Faith

The second step to riches is Faith.


"Repitition of affirmation of orders to your subconscious mind is the only known method of voluntary development of the emotion of faith"


But what is faith?


I look at faith as encompassing two equally vital aspects:

1. A belief that you are the sort of person who can achieve your goal
2. A belief that the achievement of your major definite purpose is inevitable / unstoppable.


Believing you are the kind of person who can achieve a goal works into the self-confidence formula which we have talked about before. So, how can you achieve confidence in your abilities?


I want to mention one way today. William James the Harvard psychologist from the last century described it as the "act as if" phenomenon.

So you dont think you're the kind of person who can earn $100,000 a year? Maybe you're not. But what if you listed all the attributes of someone that can earn $100,000. You could use examples of people you know. First of all, in doing this, you would probably realise, that there is nothing magical about earning $100,000 or even $1,000,000. Those people are the same as everyone else, but have one or two qualities that others dont have to the same degree. One of these is invariably vision, and the other is invariably persistence. They may have other qualities too, but these are the big ones.

So, lets say you think you are lacking in persistence. In applying the "act as if" principle, you live your life as if you already have persistence. By pretending that you have a quality, you fast track your way to actually developing that quality. Sounds easy, but its not. So thats why I'm a great believer in starting off slow.
e.g. You can't find a car park in front of the store you want to go to.
Normal response: give up and park it 5 miles away.
New response: keep trying once more, twice more, three more laps. Show yourself that you are persistent even in this minor act of finding a park.
OK, not very environmentally friendly, but you see what I mean.

In little acts, convince yourself, you are the type of person who doesn't give up. Keep trying it every day, and build it up over time. You will become a persistent person, even though you only started by "acting as if".