Hi everyone,
My dear friend, Suzy Morgan of http://www.AngelvisionInfo.com was kind enough to type up the following story from
The Aladdin Factor by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. It is a powerful lesson for all of us about goal setting.
From The Aladdin Factor
"I took a ten-evening course on goals and on the first night she gave us a blank booklet and said, "Write down a goal you have." And then she said, "Okay, write down another one." This went on for about ten minutes and we were all getting a bit bored. And then she said, "Write down another one." This went on for an entire three hours! All she did was say, "Write down a goal." "Okay, write down a goal." Don't use the fact that you can't think of another one to not write down the next goal. Just keep writing." For three hours!
When it was all over she said, "Okay, now I want you to do a special thing. I want you to write down 'a goal', but this one is special. On this one you can wave a magic wand, and write down anything you want. It doesn't have to obey the law. It doesn't have to obey gravity. It doesn't have to live up to any requirement of anything. Just imagine you have a magic wand."
Now remember, I had been writing down goals for three hours. Everything I could think of - money, health, relationships, travel - anything I could think of for three hours. So I said to myself, "Okay, it doesn't have to obey the law? Okay! I want to live in a whole house full of beautiful naked women." It was embarrassing, but that is what I wrote down. I didn't tell anybody this for ten years, but that's what I wrote down. I had been dredging my mind to think of anything I could for three hours so I just made up that.
Sandra, the instructor said, "Okay, I'll meet you back here one week from today for the next class, and, by the way, that last one is the one that will get fulfilled." Everybody in the room gasped.
When we returned to class a week later, I was absolutely shocked because during that week I had met a woman, Carla, who later became my second wife. We went on a date and I went nuts over her and asked if I could stay overnight. She said, "Yes."
I stayed overnight, and in the morning, her daughters - she had two little girls- came running in bare naked and of course Carla was in bed with me naked. I said, "Oh my God, I'm in a whole house full of beautiful naked women." Except of course two of them were two and four years old! I guess I forgot to be specific enough in my request.
So I come to the class, and the instructor says, "Put up your hand if you remember the very last goal that you wrote down, that was totally outrageous and didn't obey gravity or the law or anything. Put up your hand if it has already come true in one week!" Fifty of us - one quarter of the people in the room- put our hands up.
She said, "I've done this many times. It's the last one you just wrote that always comes true. It's because I am the teacher and because I said it with total conviction. I didn't try to convince you of it, in which case you could be skeptical; I just announced it as an obvious fact." Of course none of us had believed her at the time, and yet one-quarter of the people in the room had achieved their goal.
We had goose bumps because people jumped up and said what their goals had been. They wanted their income to go up by a factor of ten. They wanted a sixty foot yacht, and meanwhile they were just a social worker or teacher. And in the intervening week some relative they didn't know had died and they inherited a sixty-foot yacht. Our jaws dropped open for every one of them because originally Sandra had specifcally said, "Make sure it doesn't obey gravity, or have any restrictions of law or anything." So we went totally wild.
Then she said something even more shocking. She said, "By the way, it happened because you all believed me." I stood up and said, "Sandra, I want to understand something. If you had said a different one, then that's the one that one-quarter of us would have had fulfilled?"
She said, "Yeah! Sometimes I say it's the third one that you wrote down." Everybody in the room opened their books to read the third one because we could just as easily have had that instead. We were sitting there totally stunned.
There were people in the room who were crying. She had told us on that second evening that there's nothing out there. There are no rules, and there's no law. It's not that we're lawless, it's rather that you create with your mind so powerfully. It's all in what you believe is possible. - Raymond R."