3 Ways to Increase Your Value and Your Income

If there is one thing I’ve seen that holds people’s ability to increase their value and income in all of my years of personal development and being in the business world, it’s their invisible mental thermostat.

At first, people aren’t even aware that they have a mental thermostat in their head.  They believe that the amount of income they make is dependant on external circumstances such as the job they have, their boss, their profession, their race, their sex, their geographical location, their experience, their education, etc.  They haven’t yet realized that there is a mental thermostat in their heads which limits their income and their net worth.

For example, Dr. Joe Vitale talks about this in some of his books.  He was on the road to wealth himself but continued to hit a glass ceiling in his income which he couldn’t figure out.  At first he thought it was external circumstances that were preventing him from making more money, but after a while a pattern emerged and he realized that there was something going on behind the scenes that was preventing him from fully realizing his potential. 

In his case, the maximum amount he could make per year was just a bit less than the most money his father made per year in his life.  I don’t remember exactly the whole story, but apparently he had a mental barrier in his subconscious mind that would not allow him to make any more money than his father did.  It was only after realizing that this barrier existed that he was able to come to terms with this and break through it.

Personally, I had a similar story except that it was consciously self created.  Around 1998 I was reading a lot of books that taught the power of positive thinking and affirmations.  At the time I was still living at home with my parents and running a business that was failing and not making any money.  Using the principles in the books I created an affirmation for myself which basically said “I make $3,000/month.” 

At the time, this amount of money seemed like a massive income for me because the most I ever made prior to that was $2,000/m when I had a job, and I was pretty much making $0/m from my business when I wrote out that affirmation.  I actually wrote it out around 490 times in my journal over a period of several days.  I didn’t notice any difference in my income so I kind of got lazy and didn’t write any more.

About 4 or 5 years later I was in a totally different place in my life.  The journal I wrote the affirmations in was long forgotten, packed away in some box.  I was running a multi-million dollar per year in revenue business, I had about 15-20 employees, I was living in a house I owned and was working 12-16 hour days, 6 to 7 days a week to build my business.  I was putting in a LOT of hours but for some very strange reason I was constantly stuck at making no more than $3,000/month.  I couldn’t figure out why. 

My business could make a lot of money, but by the time I paid all the expenses, and the employee salaries and everything else, there would only be enough money to pay myself $3,000/month or less.  If one month I paid myself $3,500, the following month it seemed like some expense came up and I had to lower my salary to $2,500.  I even had employees that had way less responsibilities than me who were making more money than me.

It took over a year for me to figure out that there was definitely something wrong and it felt like some invisible force was holding me back.  I was frustrated.  There weren’t any more hours in the day that I could work.  I couldn’t work any harder than I was working, and I had no personal life outside of my business either.  Something had to change but I didn’t know what.

Then, one day I was moving some boxes around in my house and I found my old journal.  I totally forgot that I even kept that journal.  I thought to myself “Cool!  Let’s see if I hit some of the goals I set a few years prior.” I began flipping through the journal, and my jaw almost dropped to the floor when I got to the part of the journal where I saw pages and pages of “I make $3,000/month”

I could NOT believe it.  I had programmed my mind to believe that I make $3,000/month and all this time my subconscious mind was self-sabotaging my income to hold me back and only allow me to make $3,000/month.  The very affirmation that I wrote out years prior to help me INCREASE my income was now holding me back! 

What’s crazy though, is that in my mind I went through all the circumstances that happened at my business and it completely fried my brain because a lot of the things that caused the events that kept my income at the programmed $3,000/month were NOT things I had direct control over in the physical world.  This was a time of awakening for me when I discovered the Law of Attraction and saw the power that it has to shape your reality.

Very soon after that I changed my internal thermostat and my income soared.

The reason I bring these stories up is because there are really three levels of understanding and awakening that I have gone through in my life when it comes to providing value.

Awakening #1 – Learning to Take Action

The first awakening I had was learning to self-motivate myself and to take action.  At this level, I learned all kinds of techniques to help me manage my time, to set goals and milestones, to prioritize, to build relationships with employees and clients and to build a business.  I saw countless opportunities to improve myself and my skills and I took massive action to take advantage of those opportunities.

For many people this is the first way to provide more value and to make more income in life – simply take more action.  I know this is easier said than done, and it does require discipline, determination and requires you to overcome laziness and fear, but it is possible to push yourself and develop your personal power to be a much more positive influence in the world by taking massive action towards your goals.

At this level, one of the best teachers you could learn from is Tony Robbins.  His Personal Power II program is one of the best all-inclusive systems for taking control of your personal power. 

Massive action in the direction of a positive goal is a great way to increase the amount of value you provide in the world and the amount of income you receive.

Awakening #2 – Certain Kind of Action

As I mentioned in the stories above though, taking action alone will not yield all the results you want in life if your mind is not properly “tuned”.  One of my favorite quotes from “Money and the Law of Attraction” is:

“No amount of action can compensate for misaligned thought.”

I had to spend years of my life taking massive action and have no life outside of work to realize the power that the mind has over the value we provide and the results we produce from our actions.  Perhaps it was a necessary step though, as now I am completely 100% convinced that if we don’t apply things like affirmations and the Law of Attraction to the actions we take, we are severely limiting the amount of value we provide and the amount of income we make.

I know with ab
solute certainty that when our thoughts and feelings are properly aligned, the actions we take (while in this aligned state) provide massive amounts of more value and the results we produce are infinitely more powerful.

In his book “The Science of Getting Rich”, Wallace Wattles calls this “a certain kind of action”.  The person who takes the most amount of action is NOT the person who provides the most value, or the person who makes the most income.  This is a basic flaw in most people’s thinking and it is the reason why most people feel that the world is “not fair”.  They work hard, they take a lot of action, and yet others around them are getting better results while seemingly “doing nothing”.

The secret is that the person who takes the most “aligned action” or “acts in that certain way” the most will be the person who provides the most value in the world.  If I was to quantify this understanding into some form of numerical value so that you could understand the significance of this, imagine that if every “regular action” that I take in the world has a value of 1 “action point”, then every “aligned action” or “action taken in that certain way” has a value of 10,000 “action points”.  That’s how massive the difference is. 

The more you learn about this “alignment”, the more of a multiplier your actions have.  At first, when you just learn about the difference between the two types of actions, your “aligned” actions may really only be a little bit more “aligned” than your “non-aligned” actions, so maybe at first your “aligned” actions may only produce 2 “action points” compared to your regular actions, but if you continue to study this path you will be able to increase that multiplication factor significantly.

So, the second way to increase the amount of value you provide to the world and the amount of income you can make is to “align” your actions so that you are always “acting in that certain way”.

Awakening #3 – Alignment Beyond Temporal and Spatial Limitations

This last awakening is something I have just recently experienced.  It adds a layer of awareness to the second awakening that goes beyond restrictions of time and space.  It’s a bit hard to explain, especially to those who haven’t yet fully grasped and experienced the effects of the second awakening, but I’ll try my best to explain in clearly.

At the first level of awakening I described above, the pinnacle of creating results rests in your ability to take massive action.  At this level, the only way to increase your value and your income is to learn to self motivate yourself or hire a coach to motivate you to take massive action.

Imagine a telemarketing centre where people pick up the phone and bang out phone calls.  It doesn’t matter what state the person is in while they make the phone call, it doesn’t even matter if he or she absolutely despises the job.  The person is simply paid an hourly figure to take massive action and to go dialing for dollars.  Out of every couple hundred phone calls, the telemarketer encounters a person who happens to be interested in the product they are selling, or more likely doesn’t possess the ability to overcome the well scripted questions that the telemarketer is told to read word for word, and the customer ends up getting trapped into buying whatever is being sold.  Of course, a large percentage of customers then cancel, but it’s all part of the numbers.

It doesn’t matter if you’re not working at a telemarketing center.  If your actions are not properly aligned, whatever it is that you do, you are pretty much providing value in a similar way.  This is a very “weak” way of providing value, and that is why this type of action gets such poor results.  When you put in 4,000 hours of “hard work” into a business over a period of 12 months and are making less money than people who work less than half as many hours doing way easier work, you’ll probably “get” this like I did.  Hopefully, you can “get this” without having to go through that kind of contrast in your life.  There are stronger ways to provide value and easier ways to increase your income.

At the second level, we learn that we must “align” our actions.  Your state (physical, mental, emotional), your goals, your alignment with the Law of Attraction, your beliefs,  and any other conscious and subconscious limitations that you carry with you in your way of “being” while performing an action all have an impact on the value and results you get from that action.

People who understand this make sure that they align themselves properly before taking action and begin to see dramatic differences in their results.  For example, a sales person takes some time to get in proper “state” before making a telephone call to a prospect, or a Blogger who gets into an empowered “aligned” state before writing a single word of an article.  These are all examples of the second level of awareness when it comes to taking action.

However, there is still another level beyond this that I have only recently discovered.  The next level beyond the first two levels is the understanding that “alignment” is not limited by time and space.  Meaning, it is actually possible to come into “alignment” in your way of being even for actions that have happened in the past or will happen in the future.  I know this may seem really strange at first, but if you experiment with this a bit you will see that it’s actually true.

See if you can grasp the following concept: The value or results that an action produces is not solely dependant on the level of “alignment” with which that action was taken at the time it was taken.  Your “alignment” in the present moment (the now) affects actions you have taken in the past and any actions you take in the future as well.

This realization is so profound, it would benefit you to read the underlined words a few times until they really sink in at a deeper level. 

There is really no simple way to explain this.  It’s something that you just “get” when you’re ready to understand it.  I can offer a couple of examples that kind of shine a bit of light on this level of understanding but I know they still don’t do it justice.  It’s kind of like trying to explain what swimming feels like to someone who’s never been in water.

Think back to my story where I was limited by my $3,000/month mental barrier.  We know that our subconscious programming affects our results.  Ok, now imagine if you work for a corporation and you do something that you feel good about.  You feel great about yourself, you work in an office environment which you enjoy and you feel that you are getting compensated properly for your efforts.  Although you make double or triple the amount of money compared to most of your friends, you feel totally at peace with that because you know that the company you work for plays a major positive role in helping the world.  You may feel slightly lucky to have been able to land that job, but you feel totally justified making the amount of money you make.

You’ve put aside a large chunk of savings for retirement and your life is going great.  Now imagine if all of a sudden you turn on the news and you hear about the fact that the company you’ve been working for has been lying all along.  The reason they’ve been able to make so much profits and to compensate their employees so well is because they have been doing unspeakable things in other countries to exploit people and commit crimes that are horrendous. 

All of a sudden you realiz
e that all the effort you’ve put into helping the company grow has really been causing massive hurt to people in the world.  The fast growth that the company experienced partly due to your efforts has actually caused more destruction in the world.  You begin to feel horrible.  All of a sudden you no longer feel that you’ve been getting paid three times as much as your friends due to your awesomeness, but rather because you have been part of a criminal organization and you have been paid so much to keep you blinded from the truth.  You look at the money in your retirement savings account and it begins to disgust you.  If you were unable to change your perception or feeling about the value you have provided in the last five years of employment and about the money that you have been able to save, what do you think would happen?

This example is not perfect, but it shines a light on the fact that it is not only your alignment with your actions at the time you are taking those actions that affects things.  Your current alignment with all the actions you have ever taken plays an important role on the value they provide.  Once you realize this, you will begin to understand a very important point, which is:

Your “alignment” with the actions you take, have taken or will take has a profound influence over the value these actions create and the results they produce, therefore the third way to increase your value and your income is to be always working on coming into fuller alignment with what you want in life and the person you want to become in life, in the present moment.

This is where the “Power of Now” and teachings of this nature play an important role.  If you can learn to feel great about yourself NOW, and you can get clear on what you want NOW, and you can eliminate any limiting beliefs that you have NOW, the process of doing that will not only have an effect on any actions you take moving forward, but will ALSO have a massive effect on all the actions you have taken in the past and will take in the future. 

This realization places MASSIVE importance on your “alignment” and state of being in the present moment.  The present moment is all we ever have, but the great thing about this realization is that the present moment is all we ever need to massively increase our value and our income.

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