The Law of Attraction, or Abundance Mindset

Let’s talk about abundance and the Law of Attraction. But first, observe the photo. 

This was one of our finds at Le Marche aux Puces-St. Ouen in Paris. Le Marche aux Puces-St. Ouen was just below the Louvre on my list of must-sees for our trip. This is the famous Paris Flea Market. Or one of them. They’re featured in every home design magazine. Clever interior designers are always touting their finds from this warren of stalls and alleys. Antique bargains, clever repurposed chairs. Even though we live with situations like this, 

I think of myself as a decorator-manqué. So, I thought maybe, just maybe, I would find a console for our mudroom. 

Well, this was our first find. A catuck? A ducat? Who can say? I’m sure that nutty fan of stuffed and mounted wildlife The Bloggess would enjoy this. 

It wasn't a bargain-priced but indisputably elegant console for the mudroom. No, it was more a reflection of my mindset as we arrived at the eerie and half-deserted warren of alleys and stalls. This was how I'd been feeling of late. It’s chic. It’s wearing a scarf. But, really, it’s kinda poorly put together. And also discarded.

Oh, alright, I’m being melodramatic. But I was feeling a bit blah. Due to waiting - apparently endlessly - for an editor to accept my book proposal. I was in limbo, and enough time there and I start to feel blah. I’m trying to come up with a better way of using this taxidermy catuck as an analogy for my state of mind, but Readers, it’s just not flowing. Suffice it to say, this item was odd and so was my mood. 

As I mentioned, the flea market was semi-deserted when we arrived. It was midday on a Monday, and many of the stalls were shut. I wondered if we’d made a mistake in coming to this vast place. In the moment, I lacked courage to scavenge for furniture, so I trailed along after the family, past bins of this and that.

After stumbling around purposeless for a while, the 8th grader said, “Here’s what I want: I want to find an old key that I can turn into a necklace.”

Lo and behold, a few yards along, we came across a large bin full of rusty, old-timey keys. I haggled with the seller, who wanted 5 Euros for this rusty, old, worthless key. (Bargained him to 3 - still robbery). 

But despite the obvious rip-off price of that key, it was a great find. It unlocked something in me that I had forgotten. My first thought was a memory of one of the friends I made at the law firm where I had my first job out of college. She was a few years older than me, a divorced mom. One night, at her house, she told me that she was going to ask the universe for the right man. 

“You have to be really specific,” she told me. “But you have to ask the universe for what you want.” Shortly thereafter, she did meet a great guy, to whom she is still married, several (ahem) decades later. I, by the way, apparently forgot to ask until much later. 

Anyway, there by the keys, I realized that I had once again lost all sense of abundance and possibility. I was dragging around with a feeling of scarcity. A poverty mindset. This is easy to fall into when things are in limbo. This is easy to fall into when something bad happens. For example, one of my dearest friends is having a heart problem. But when the 14 year old found her key, I found that idea of abundance again. 

Finding the key turned out to be symbolic, too. 

After remembering Debra and her invocation of the universe, and remembering that I have at times felt connected to a sense of abundance, I wished (to myself, because of all people, the husband is definitely not a believer in that kind of hokum) that my book proposal would get picked up by a publisher soon. Two days later, my agent emailed that I had another new reader.  Coincidence?

Probably. Some people openly embrace this whole idea of abundance versus scarcity. Donna, my hair stylist, for example, was not at all surprised to hear about the 14 year old and the key.  “It’s the Law of Attraction,” she said, nodding and smiling. 

So is the secret to success invoking the Law of Attraction? There’s a whole major strand of success literature that says it is. The mystic success people that started back in the late 1880s, flowered in the 1920s, and keep repeating on us every decade, like a bunch of bad burps. Deepak Chopra being the one with most credibility. That lady who wrote The Secret being one of the least. I wrote about it here. 

It’s always there, this idea of asking the universe for what you want and then by your positive thoughts manifesting it. But the flip side of this is ugly. There’s a potential for self-blame that goes along with it. If what you want doesn’t manifest, did you fail to think positively enough? And if something negative happens, is that then the fault of your negativity? If you are depressed, can you never expect anything good to happen?

The grain of truth in this idea of the Law of Attraction, however, is that priming your brain really is effective in influencing your performance. Daniel Kahneman, who is not at all into hokum and who has a Nobel Prize, talks about how easily influenced the brain is. For example, in one famous study he takes two groups of college students and puts them in two rooms. To one group, he shows a bunch of slides of elderly people doing slow things. To the other, he shows slides of people enjoying vigorous activity. Then he asks everyone to move to a third room, and - this is the actual metric he’s seeking - he times them as they move from one task to the next. The ones who saw the elderly, slow people moved slower than the other group. 

Or, there’s this. When I was in high school, I had a crush on a guy who drove a lime green car. Suddenly, I saw those cars everywhere. Were there suddenly more of them? Nope. I was just primed to notice them. The 14 year old wanted an old key. She was thus primed to pick out a bucket of them from amongst all the related and unrelated bric-a-brac at the flea markets. 

So did asking the universe for a new reader bring me one? 

Isn’t it much more fun to think so? 

The result of this key find was that I reinstated my morning practise of thinking of three things for which I am grateful, and then making one wish. And just this week, after wishing that my agent would call and tell me a publisher likes my proposal - and also that the dermatologist would find no new skin cancers at my appointment - she did! And he didn’t! 

Focusing on what I’m grateful for and looking for positive outcomes hasn’t erased negatives, but it has set them into the background. 

I no longer feel like the catuck/ducat. 

I have to revise my sample chapters in my book proposal. Wish me luck! And I will keep you posted. 

Onward!

The Power of Motivated Positive Thinking

http://www.vintagevwcars.com/Images/hippie-bus.jpg

Good news for the “if you can dream it you can do it” folks. Another vote in favor of positive thinking comes from Heidi Grant Halvorson. That’s right. She joins the wisdom traditionalists like the annoying Florence Scovel Shinn and Louise Hay, the spiritualists like Deepak Chopra, the businessmen like Mr. Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, and the “success scientists” like Matthew Syed, who wrote Bounce, in touting the importance of positive thinking in reaching your goals. 

But, and I know I’ve mentioned this before, the type of goal you’re aiming for and the type of positive thinking you do about it influences your chances of success. First of all, you’ve got to be motivated. There’s a fancy theory psychologists named about motivation called the Expectancy Value Theory, which means, according to Heidi Grant Halvorsen, “people are motivated to do anything as a function of (1) how likely they are to be successful (that’s the expectancy part) and (2) how much they think they will benefit from it (that’s the value part.)"

So if you’ve got your motivating goal, then go ahead and visualize achieving it. But, readers, you must also remember that your goal should be difficult, specific, and you can’t simply visualize breezily zipping over the finish line through the ribbon to claim your laurel wreath. You must visualize all the obstacles you might have to overcome, and visualize overcoming those, too. 

Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? And in fact, H.G. Halvorson has a distressing passage about weeding out unrealistic goals, by considering if the obstacles you envision are too great. Which seems to beg the whole question of achieving your dreams, if you really think about it in a certain type of depressing way. 

Nevertheless, if you can visualize both those obstacles and overcoming them, then you are set to go go go for it, because people who do that have the persistence and are willing to put in the planning and effort required. Those of us who prefer to imagine “podiuming” (in the immortal words of that adorable snowboarder Shaun White who won the gold in the last Olympics ) are more likely to be unprepared for the difficulties we will inevitably encounter on our runs down the mountain. 

If it all seems too exhausting, consider that question of motivation. I know there have been times when I’ve hardly noticed the hard work I put into achieving a goal because I was so motivated to achieve it.For example, the year after college (an excellent time to learn a life lesson), my friend Cathy and I wanted to move to San Francisco. We got out there, and my handsome friend Phil offered to take us around to look at places. He borrowed a VW bus from his friend Eddie, a former Buddhist monk who was at the time laid up in a Silicon Valley hospital with two broken legs from hang-gliding. Phil drove us all around the city. It took all day. We looked at 20 apartments. When we finally found one we liked and could afford in Haight Ashbury, we had to beg and plead with the landlord to take a chance on us. My friend was unemployed and waiting to hear from the Peace Corps, and I had a job as a paralegal. 

We got the apartment. 

It was only after handsome Phil rumbled off in Eddie’s bus that I realized how exhausted I was. And I learned a lesson that day, readers. The lesson was, that if you really, really want someone--I mean something--then the work involved doesn’t bother you at all. 

Is Success High Concept?

Well, yes and no. After all, in some respects, success is simple to define: achievement of aims, whether they be material or intellectual, monetary or hallucinatory. What's the big deal? Why even bother to examine it? When you do examine it, however, you find the word can open up into a real umbrella concept.  Therein lies the fun.

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/images/unbrella.gif

So, after that brief pause to justify myself to you, my scores (possibly that is a misleading descriptor, but let's stick with it for now) of readers, let me move onward under my umbrella!

Carol Dweck's book Mindset is high concept. That means you can sum up her idea in a sentence or two. I am very proud of myself for learning this term, lo these two decades ago, and finally being able to use it. So, as I mentioned in a previous post,  her idea is that achieving and sustaining success and feeling successful depends on whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset. People with fixed mindsets feel that intelligence and personality are established genetically and are pretty stable throughout life, while people with growth mindsets believe that these traits are improvable, influenced by effort.

I liked her book. It was easy to digest. Growth is better. You can change your mindset from fixed to growth. She tells you how. Bam. Done.

Then there's her former student, now her colleague, Heidi Grant Halvorsen, and her book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. 


Ah-ha, I said when I saw it, because not only is it another book by a woman (thanks be I found another one after that disastrous side-expedition into Florence Scovel Shinn), but also, yes, Goals. In all my researching, goal-reaching has become a very theoretical prospect. You know, establishing values and principals (S. Covey, et. al.) and it might just be time to get back down to some practicalities. Also, ah-ha, because a protege of Carol Dweck ought to be nice and high-concept herself. Perfect for a blog post. Perfect for a boggled mind. Perfect for we of the short attention spans.

Alas, Heidi Grant Halvorsen's book is a wee more involved than I'd hoped. Indeed, I'm only part of the way through it. Granted, I've been to a reunion, had that thing published in that paper, and read several other books, including Fat Men From Space by Daniel Pinkwater for my mother-daughter book club. It, too, was high-concept: don't eat too much sugar. Then again, if the main character hadn't had that cavity, that invasion from outer space wouldn't have happened. So maybe that's not so high concept after all. And I've been digging into Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, which uses the word I hate most in the English language (heuristic) so many times in the first section that I had to hyperventilate and recover with a novel by Heidi Julavitz. I also had to administer David Copperfield, not possible to swallow at once.

So I've digressed. However, I'm here to say that Halvorsen's book has some interesting tidbits to ponder. So far, she points out that having thoughts or wishes or general goals for the future is not the same as having goals. Goals are concrete things you can work towards. Furthermore, contrary to what many of the self-help books say, all the confidence in the world won't assure you'll reach your goal. You need self-control. Furthermore, self-control is affected by use: if you expend a lot of it avoiding eating a marshmallow sitting in front of you, then you might not have a lot left to apply to your dissertation. Luckily, you, and by you I mean we, can develop more self-control, and figure out how to use it wisely. We can learn how to set appropriate goals, and in general, learn how to succeed.

That was just the introduction, my scores of readers. In the very first part of chapter one she says we must set goals that are specific, and difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

So you can see that this is going to be a multi-step investigation. Not at all high-concept. But I will help you through it. My first goal is to finish the book. No, wait, that is not a difficult goal. How about: finish the book and explain it wittily without eating several handfuls of chocolate covered almonds every time I sit down to it.

Now that's a goal I can work towards. Crunch.

Abundance Redundance

http://www.newthoughtlibrary.com/shinnFlorenceScovel

Last week, after spending two long hours taking care of my car's regularly scheduled maintenance plus unexpected fitting with new tires, I treated myself to a visit to our local cafe. While sipping my decaf, I felt suddenly light-headed. I immediately assumed brain cancer, at which thought my heart began pounding at high anxiety and I began feeling over-warm; reason soon suggested perimenopause. Occam's razor and all that.

Needing air, I wandered outside and down the block to Peaceful Inspirations. I don't think I need to explain what kind of store it is. But it is interesting that my little town center has, besides the coffee shop and pizza places, and a nice book and gift shop, an integrative medicine center, yoga and Pilate's studios, and Peaceful Inspirations. It's like a microcosm of Berkeley, or Cambridge, MA, places I hold dear.

And you thought Upstate New York was conservative...

Anyhoo. I wandered into the new age store, and discovered a bookshelf devoted to success. Only in this store, it's Abundance. Abundance is the mystical-spiritual term for Success. I scanned the shelf and found many of the usual suspects; but I also found a book by a woman, Florence Scovel Shinn.  Written in 1925. Twelve years before Dale Carnegie began winning friends and influencing people.

So natch, I bought Florence's book, The Game of Life and How to Play It. Because she wrote it a long time ago, and because I'd never heard of her. And because she was a woman. Unlike Dale Carnegie, of whom I have heard, and who was a man.

The other reason I had to buy it was that when I opened it up to the table of contents, I saw this:

And I had just begun reading Deepak Chopra's book from 1993, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, whose table of contents is this:

Which one of those was written first? Which one have I heard of? And which was written by a man?

So either Deepak Chopra owes a debt to Florence Scovel Shinn, or I haven't read deeply enough in his books to learn that he has indeed credited her with inspiration.

A third possibility is that Chopra and his ilk and Shinn and hers, arrived at similar conclusions independently, coming from Eastern spiritual philosophy and Western respectively. The so-called Wisdom Traditions, which is the semi-academic name given to these books that all seem to suggest the same types of spiritual practices as the key to success--excuse me, my tens of readers, I mean abundance--is a general public-domain type deal. In other words, everyone who draws on it, is drawing from such an established and understood pool of ancient wisdom that, you know, copyright isn't necessary to be observed.

There's not a single book I've mentioned lately that doesn't mention meditation, relaxation exercises, and positive thoughts as keys to success. This hodge-podge cross-fertilization of Hindu- Buddhist and Judeo-Christian ideas has been around for a long time. It blended into a strange mix of new ideas in 19th Century America.

William James, psychologist, philosopher, brother of Henry, and a dabbler in spiritualism himself, if memory serves, described Shinn's precursors as Mind Cure people. They called themselves members of the New Thought movement. Whatever they were called, they believed that through proper prayer and thought one could cure any physical or mental ailment.

Through prayer and thought, did I say? Yes, I did. That would be through AFFIRMATIONS. Shinn's books are chock full of miraculous cures for everything, especially poverty (she wrote from the 1920s through the 1940s) using prayers and affirmations in the name of JESUS.

The corollary being not so kind to the sufferers of chronic or acute illness or emotional problems, or the unemployed. Blame the victim anyone?

But I digress. And I haven't even gotten to Deepak. Another time. I've reached the maximum acceptable word count for blog posts.

Besides, I've got to meditate. And review my affirmations.