TLDR: A man, recently laid off despite positive job feedback, doesn’t realize his negative beliefs attract such experiences. His subsequent “adult tantrum” reveals deeper insight into why he keeps losing his jobs. And shows the rest of us how to benefit from an important life hack.
A client had a disappointing experience: he got laid off. It wasn’t something he was expecting. In fact, when the boss told him, it shocked him because, up to then, the boss said the client was doing a great job. In reality, he should have expected it because he was expecting it.
But he wasn’t aware he was expecting it because he didn’t have access to the hidden, practical hack life had been offering him for decades. A life hack that could dramatically alter his success.
Of course, the layoff wasn’t about the client. The boss, who also is the business owner, had to make personnel cuts. The business wasn’t supporting itself. And in most businesses, employees represent the largest business costs. So someone had to go. Our client had the least amount of students. It made sense the boss would let him go.
But my client didn’t see it that way. He played it cool in the moment, when his boss broke the news. But when he got home, his thoughts and behavior changed, a lot.
This story is about gifts hidden amidst our actions. Physical reality, including our actions, offer great clues about what we’re creating. Understanding this can dramatically change our lives for the better. That understanding, however, comes with practice.
Let’s see what happened next with this client so we can understand how what happened next offered him wonderful hacks that could dramatically improve his life.
An adult tantrum
The client said that upon arriving home he went straight into his tool shed. There, he “kicked the hell out a bucket for a good ten minutes.” While doing that, he cursed his former boss, the business and his “luck” for being the one to lose a job “AGAIN.”
Now, the fact that he mentioned losing another job “again” wasn’t surprising. This phrase indicated two things: one, that he has very strong negative momentum creating persistent experiences of losing jobs. Two, his awareness of the fact that he keeps losing jobs is perpetuating that momentum. I told him this, but at the moment, he was too embittered to hear it.
So I shifted the focus.
I said to him that his “adult tantrum” in the shed offered him a wonderful gift. That caught his attention. I don’t think he expected that. I then explained how our acts in physical reality are manifestations. Just like our desires turning into things, our actions are manifestations reflecting beliefs we hold about the world around us. Furthermore, if we can read what those acts are saying, we can transform our lives.
He wanted to know more. So I told him what his tantrum was telling him.
A steady diet turns to hate
All of us create our reality through our thoughts. Persistently held thoughts turn to beliefs. Thoughts that become beliefs have gathered enough momentum to complete the process of turning into things. Persist in that belief and that belief will turn into physical reality. Then reality will reflect the essence of that belief back to us. At that point, our belief becomes “true”. When it does, the belief recedes into the background of our awareness. Meanwhile, the belief gets “confirmed” in our experience as “the way life is.”
For this client, “the way life is” is that he can’t keep a job. But that’s not the whole story. For decades, this client fostered a steady diet of anger and frustration about capitalism, money and earning a living. He sees these things as scourges on humanity and the planet. The client resents having to earn a living. He dislikes doing work he doesn’t enjoy. And he doesn’t like needing money to get his basic necessities.
These beliefs took up residence in his vibration many years ago. Jobs he manifested since then showed him more evidence of his distasteful economic reality: those jobs he got paid little. His managers always belittled him. And, of course, they laid him off. One job he kept for some time wasn’t helpful either. He wrote copy for a blog. A blog that critiqued capitalism and the money system.
But you can see how the client was a perfect match to that job. In that job, he amplified his anger and frustration about capitalism, money and earning a living into hate for those things. That is, until owners of that company laid him off too…
Success eluding him
By this time, the client found himself at wits end. His hate over capitalism, money and earning a living overflowed. Finally, he turned to gig work. He delivered meals for a time before going onto social security. That soothed some of his negative momentum, which allowed him to get the last job. The one in which he, again, got laid off.
I told this client his actions in the tool shed told him something important. “Here you are taking out your frustration on something having nothing to do with what happened” I said, referring to the bucket. “The bucket didn’t lay you off.”
In fact, the boss didn’t either. If “you create your reality” is accurate (and it is) then this client laid himself off. The boss only did what was a reflection of the client’s dominant intent. He was a cooperative component to my client’s unfolding understanding, in other words. The intent wasn’t to get laid off. The intent was to reflect to the client where his beliefs were in conflict with his desires.
Despite extremely negative interpretations of the world around him, this client wants a life that’s easy. He even wants money. He’s a musician and writer and one of his great desires is to receive generous compensation as recognition of his talents. Of course, he wouldn’t put it that way. He would say “I DESERVE recognition because of the blood, sweat and tears I’ve put into my art!”
But that way of expressing it creates resistance. It’s more aligned with his hatred of the money system. Which explains why that success continues eluding him.
Putting blame outside ourselves
I told the client this is what his tantrum offers: an opportunity for him to see what he’s doing. He’s literally blaming everyone and everything for his troubles. He’s also blaming “the system” and “money” for his troubles. All the while, he’s ignoring the only Source of power he has…and the only Source from which his experience springs: himself.
“You beating up that bucket,” I told him. “Is showing you how, in your powerless state, you’re projecting your power onto things and people that have no responsibility for your created reality. And in doing that, you feel tremendous pain. Because that pain tells you that your Broader Perspective knows different.”
Our Broader Perspective is clear that we create our reality. No one else does that for us. We do, and only we do. When we blame circumstances or others for an experience, that shitty feeling we experience while doing that is an indicator telling us something important. It tells us our thoughts and behaviors are at loggerheads with what our Broader Perspective knows.
That’s important because if we heed that message, we can dramatically change our lives for the better. And it’s to our advantage to do so. Because no one else will do it for us. That’s because no one else is in our reality other than us.
When beliefs change, life changes
But this manifestation business is not magic. We can’t create around our persistent beliefs. This client has 40+ years of negative momentum he’s going to need to unravel. So for this client, it may be a while before he really understands what’s happening. Before he understands well enough to take productive action.
Every action we take in life is a manifestation. They reflect back to us a belief we hold. Decipher that reflection and we get a clear sense of what we believe. And what we believe creates our life experience.
That means, if we change our beliefs, our life experience must also change. Isn’t that a great thing to know? I think it is. But it’s even better experiencing this in one’s personal experience. Because nothing teaches better than personal experience.
All this means changing our lives is as easy as changing our beliefs. And our actions constantly shower us with clues to beliefs creating our life.
What a cool hack! Examine beliefs and we change life. Tapping into that hack is a powerful resource. The challenge is, understanding what hack tells us about what beliefs we hold can be tricky. It helps to know how to interpret them accurately. Let me show you how.
Postscript
A wonderful followup needs to be added here. I wrote this story weeks ago. Two weeks after this happened, the client, after I held his feet to the fire about what he was doing, decided to re-commit to the Positively Focused Practice. What happened after a week of rededication is remarkable. But also it’s just what happens when one becomes positively focused.
That pending newspaper interview is a direct manifestation of his desire to gain notoriety for his artistic expression. Is it a coincidence it came to him after rededicating himself to the practice? My clients know the answer to that question is “NO!”.