Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational speaker who can speak about the Law of Attraction and the science behind its validity at your next business event. Contact us to check availability. The full transcript of the above video is included below.
Full Video Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about the law of attraction, whether or not it’s real or whether or not it’s maybe not so real. And look, the proponents of the law of attraction, they say it’s true. They say that literally you think a thought and the universe will conspire, everything in the universe will shift to make your thought turn into reality.
And if you actually read some of these books, they take it to the extreme. They literally say if you think a thought, it is creative. Your thinking is creative. You are creating the universe with your thoughts. If you think something, it’s going to come to pass. The universe is going to shift in a way to make it true.
Now, on the other side, proponents think it’s absolutely hogwash. They think if anything—and maybe it doesn’t work at all. A lot of people just think it’s completely not true at all. But some people think that maybe it does work but it’s a function of probability. It’s a function of probability, and I’ll explain that in a second.
I would say that the reality is somewhere right in the middle.
So let me tell you a quick story. I grew up in Canada, and when I first moved to the United States and moved to Los Angeles in 1998, and I bought a dark green Volkswagen Jetta at the time—now, I was in sales, and those big Los Angeles freeways, I was driving around all the time. In a given day I probably saw 10,000 cars, on average, maybe more. Now, I bought the Volkswagen Jetta, and all of a sudden what did I see everywhere I looked? I saw Volkswagen Jettas. They were everywhere. I couldn’t believe it. I had never noticed that there were so many Jettas. And maybe this has happened to you.
But these Jettas, now were they there before? Of course they were there before. But I didn’t notice them before. Now, why did I notice them? I noticed them because there was a focus of a Volkswagen Jetta in my head. Because I now owned one I was more aware of them, so my subconscious mind noticed all the other Volkswagen Jettas that were out there. This is the probability theory. So because I was focused on something—I saw it over here, I saw it over here, I saw it over here—I couldn’t believe how many places I saw them and they were everywhere. If I wasn’t focused on them, it wouldn’t have happened.
So what the reality is—this is the probability theory— is that your subconscious mind is extraordinarily powerful. Your subconscious mind, they say that what’s actually in your conscious mind—listen to this statistic—in a given situation, any environment, even the one you’re in right now, you’re watching a video on a computer, you’ve made roughly 10 million observations of everything around you. It’s all happening in your subconscious mind. The seat you’re sitting in, the room, the temperature, the things on the wall, dirt on the floor, someone who walked down the hall, a noise, a cat, anything – your subconscious mind has noticed all those things. One way or another, the observation was made.
Meanwhile, your conscious mind can only keep track of about 30 or 40 things at a time. Thirty or 40, can you imagine? So the vast majority of observations you make on a daily basis in any situation, 99.9996%, the vast of majority of observations you make, you’re not even consciously aware that you made them. So your subconscious mind is extraordinarily powerful and it will notice things all around you that today you don’t even know are there if you train your mind to look for them.
And that’s what the law of attraction is. What does the law of attraction want you to do? It wants you to think about what you want. Maybe you do a vision board where you put pictures of the things you want on a board, or maybe you just visualize different scenarios that you want to be in at some point in the future. You visualize them in your head as if they are real, as if they’ve already happened. So, very important that you train your mind.
If you study this—and I have, I’ve studied this a fair amount, actually—you have to train your mind that it has already taken place, because if you’re telling your mind that it’s something in the future, your mind, your subconscious mind, it just takes directions. It will assume it’s at some point in the future, so it’s not relevant today. But if you picture it as if it has already happened, as if you’re already there, your subconscious mind is going to start noticing all kinds of things that will actually help you get there in real life.
Now, is that magic? It’s not magic at all. It’s just training your mind and taking advantage of the power of your subconscious mind to help you in achieving the goals that you have for yourself and for your life.
Now, one of the things that the law of attraction says, a lot of the books and things that are on this topic they all say, and it’s very true, you have to actually take action. In other words, let’s assume that you want to—most people want to get rich. But you’re going to sit at home and not actually do anything. So the only observations you’re making are the observations within your home – sitting on the couch, watching TV, doing whatever it is you’re doing. Well, your subconscious mind, you’re not even giving it a chance to make the observations that will help you, because all you’re seeing is your surroundings every day. You’re not exposing yourself.
So you have to take action. You have to do what you can with what you have in the direction of your goals. You have to at least take a step forward. Go out. Take action. Make a phone call. Visit a building. Do whatever it is. Go to an event. Meet some people. Shake some hands. Whatever it is that you can do, you have to do that because, again, keep in mind, 10 million observations in any given environment. If you’ve been in one environment, that’s it, 10 million. If you’ve been 40 in a day, now you’ve got 400 million. The more different places you go, different things you do, taking action, you’re going to expose yourself to different environments where your subconscious mind can notice this thing and that thing and this thing and that thing, and all these different things that are all around you that can help you get to your goal.
And I’ll tell you what. When you do that and you train your mind to do it, sometimes it does seem like magic. I mean, listen, I’m a pretty mathematical guy. My father was a university professor of quantum physics, so pretty left-brain, methodical, mathematical family. I’ve got a whole family full of PhDs in the sciences.
But the truth of the matter is that if you train your mind to focus on something and look for things, it will find things that seem so serendipitous that you just think sometimes, “I can’t believe that that happened.” And I’m sure you’ve had serendipities in your life. Those things happen. And sometimes you think, “Gosh, that’s like a miracle.” If you’re a religious person, a person of faith, you think, “That is God at work right there.”
I’ll tell you what. It might be. I’m not saying God doesn’t exist. I actually believe in a higher power myself. But the reality today is that you’re living your life and you’re making observations all the time. If you focus on the right things, you’ll be astonished at what you find. And that is the law of attraction in action.
This is Patrick. Thanks so much for watching this video, and here I am one more time reminding you to think bigger about yourself, think bigger about your business.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a keynote speaker who has spoken at business conferences in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
