On the surface I was a success. I had a wonderful job; I was the CEO and owner of a big company. But I was getting little enjoyment from it. I told myself that my position was a stress- ful and demanding one that required a lot of my time. Since I already believed that I was a workaholic, it followed that I was going to have to put in long hours. When I believed those things, I did have to put in long hours and my job was stressful. What I believed to be true became my reality. To make things worse, during that same time, I was dealing with a very difficult relationship with my business partners, which made life at the office even more challenging.
I was dealing with problems in my personal life as well. When our young son was diagnosed with autism, that created a whole new mountain of stress. He is a high-functioning autistic, but autistic nonetheless. So my wife and I struggled as parents, trying to understand how to raise him and how to cope with the situations that parents of autistic children so frequently face. It was extremely difficult. In fact, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever faced, because we all had to deal with very powerful emotions – mine, my wife’s and our son’s. It was an enormously challeng- ing time in my life.
I believed that life was hard, and that it wasn’t ever going to be easy. And life did not fail to live down to my expectations! I will always remember this as a time when all areas of my life
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were spiraling down on me and I felt that my life was falling apart around me. I didn’t want to be at work; I hated my situ- ation there. I didn’t want to be home, because I couldn’t cope with the family struggles that we were dealing with.
My health continued to fail as well, and to make it worse, during this time I was losing any faith in spirituality, in my sense of the universe, in God. I wondered what my role really was in this whole crazy drama. It was, as I said in my Introduc- tion, truly the proverbial dark night of the soul.
Then a miracle happened, which I wrote about at more length in Secrets Of The Miracle Inside. Basically I changed the way I looked at the things in my life. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change – the world can change and your situation certainly can change. I began implementing this Step 5, belief: belief in myself, at a level that spurred me to take action to make my life better. I also began to change my erroneous beliefs. The result of these changes was that my actions changed, and therefore my life changed.
I began to believe that life could not possibly be as hard as I was thinking that it was, because if life really was that hard, it just wasn’t worth living. I began to consider my options:
Either life is not worth living… Or I’m looking at it all wrong.
I decided to undertake a grand experiment and ask myself, “What if I am looking at life all wrong?” And I began to ask my- self some other important questions:
What if I begin to believe the opposite of all the things I previously believed?
What if I begin to believe that life is easy? What if I begin to believe you can make millions of dollars without having a job? 1.
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What if I begin to believe that I can begin acquiring all the real estate I’ve always wanted to own?
What if I begin to believe that life is full of opportunity every single day and that money can be created with just my ideas?
What if I begin to believe that my health is fabulous – and that I can run hard, ride hard, swim hard and do all the activities that I want? What if I begin to believe that I eat healthy? What if I begin to believe that I get restful sleep at night and I wake up full of energy?
What if I begin to believe that I can be wealthy
and stress-free – that I can create money, have
wealth and prosperity and great health without having a job or the stresses in my life?
Just as an experiment, I made a conscious choice to believe all of these things. It certainly couldn’t hurt, I reasoned, and it was far better than sitting around wallowing in my misery. To make the experiment worthwhile, though, I knew that the beliefs I chose to embrace had to be something more than mere items on a list. After all, millions of people hope for most or all of those things I had listed. Many of them ask or expect the uni- verse to provide those things, or they pray to God to bring those things to them. All too many cannot imagine actually amassing a fortune of their own creation, so they simply wish, hope, pray, ask or expect to win the lottery.
They meditate about wealth, they visualize it, some cre- ate vision boards for themselves; every day they imagine being wealthy – and years later, they’re still in the same position they were in, if not worse.
I knew that if my list was to become a reality for me, I needed
a different kind of belief. I needed the belief that would make me
know that it would happen – not just hope that it would hap- pen, not just wish that it would happen and not just sit around waiting for it to happen. I had to know it would happen.
How did I get to the point where I knew it was going to happen? The simplest way to put it is that I convinced myself that it was already so. For example, if I wanted to eat healthy, I simply had to believe that I already did eat healthy, and I had to believe it in such a way that my belief would spur me to ap- propriate action – so that I really was eating healthy.