Life Pays What We Ask Of It

"Ask and Ye Shall Receive."

Notice the quote doesn't say "Bitch and ye shall receive."

Nor does it say "Write an attention seeking Facebook status complaining about how everything sucks until you receive."

This week, I found some notes I had written after attending Tony Robbins' Unleash the Power Within seminar early this year.

At the time, I was still relatively new to entrepreneurial life and had not yet set a clear vision for what success actually looked like for me, which is a giant problem.

You wouldn't begin a long car ride to a place you've never been without typing a destination into the GPS first, right?

The same holds true for our life goals. Success begins with cultivating a clear vision for where we want to be. For me, mine included a specific, pie in the sky number for speaking engagements.

As a new coach and business owner, I didn't know if anyone would really pay me this amount of money to show up and teach transformational life lessons. But I've learned in life that whenever I state the "what," the Universe will respond and take care of the "how."

I had forgotten all about these notes I had written down until I found them this week while packing for a business trip to New York. The purpose? To finalize the details of an upcoming corporate speaking engagement.

Oh, by the way, the fee I am making is the EXACT number that was written down in my notes.

Life pays us what we ask of it.

But there are two things we need to remember as we design the life we want.

1) Be focused. If you simply want to make "more money", you can hit your goal and still feel dissatisfied when you only get a $100 bonus. What is the actual amount which allows you to pay all of your bills and simultaneously build you savings? Get clear about it and actually write your goal onto paper. 

Harvard Business school did a study in the 1980's that showed the 3% of graduates who bothered to write their goals down, as opposed to just mentally setting them, made ten times the income of the other 97% of their graduates COMBINED.

2) Have faith. Setting the intention doesn't guarantee an immediate payoff. For me, it took nearly six months to hit my "dream number." There were times it would have been easy to get frustrated and give up when things weren't happening on my timetable. 

But there are 7 billion people on the planet. They are all setting intentions just like you. Sometimes, it's as if the world is a huge chess board and we need to wait for the other pieces to move where they need to be before we can call "checkmate." 

So that is my wish for you today. Take a few minutes and write down your goals. Focus on what you want to create instead of what you don't want. Then simply be open this week and assume each new person you meet and every new "coincidence" that pops up is pushing you closer to achieving it.