How To Express What You Want

The following is an edited excerpt from the book, Waves of Magic: How to Tap Your Inner Resources to Achieve Anything You Want by Peter Sasín.

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“Be clear about what you want.”

I know, I know — you’ve heard it about a thousand times before, in every book and seminar. The problem is that you can’t be clear about what you want until you understand what clarity really is. So many misconceptions exist. Ironically, clarity hasn’t been made clear.

There’s another obstacle people often face when they even think about being clear about desires. Not everybody is ready to believe that life can be easy. For many people, it’s a new, strange idea, and we can leave it aside for the moment. Before you dive into what M.A.G.I.C. can do for you, you must decide what you want it to do for you. For example, where do you want to be in five years? What do you want? What would make you happy?

Boom! Maybe even answering those questions seems as impossible as believing in an easy life. You’ll find clarity in this chapter, including suggestions that will probably surprise you. For one thing, you won’t need to take notes or make lists.

Don’t Mess With “Don’t”

Let’s start by brushing away a common misunderstanding. If you ask people what they want, many often tell you what they don’t want: “I don’t want to be poor.” “I don’t want to be ill.” “I don’t want to work for that person anymore.”

Those people think they’ve effectively expressed their desire. To the conscious mind, “I don’t want to be poor” and “I want to be rich” are the same. To the subconscious mind, though, the statements are not the same. When people express their desires using negative terms like not, no, or nothing, the speakers’ inner resources can’t help.

It’s as if you go into a restaurant, and when the server asks you what you want for lunch, you say, “I don’t want a burger, I don’t want pasta, and I don’t want a salad.” When he replies, “That narrows it down a bit, but what is it you want?” you insist you’ve already told him. The customer is always right, so he returns from the kitchen with calf’s liver. If his selection does not please you, would you complain that you didn’t get what you wanted?

Most people know not to behave that way in a restaurant, but they do when they’re “ordering” aspects of their lives. They sort of play Russian roulette, but worse (well, except for the possibility of getting killed). The outcome is often exactly what they said they didn’t want. For example, my friend from college dreamed of a future husband who was not short, blond, or a soldier. Today she is married to a short, blond cop. (YES! He’s not a soldier! Close enough, though — damn.)

If we consider the nature of our subconscious minds, my friend’s outcome should have been obvious. We so often get what we expressly don’t want because the subconscious skips the negative words, such as not. The mind knows only how to add things, not to remove them. For example, if I ask you not to imagine an alarm clock in a refrigerator, it’s likely that you instantly call up a vivid image.

When I pose that question in seminars, attendees of all ages usually describe an old-fashioned clock with two bells on top in an empty refrigerator. People tend to add similar details to their “forbidden” images. We are capable of “seeing” something, like an alarm clock in a fridge, that we’ve never actually seen. We can imagine, say, being happy or being rich even if we’ve never been happy or rich before. Our minds are remarkable.

Our minds imagine so they can process information. You might have experienced telling a child not to do something — such as “Don’t climb that tree because you’ll fall” — only to watch her disobey. The child was likely to do so for a reason that’s all in her mind. You planted an idea she could understand only by imagining climbing the tree and falling. Whether or not she fell, or even actually climbed, the movie you programmed in her head will replay whenever it fits.

To send the right message to our subconscious, we need to clarify our dreams and how we express them.

Be Specific

Along with being positive, the information that we send to our subconscious also must be specific. For example, if you tell your mind that you want more money — a popular wish — you need to illustrate exactly what that means. Otherwise, find a penny on the street, and your subconscious reacts, “Mission accomplished!” You might have gained only a penny, but it’s still more money than you had before. The subconscious mind tends to be that literal. That’s the way it fulfills the wishes in all areas of your life.

Instead, paint the picture of what the experience of having enough money would be like. Imagine where you would live, what you would drive, what you would wear, and where you would travel. Imagine how your life would look if you had all the money you want today.

Plan Your Outcome, Not The Process

Although many people begin a life change by planning a series of steps, the process is not the right place to start. Considering process is important, although defining your desired outcome — or goal — must come first. (Later in the book, we’ll look at the process stage but in a different way than you might expect. You won’t find any requirement to make lists in the process I recommend.)

The problem with a step-by-step process is that it can hinder flexibility. In fact, starting with the process rather than the outcome is one of the most common causes of failure. For example, if your desired outcome is to win a contract with a certain company, the first step of a process might be to call the CEO’s assistant. If he doesn’t give out the number or the CEO doesn’t want to meet, though, you’re stuck at step one. Focus on the outcome instead, and you’re far more apt to beat any obstacle to getting there.

Along with focusing on the outcome, you’ll strengthen your visualization if you add the “scenario” dimension. Where an outcome might be buying your dream house, the scenario is imagining a future in that house. You might picture your family happily living there, maybe celebrating a birthday or hosting a holiday feast.

To further explain the difference between the goal or outcome and the scenario, let’s say you’re facing a meeting with potential clients. You focus on the outcome if you expect to have a good meeting. You visualize the scenario if you imagine yourself shaking hands, brilliantly answering clients’ questions, and hearing them offer you their business.

When I prepare for a speech before a large audience, my goal is to give a great speech. To support that goal, I imagine the scenario of a standing ovation, followed by audience members approaching me to sign their copy of my book. Reality often reflects my visualizations, so I credit them with at least part of the reason for that happy ending.

More Examples Of Clarity In Action

The M.A.G.I.C. Reality Creator™ has endless applications. In this section, we’ll explore some typical situations, including those shared by my seminar attendees.

Transforming In-Law Visits

Maybe you’re concerned about an upcoming visit from your in-laws (if you adore yours or if you don’t have any, just play along). Based on previous visits, you might start thinking, “Man, this visit will be a disaster!” That expectation, especially as expressed, is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Setting a more positive goal — let’s say, a good relationship with your in-laws — will work better, but even that doesn’t go far enough. You should also imagine what that future relationship would look and feel like (and any other appropriate senses, all of which we’ll explore in Chapter Three).

At this point, you might be thinking, “What’s he talking about? It’s impossible to imagine a good relationship with my in-laws!” I’ll ask you to suspend disbelief, as if you’re making a fictional movie. Maybe you imagine a scene in which you greet them with warm hugs and praise; maybe you see yourselves enjoying preparing meals together and, after they return home, calling each other just to chat. These thoughts will change your state of mind and possibly your in-laws’. The change will help you actually look forward to their next visit.

Transforming Dinner With The Kids

Another typical family situation that can need improvement is daily dinner with one’s children. You, like many parents I hear from, might dream of children who, instead of fighting, sit quietly and eat or who answer your many questions about their day. The first dream would probably bore the children, though, and the second is likely to strike them as gestapo-like.

In that case, I would advise you to redesign your scenario to make everyone happy. For example, you might imagine everyone having a good conversation. Picture the light in your children’s faces as they have fun sharing their secrets. Hear everyone’s laughter, and feel the warmth and the joy.

Transforming “So Sad!”

When a seminar attendee and his wife walked in the neighborhood, he said people often stopped to admire their one-year-old son. If the boy was not smiling when they peered into the stroller, they would say something like, “Is he sad?” After the first time, the experience repeated itself, and the father asked me what to say to make the onlookers stop making such comments.

I counseled him, “Go back a step. By the time the onlookers react, it’s too late to change the scenario.” Their feedback was influencing the parents’ behavior toward the child; the parents started to approach him as a sad child. That approach, in turn, influenced the child’s behavior.

I advised him instead to prepare before the walk for a different outcome. If he and his wife could imagine a favorable scenario, one in which passersby praise the child for beautifully smiling, they could replace the negative image. The parents would react to their son as though he were a happy child. That alone, I said, would manifest smiles all around.

The man and his wife, although skeptical, went to work on this simple idea. First, they needed to become aware of the times they thought of their son as frowning. Then they substituted smiling images. As I had counseled, they employed various senses to add details to the mental picture. For example, they imagined the weather, feeling the sun on their skin, and the sounds in the neighborhood.

When I met the man a few months later, he said the situation had dramatically changed almost immediately. When they, the boy’s parents, stopped letting themselves be influenced by other people’s reactions to the child’s sad face, their new perspective triggered a new reality. The way they approached the child now resulted in a happy expression, and spectators’ comments reflected it. The parents had planned and created this exact outcome.

Transforming Phobias

Future-scenario images can also sometimes help combat phobias. For example, another client asked how to cure her daughter’s fear of the subway. I advised the client to imagine her child laughing in the subway car. When the mother projected that image onto the child in the form of new behavior, she stopped expecting a terrible subway experience and allowed the child to release her fear.

Transforming Athletic Performance

Let’s also take the example of athletes. When I ask them what they want, most athletes say only that they don’t want to lose. So after turning that around — to “I want to win” — they can build future scenarios, as successful athletes do. Runners might see themselves dashing first through the finish line or wearing a gold medal; hockey players might see themselves scoring the winning goal. Of course, that doesn’t mean they always win, because other factors weigh in, but they’ve done the essential subconscious work to set themselves to win.

Like the frowning baby’s mother, you may be skeptical. Sometimes, seeing is believing. I again urge you to suspend disbelief long enough to put your heart into an experiment about something you want to change.

Prove It Yourself

As you’ve already seen in this chapter, your subconscious mind can change your reality. It can change your reality the way you want if you speak clearly to it in a language it can understand. Now you might be ready for some proof beyond the examples I’ve already given you. I invite you to test the M.A.G.I.C. model; this book contains many experiments, and you can find more in my other book, Triumph: Your New Life Story, and on www.wavesofmagic.com.

I test the model every day, both with my clients and by myself, in both small and big ways. For example, I had read about an experiment in Washington, DC, that illustrates the power of M.A.G.I.C. During the two months that hundreds of people meditated on inner images of peace, the crime rate in that city dropped by 23.3 percent. I repeated the experiment in Bratislava with the 250 people in my seminar.

When we looked at the official crime statistics for that Saturday, we compared them to the stats of the same day on many other weeks. The daily minimum was typical: nine crimes. On our meditative Saturday, though, the number fell, not to zero, but to three crimes, a 66 percent reduction. The result shows one of two things. Either it works to use thoughts to influence reality, or most of the criminals were in my seminar instead of committing crimes!

Although we can measure the crime rate, we can’t count how many good things happened on meditation day — how many people felt inspired to help someone. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if cities collected that type of data?

You don’t have to change your city’s crime rate to demonstrate the value of M.A.G.I.C., though, and you don’t have to move the planets. You can start with something personal. For example, you could experiment on your next meeting with a potential client. Visualize how you want to feel during and after that meeting.

Listening To Echoes

If you’re familiar with The Secret book or movie and its explanation of the Law of Attraction, you also might be wondering whether and how M.A.G.I.C. compares. I credit The Secret for preaching the power of the conscious mind and for inspiring people to think positively. It contends that what you think is what you experience.

On the other hand, the book and film seem to suggest that a wish alone is enough to change one’s future. But wishing, which engages only the conscious mind, is only a micro step. It leaves out the subconscious mind, so it lacks inspired action on the part of the wisher.

Like The Secret, the M.A.G.I.C. model encourages you to view the Universe — and your life — as the great echo machine that it is. In both models, the Universe delivers feedback based on what your subconscious calls in. M.A.G.I.C., though, gives you more tools to understand that feedback and react appropriately to it.

The question is this: Do you love the feedback you’re getting? If you don’t, it’s futile to complain about the feedback. It’s even more futile to ignore the feedback and repeat the failure. That repetition might even be insane, according to one definition.

Instead, use the feedback, and if you don’t like it, consider what you can change. For example, illness is often nothing more than feedback. You probably have family members, friends, or acquaintances who recovered after responding to the feedback by changing something, whether behavior, environment, or beliefs.

Picturing Your Future

When you think about your future, how do you see it? Many people find it surprising that their minds often use pictures to process their thoughts. What’s more, image-based thoughts aren’t limited to sighted people. Even people who have been blind since birth use a type of visual interpretation to process thoughts. In their case in particular, hearing and touch tend to inform their images.

The power of visualization suggests why you read about visualization in so many goal-oriented books. How you visualize makes all the difference to the quality of the outcome. Returning to the money goal, someone who always thinks about not wanting to be poor shouldn’t expect the mind to be able to call up pictures of wealth. The mind can’t turn “not poor” into “wealthy” images. Our minds and our lives can go only in the direction determined by the pictures we feed them. The M.A.G.I.C. model adds precision to the mental images.

Because it speaks so clearly to the subconscious, M.A.G.I.C. also helps you apply its lessons on a subconscious level. This model, unlike those that address only your conscious mind, is unlikely to fade with time. Like a baby who, having learned to walk, doesn’t return to crawling, you’ll continue to practice these subconscious communication skills. It’s as if you’re rewired.

The story of a client further illustrates the rarity of a relapse after using the M.A.G.I.C. model. This man was agoraphobic until he learned how to speak to his subconscious mind, which didn’t only improve his symptoms — it permanently cured him.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” M.A.G.I.C.’s version is “Be careful what you show and tell your subconscious because you will get it.”

Not For Everyone? Nonsense!

The M.A.G.I.C. Reality Creator™ is easy and radically effective, so why doesn’t everyone use it? First, everyone doesn’t know about it yet. Second, some people who do know about it don’t trust what they haven’t experienced. To other people, it sounds like voodoo. To the second and third groups, I say, “Skip the excuses! Test the model! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain!”

Related to the second group are the people who insist, “How can I imagine being a millionaire? I can’t picture what I haven’t seen!” The alarm-clock-in-the-fridge example demonstrates you can. In your mind at this moment are the images of a version of yourself who is more successful, more beloved, happier, and richer than you are now. Let’s pull them out of you. If you still feel an absence of images, though, just pretend how it would feel if you could imagine. What would you observe?

A final group tested the model without seeing desired results. That happened for one or more of three reasons: Their images weren’t clear enough, they didn’t pay close enough attention to the feedback they were receiving, or they tried instead of testing.

Recapping Clarity

To get ready to meet the M.A.G.I.C. Reality Creator™ in detail, let’s go over the steps to achieving clarity:

1. Focus on the outcome, not the process.
2. Ask yourself, “What outcome do I want instead of what I have now?” If you don’t know the answer, keep asking until you get it.
3. Next, tackle “How will I know when I get it?” That question should trigger another series of questions related to scenarios. For example, how would you know that your sales prospect is happy? How would she look and what would she say if she wants to meet again?
4. Working backward from the happy end state, create images that illustrate it. An example is the athlete who starts with wearing a gold medal after crossing the finish line. Because trainers and authors often ask you to focus on the process, this step may seem counterintuitive to you. It isn’t to your subconscious, though.

For example, if you’re looking for the love of your life, picture a perfect future for you and him or her before imagining the path you might take to get to that point. How will you recognize it as a perfect future? You might say that you see the two of you relaxing, traveling, cooking, and attending events together. You might’ve gone on a lot of dates and signed up for every dating website, but if you haven’t engaged your subconscious, you haven’t done everything you can.

The saying “Fake it until you make it” applies here. I recommend that you further help your subconscious by making room in your life — your home — for someone else. That doesn’t mean you need a big apartment, only that you clear some space in your closet and in the bathroom. Get rid of some things if you need to. If your soul mate appeared on your doorstep today, would you have room for that person?

One client had trouble finding a partner. When she mentioned that she loves going to the movies, I suggested that she buy a second ticket to tell her subconscious mind that she’s not going alone. The client started to overthink: “Do I call a friend to use the ticket?” No, I said, just keep buying the extra ticket. One day, I added, her subconscious mind will see that she uses the spare.

The woman might have taken my advice; when I later ran into her at the gas station, she was with a man. I didn’t ask, but he certainly appeared to be her significant other.

Just yesterday, a former seminar attendee told me he credits an extra toothbrush and cleared space in the closet with meeting the woman who became his wife.

Engaging the subconscious is not only easy, but it can also be a game. Trying too hard, on the other hand, can work against a quest for love, prospects, anything.

Ready, Set, Apply

In this chapter about clarity, you’ve learned how to clear the way to magic through the M.A.G.I.C. Reality Creator™. You’ve learned the need to express your desires in positive terms and as detailed scenarios visualized in your mind. In each of the next chapters, you’ll learn the five magical steps to riding the Wave and bringing magic into your life.

For more on how to accomplish your goals, check out Waves of Magic: How to Tap Your Inner Resources to Achieve Anything You Want by Peter Sasín.