In the age of booming technology that keeps us connected 24-hours a day and transportation that can carry us to any corner of the world (and beyond), it is the first time in history that we can experience more than what is in our own cities and hometowns. It is nothing less than a miracle that we have the ability to carry a computer in our pockets and visit all seven wonders of the world in the short span of our own lifetimes.
We can truly do it all and see it all, if we so choose.
Yet many of us spend our time focusing on the things that we don’t have, the relationships that drain us, or the job that doesn’t fulfill us. We focus on the boss that aggravates us and the weight we haven’t yet lost. We allow ourselves to be emotionally and physically drained by the demands of a seemingly frustrating existence while we simultaneously mutter that we “don’t deserve this” under our breath with disdain.
You’re right. You deserve better. In fact, you deserve the life of your dreams. But how do you access it? By living in a state of abundance.
Before we go into the principles themselves, it’s important to understand exactly what that means. Many associate the words “abundance” and “prosperity” with monetary and material gain or professional success. It can look like those things but abundance is the cause of that prosperity, not the effect.
Abundance is a mindset. It is a state of being and a consciousness of gratitude. Prosperity is the result of that shift in consciousness because when you shift your mindset, it also shifts your thoughts and actions that will yield different results for you.
There are plenty of millionaires and celebrities who are prosperous, but not abundant. On the flip side, there are many meager-earning families who are abundant without that financial or material prosperity. It is because those who are not abundant subscribe to a scarcity mindset. They may constantly feel as though there is not enough time, not enough money, not enough energy, or that life is always happening to them. Someone who lives abundantly is constantly grateful for all the blessings in their lives to create more and ultimately shifts their circumstances to make life happen for them.
The following are my ten principles of abundance and prosperity shown to yield extraordinary results. They are your keys to an abundant life where you have the fulfillment, joy, love, passion, career and life of your dreams.
1 – Giving
This first principle is similar to what you may know as the Law of Attraction. When we make an effort to be a giver, without keeping score or having expectations of a return, we are sowing seeds to receive more.
When we acknowledge the gifts that we have to offer the world, we realize that we have a lot of value to give to others. It is when we give our gifts away that we are in service in a way that only we can contribute. Our contribution and gifts become irresistible to others and we find that people, in turn, cannot resist giving back to us. This is particularly true in business and interpersonal relationships. We begin perpetuating a cycle of building our self worth as we contribute our unique gifts to others and receive genuine appreciation for those efforts. Whether it’s a talent, a skill, a life experience, or even your companionship, you have something to share and give that no one else can.
Think of this step as investing in your karmic piggy bank. It’s not about what’s in it for you, it’s about what value you can contribute. Your ROI for a genuine deposit may seem risky at first but will always be rewarded if you are sincere and patient.
Challenge Yourself: Make a list of 10 accomplishments you’re proud of. Not only will you build your self worth by allowing yourself to celebrate your wins, but you’ll discover 10 ways you are able to contribute value and give of yourself to others.
2 – Letting Go
Letting go of the past can be an incredibly painful process which is why we often prolong the pain by stuffing it or carrying it around with us like a monkey on our backs. Let the monkey go!
Whether we’re holding onto guilt, resentment, or distrust, we are only hurting ourselves when we latch onto the stories of how someone else has hurt us and caused us pain. We get to let go of that pain and, in some cases, let go of the people in our lives who have caused us that pain.
The best way to begin letting go is to actually confront those that have hurt you. It’s important to clear the air so you are able to re-establish the relationship and communicate what has been coming up for you. Keep in mind this may mean you are having that clearing with yourself or someone who has long been gone from your life. It is then, when you are transparent about your hurt, that you can truly let go of what has been plaguing you.
Clearing with someone is not dumping on them and all the ways that they are at fault – for yourself included. Relationships are multifaceted and we get to take responsibility for our part in the scenario. To effectively do this, you want to establish the relationship with the person, communicate the hurt, and then request something from them in how we both move forward in the relationship.
Here is an example: “Chris, I want to thank you so much for being such an important part of my life. You’ve been a great friend to me overall, but when you didn’t show up to help with [X] when you said you would, it made me feel as though you didn’t value our friendship. My request of you moving forward is that you follow through on the commitments you make with me or let me know ahead of time that you won’t be able to attend.”
The person can choose to honor your request or not. In fact, you may even be having this clearing conversation with yourself or a deceased person where you can’t expect an answer. That’s okay. This isn’t about them. It’s about you and the abundant life you’re looking to create.
Challenge Yourself: Write out all of the hurtful things you felt about a certain person or situation that you’ve been holding onto. Don’t hold anything back. Then allow yourself to finally purge the pain by burning it, shredding it, or in some other way destroying it to symbolize that it’s gone for good.
Bonus Challenge: Have a clearing conversation with someone that you have been holding back on doing so. Maybe it’s a colleague or a family member you don’t feel as though you can avoid. Create the space to have an open and honest conversation to let them know how you feel so you can let it go and move on.
3 – Integrity
Not being a person of your word is the quickest way to destroy your self worth. Living with integrity creates wholeness, credibility, trust, and honor. It’s a sort of “spiritual high ground” that can create or destroy relationships – especially your relationship with yourself.
If you do not keep your word, you are repeatedly showing yourself that following through on the things you declare are important to you don’t matter. This will become especially painful when you realize that you’re not able to achieve those goals that you say matter. We always pay a price for not keeping our word. It’s just a matter of whether we pay now or later. We pay in the form of broken trust, hindered relationships, and damaged self esteem.
Integrity is not something we can shortcut or fast-track. It can be incredibly draining to cover up our lies and missteps in lieu of using that energy to create abundance in our lives. Inevitably, it takes up far more time and effort to cover our tracks than it does to be honest and in integrity in the first place.
Challenge Yourself: Begin to live in integrity today. Now! Clean up any broken agreements you have with anyone by taking ownership and responsibility with the clearing conversations you learned about in the second principle above. Then write down a list of ten core principles that you live by. Frame them or post them somewhere that you will see them daily. Having the constant reminder of your principles will guide your actions, decisions, and thoughts to living by those principles and being a man or woman of massive integrity.
4 – Visualization
Seeing and visualizing the results of your goals and dreams is paramount to their achievement. The more clearly we can visualize the outcome, the higher the odds are that we will achieve something. Much like how our ten core principles guide us, visualizing our successful results will be a compass to lead us back to the path to success.
The word “visualization” itself comes from “vision.” A vision is the end game: the prosperity we seek in whatever form we choose (love, career, health, wealth, etc.). We cannot have prosperity without abundance. And we cannot have abundance without a vision.
This is where it becomes important to curate your visions wisely. If we are constantly visualizing how something won’t work or how we will not succeed, we are planting the seeds in our subconscious to attract those failures. The more we think about them, the more they will grow and we will be attracting more failure to us. Contrarily, if we visualize our success and our achievement, we’ll be planting seeds for that success and creating energy that allows the universe to provide abundance for us easily.
It’s important to visualize something you are working for, not something you are working against. There is a difference between working toward something versus working to prevent something from happening. Your body and life will know the difference between “I will find the love of my life” versus “I will not die alone.” Energetically, you’re manifesting different goals. Visualize the things you abundantly want, not the things you’re avoiding.
Challenge Yourself: Create a vision map for yourself. Whether it’s a poster on your wall or a digital copy on your computer/phone, make a collage of images that represent the things you want in your life: the perfect body, the perfect house, the fantastic job, your desired monthly income…get creative.
5 – Affirmation
Your sarcasm may get a good laugh, but you may not realize the damage it’s doing to your subconscious. Language is a powerful tool that anchors us into reality. When we say things like “Traffic is killing me,” even in jest, we are opening up the energetic pipeline for traffic to be a continued frustration in your mind and in your body.
Using affirmations is a way of harnessing the power of positive language to shift your mindset into the consciousness of abundance. Powerful, positive words can yield powerful, positive results. Affirmations are, therefore, kryptonite to negativity. Each time you use them, you are creating a mini-contract with yourself to recommit to over and over and guide you to abundance.
Challenge Yourself: Create your own affirmations as a way to craft the traits you are honing for yourself. Just like visualization, these should be words that affirm behavior as opposed to negating behavior. Use your affirmations constantly as a reminder of what you’re up to and how you’ll show up in a particular situation where you may be feeling less confident.
6 – Declaration
While affirmations are for yourself and often an internal process, there gets to be more accountability for what you’re up to in your life. Declarations are where you begin to outwardly establish goals to affirm that you have the resources to achieve the prosperity you’re seeking.
Your vision board has all of your results brought to life. What will it take to get you there? Work backwards from there to turn your goals into small, digestible and actionable steps. For instance, if your goal is to become the Founder of a non-profit organization, you may feel that is a lot to swallow at the beginning. Instead, declare that you will find a mentor who started their own organization first so you may learn from them. It’s important for your declarations to be quantifiable and have a deadline. Leave no room for interpretation. Finding a mentor is a quantifiable goal that keeps you headed in the direction of the long-term vision.
A declaration is affirming that you have what it takes to manifest your goal. A declaration is simply making a choice. A declaration is focusing on what you really want, deep in your heart, not what others want for you, but what YOU truly want. A declaration is transforming your vision that you visualized into a laser of intention.
Challenge Yourself: Imagine it is ten years in the future from today. What date is it? How old will you be? What are the ten goals you’ve accomplished in the last ten years? Write them down as if they’ve already occurred. Once you’ve written these down, work backwards to today. What goals will you need to achieve in five years in order to reach your ten year goals? Write those down. Then write down the goals you’ll achieve in one year. Then six months. One month. One week. One day. When you break it down into baby steps, your prosperity is right around the corner.
7 – Persistence
Persistence can often sound like an elusive trait that is only for the highly motivated or natural-born achievers out there. It’s actually much more easy to obtain for everyone. Persistence is nothing more than the continuous habit toward a goal. It is keeping your goal in mind and then choosing it in every moment no matter how you feel or what circumstances you face.
For example, if you’re looking to lose weight, you get to be persistent in the methods to get you there including proper nutrition and regular exercise. Being persistent in meeting this goal then looks like sticking to the meal plan you set out for yourself, completing the workouts you put into your schedule, and intentionally creating deviations from your plan. Any time we allow our feelings to choose our actions instead of our vision, we are choosing not to be persistent.
This may sometimes be the biggest reality check for those who have not reached the levels of abundance and prosperity. It is important to take responsibility for what you are creating (or not creating) in your life. Every human has the power to create the life of their dreams. It is our responsibility to take action with that power.
Challenge Yourself: Pick one thing to focus on for two weeks that is a step toward one of the declarations in your vision. Choose it unapologetically every day for two weeks no matter how you feel, what the weather is, or whether or not you feel as though it will stick. You’ll surprise yourself with how much the habit grows on your and becomes part of your natural routine as each day passes.
8 – Surrendering
Though we have set our vision, have our affirmations to support us, and the declarations to go after the abundant life of our dreams, it’s important not to be too attached to your goal. In the same way that we can scare away our results with our negativity, we can scare away our results with our desperation. We get to surrender to what actually happens in our life instead of holding on so tightly that we cannot forgive ourselves if we do not achieve what we set out to create.
Time will pass no matter what choices we make. Instead of allowing our perfectionist to take over and get upset or tear down our self esteem for not meeting a particular goal on time or meeting a particular goal at all, we can choose to see it as a learning opportunity. We can ask ourselves questions like: What could I have done differently to have reached my goal by my set deadline? What have I already accomplished that I wouldn’t have without my declaration? When can I renegotiate my deadline for so I can keep pushing or do have my desires shifted to focus on new/different/bigger goals than I originally planned?
Allow yourself the flexibility to renegotiate your declarations. You can always be grateful you started down the path to make some progress by your original deadline versus being at the very beginning with time passing anyway. After all, time is an illusion. Today’s reality is yesterday’s memory and these goals, achieved or not, do not define you.
Challenge Yourself: Choose a goal or declaration that you were certain you would have achieved by now, but haven’t. Take an honest look at the goal and your actions to achieve it. This is not as a way to berate yourself, but to learn. Write down what you could have done differently, what you learned in the process, and what you are committed to moving forward. Surrender to the reality of your circumstances so you have the power to pursue them once again.
9 – Sourcing
You are responsible for absolutely everything that happens in the world. You are always the source of what is created in your life: joy, love, happiness, conflict, stress, or scarcity. You are the source of it all. When you shift your mentality to recognize this, your actions will alter in efforts to yield different results.
That is not to say that everything is your fault. Blame and responsibility are different things.
War in the Middle East, for example, is not your fault. However, we can still choose to see ourselves as responsible. How are we contributing – or not contributing – to efforts for peace? Am I aware of what is going on? Am I using my voice to discuss the issues with others? These are all ways we can be responsible in changing the circumstances.
Seeing yourself as the source of everything is another enormous learning opportunity. Even if we rack our brains and determine we could have done nothing differently to yield a different result, it does not mean we cannot learn from the experience. Even our interpretations of events can foster different results. We cannot control the economy, our boss’s bad mood, or anyone else outside of ourselves. But, we can behave, speak, and interact with others as though we are aware we are the source of everything that happens thereafter. When we choose different behaviors and words, it can and will yield far more powerful and positive results in those around us.
Challenge Yourself: Think of the last frustrating conversation or interaction you had. Revisit it in your mind to look at it from all angles of how you were responsible for that interaction. Were you impatient? Were you dismissive? Were you not compassionate? Think of all the different ways you could have shown up in that interaction to yield different results from that person and watch how those scenarios play out in comparison to what you remember.
10 – Surround Yourself with a Team
We all need coaches, partners, mentors, and resources. Ego says we can do it alone and be a lone wolf, but this is simply not true. While we may be capable of doing something alone, there are many things in life that are more powerful when accomplished in numbers.
No great accomplishment in history was achieved alone. Even the greatest accomplishments of my own life have had the common thread of having a team of people to support me. There are times when we will have breakdowns and the encouragement, advice, or general kindness of others will be what can get us back on track.
Networking is the most powerful tool to building your team. Not only do we meet more people that we can support and connect to one another and continue to be in service, but we can seek out those who have gone where we haven’t yet and learn from them. When we surround ourselves with those who have similar language, visions, and values, you’ll notice more breakthroughs in your life as you become stronger and more confident.
It also then becomes important to rid your life of people who do not fuel you, but instead drain you with their negativity and toxicity. Though we may have done our best to clear with them and let go of any negative feelings we had, it may not be enough. If those in your life do not feel guilty about contributing negativity or being a taker, then we do not need to fear guilt for dismissing someone from our lives. This is not to be hurtful, but to create the space for you to grow and, perhaps, even be the wake up call that someone needs to begin thinking abundantly for their own lives.
When you join your unique talents with the wisdom, experience, guidance, and support of others, that is abundance. That is prosperity.
Challenge Yourself: Make a list of 10 people who you consider strong and important teammates in your life. Describe the role each one of them plays and why you value them. If you are not able to come up with 10, you’ll realize this is an area you get to work on.
These ten principles may be overwhelming for you to implement all at once. Practice and master even only one of these principles in your everyday life and you’re bound to see massive shifts in your results and prosperity.
Remember that every day is a gift. You waking up this morning was a miracle. Cultivate gratitude for the gift of your life by saying, “thank you” immediately as you open your eyes tomorrow. Not everyone has that blessing.
Be grateful for the roof over your head, your eyesight, your hearing, your partner, your job, your car…find all the blessings of your life. It can be easy to forget that your breakdown and frustration would be a blessing to someone else. But, when you do shift your mindset to this level of consciousness, that is when the magic will happen. That is when abundance and prosperity will show up for you.
Shift into a mindset of abundance and you won’t have bad days. It is when we are actively and truly thankful for all we have in our life, even the littlest of things, that we are able to attract more to be grateful for. When we are abundant, we are grateful for everything that happens in our lives. Where abundance flows, prosperity follows.
—Learn more about each of these principles in my book Transform Your Life: 10 Principles of Abundance and Prosperity available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.