Day 8

Changing Your Habits

Over the past seven days you’ve looked at how your thoughts create your reality. You’ve explored the beliefs that you currently hold about money and about being wealthy. You took time to look at your current financial circumstances. By doing so, you gained an insight into how your thoughts have created your circumstances, and not the other way round. Now it’s time to change your mind about money, so today we’re examining how to change your habits.

If you wish to change the results in your life, you need to change the thoughts that have created those results. By changing your thoughts about money, you can transform yourself into a Money Magnet!

Are you ready to change your mind about money? Are you ready to let go of limiting beliefs and well-worn phrases? Are you prepared to behave differently around money?

It takes courage to change a life pattern. We live in a society of the quick, easy fix. We want to be transformed simply by reading a book. Your brain chooses the option with the least resistance. Your natural tendency is to stay in the “comfort zone” that you’ve created for yourself. Thinking the same thoughts perpetuates a cycle in our lives.

So, to become a Money Magnet you need to adopt a different approach. To change your financial circumstances dramatically, you need to change your thoughts and your beliefs about money dramatically. You need to clear out the clutter of old, limiting thoughts to create space for new possibilities.

The Power of Ceremony

One of the most powerful ingredients of my workshops is the use of ceremony to release old beliefs and to set an intention for a new era of abundance. Sometimes this is all that is needed and the results can start to manifest within 24 hours.

Ceremony works on both our conscious and unconscious thoughts, which is why it can be so effective in changing a habit.

It can feel a little silly performing a ceremony, but that is the whole point. It can be an uncomfortable process and, as such, it pushes us beyond our normal comfort zone—it literally shifts our energetic vibration!

Performing a ceremony is like lifting a signpost up to the universe to announce the start of a new pattern. It can be very powerful.

What Makes Up a Ceremony?

The main ingredients of an effective ceremony are the use of intention and ritual.

Think of some of the ceremonies inherent in our culture and how powerful they can be in changing our lives. The ceremony of marriage can be so powerful that the connection remains very strong even in the case of divorce. For this reason, it can be a good idea to perform a type of ceremony to recognize divorce.

Many of our culture’s traditional ceremonies are dying out, and without ceremony we risk losing our focus on what is important.

This book is about money. I wonder if you already have any rituals with your money? For example, do you always pay all your bills on a particular day each month? Do you use a certain desk? When you go to see your bank manager, do you wear a well-chosen outfit and take the car rather than walk?

Do note that if you have no rituals around money, you may not be treating it with enough respect. Resolve today to build in some rituals to the way you handle your money. For example, schedule a regular time to do your bills each month or to check your expenditure and earnings sheets, and do these things in a way that makes you happy.

Enhancing Rituals with Intentions

We all use some ritual in our lives, from cleaning our teeth to washing the dishes. The trick is to enhance the power of a ritual by combining it with powerful thoughts.

For example, when paying your bills, take enough time to get comfortable at your favorite chair and desk. Maybe use your very special “lucky” pen. Then take a few moments and a few deep breaths and reflect on your ability to pay these bills. Think of how fortunate you are to have attracted what money you have to pay the bills. Consider how lucky you are to have a roof over your head and food on your plate. Dwell a short while on all that you have for which you are grateful. Gratitude breeds more gratitude. You are celebrating your wealth every time you pay for something.

Money is simply energy. It is meant to flow from one person to another. Paying your bills keeps the flow going and creates space for new riches to come into your life. Enjoy paying your bills and enhance that enjoyment with the use of ceremony.

Let me share with you some guidelines and examples that I have used over the years, to help you get a feel for the key elements involved.

The “How to Become a Money Magnet!” Ceremony

Inevitably, a ceremony is considerably enhanced when it is witnessed by several people. If we make a statement to ourselves, it will have less power than if we share our statement with another, and even more power if we share our wishes with our family, our friends, or any other supportive group.

Each “How to Become a Money Magnet!” workshop ceremony is created by the people in the room at the time, each person contributing an idea or an action for the whole group.

Typical contributions include solemnly lighting a candle for each person, providing a shoulder massage for each participant, reading out a poem, or creating a flower arrangement. We adapt the ceremony to the season, so that in summer we often walk over to some nearby woods and use the river in our ceremony.

At the core of the ceremony is the opportunity for each person to declare solemnly to the group that he or she is now letting go of old, inhibiting money beliefs such as “I’m not good enough to receive.” The person will then symbolically dispose of this old belief. Ways of doing this have included ceremoniously placing a written copy of the old belief into a fire or into a river stream to be washed away. Feel free to be creative with how you wish to do this.

Ceremony Guidelines

• Set aside plenty of time.
• Plan ahead so that you have everything you need to hand.
• Incorporate elements that are special to you, whether objects, poetry, or specific movements.
• Have a clear intention about whether to clear or to attract something, or both, one after the other.
• Where possible, announce out loud your intention, ideally to witnesses.
• Be fully present, whether performing the ceremony or present as a witness.
• Incorporate elements that are outside your normal behavior or environment.

You can create your own ceremonies at home or in the office—wherever feels right for you. So come on, take the plunge, and celebrate the start of your new era of abundance!

The money is already there. The only thing preventing you from being rich is you.