all the techniques we teach, but to be honest we don’t use every bit of advice we offer to our friends, family and clients every day as that would be as impractical as it would be stressful!

But I woke up really early today. I haven’t been sleeping that well. I don’t know whether it’s the change of season, if I’m stressed myself and got insomnia or if I’m developing more of an entrepreneurial mindset and starting to be more exhilarated and needing less sleep! Either way I thought it was about time I began to change tack a bit on this Soul Search. Me blog and moved away a bit from stress and anxiety and talked a bit more about some of the other personal development topics we have personally found invaluable.

So with that in mind I drove around to Max’s house….he just lives around the corner.. and as the weather was a perfect sub tropical winter’s day… 24 degrees Celsius and radiant sunshine, I suggested a walk on the beach before we got back down to work and immersed ourselves in more stress. (Some of you may know, we’ve just co authored a book on stress relief called The Anti Stress Book, so we are reading and taking about stress virtually all day long even if we’re not actually stressed ourselves).

So anyway, I believe in making the very best possible use of my time so when we got there I suggested we spend half an hour each just brainstorming with each other all the things we feel grateful for. What a way to start the day! Consciously utilizing The Power Of Gratitude is an extremely important component of attracting to ourselves all the abundance and happiness we desire and deserve in our life. Developing an attitude of sincere gratitude for your current blessings unleashes the power for receiving many more. Uttering it out load and being witnessed by another person to boot is extremely powerful, as well as provoking insight and thoughts about other things for which to be grateful and which we might never have come up with independently.

So why do Max and I value gratitude as perhaps the definitive personal development tool? Well, when you are in a state of sincere gratitude your energy or vibrational resonance is one of receptivity and harmony. You resonate acceptance and joy, and as a result project a much higher vibrational frequency than when you are complaining, stressed out and focusing on lack. Being grateful is exactly what attracts to you the events, conditions and circumstances that you desire, and the more you focus on them in gratitude, the more you will attract. (The more you focus on lack, the more lack you will also attract).

To better understand what we mean by the resonance created by gratitude, you might like to consider the following comparison…

Imagine yourself as a giant magnet. Whatever you are feeling, whether it be love, fear, anger, happiness, joy, gratitude, resistance etc. you are basically creating a magnetic force that attracts and draws to you events, conditions and circumstances which are in direct correlation to what you are feeling. Fear of something creates a magnetic force that will attract more of what you fear, but expressing gratitude for any situation projects a profound magnetic force that draws to you more of what you are expressing gratitude for. In other words, gratitude puts you in a congruent vibrational state of resonance which attracts the kind of energies you desire and deflects those which you do not.

Briefly, any time you are not expressing gratitude for an outcome, you are in reality resisting the outcome which in turn places your focus on not wanting that outcome. When this happens, where are your thoughts and emotions engrossed? On what you don’t want, agreed? When you focus on what you don’t want, you are effectively creating a virtual ‘magnetic force’ which only serves to draw to you more of that which you do not want or are resisting.

So there we were walking along the perfect beach under a cloudless blue sky and it was pretty easy to see why we felt grateful, as you can imagine. But let’s say that hypothetically there wasn’t so much to be thankful for, well how would you set about doing this exercise instead of feeling cranky and unappreciative? People counter all the time with, “How in the world can I be in a state of gratitude when everything seems to be going wrong?” when I respectfully suggest that gratitude is the fastest way to attract joy, happiness, prosperity and abundance into our lives. It is the key which opens the door to wealth and is an essential ingredient of the Law of Attraction.

First of all it’s important to recognize the importance of accepting responsibility for whatever is going on in your life. All the events, conditions and circumstances that you’re currently experiencing in your life are the symptoms and consequences of the thoughts and emotions you’ve chosen either consciously, or more likely unconsciously, sometime in the past. It’s as a result of those thoughts and emotions that you are experiencing whatever outcome you currently are. Remember, you are the one that thinks your thoughts. Your thoughts do not think you. In the same way, the emotions you are experiencing serve as a measure and are a reflection of the quality of thoughts that you are thinking. The way you feel is a direct indication of the balance of your emotions, so if you could feel better, switch your attention to something you could feel grateful for.

Since it is you who is responsible for attracting and creating the things you don’t want in your life, in the same way as you are attracting that which you DO want, then it must consequently stand to reason that you are capable of transforming the thoughts and emotions to blame for creating the negative results…. which will then produce the result you do desire!! Easy peasy…

This is why both Max and I believe that if you want to change any aspect of your life that’s not working for you, you need to change your mindset… and as a result you’ll change your life! Just about all the quintessential work of personal development is also about making sure that your conscious beliefs and your SUB conscious beliefs are aligned, and this is where the publications and products at Soul Search Publishing come in.

This week I’ve talked about why gratitude is so important if we want to grow and prosper. Next time I’ll explain to you how best to set about creating more gratitude in your life and give you some more of the how to’s plus some specific structures you can use to magnify and attract more of it. Till then I hope you have an awesome day focusing on being grateful.

Sandhan