REALITY REPAIR: IMPROVING WHAT YOU DON”T LIKE.

By Bill Cottringer



“Your wish is my command!” –From the genie in the bottle of life, in The Secret.

By now The Secret is out because of the cast’s appearance on Oprah’s show. Accepting the ultimate truth of life’s simplest and greatest secret—that your thoughts and feelings attract the present realities you are part of—is only the first step in creating a better, more successful life for yourself; but it is in applying this simple secret to make better, more desirable realities out of the uncomfortable, undesirable ones where all the sweat and tears come into play. This is where we try to find and use the few important things from the rest of the overwhelming overload of nonsensical chaos. And it is obviously not merely a matter of attacking negative problems with positive thinking vibes or snapping your fingers and expecting 20 years of negative situations to disappear and be replaced by positive ones.

Here are a few ideas of how to apply The Secret for some immediate reality repair you may be trying to do in the here and now. These ideas are relevant whether you want to be in good health, have a better marriage or relationship, make more money, feel happier, be more successful, become smarter, find more meaning and contentment in life, or just want to get from where you are to where you want to be in anything.



Warning: This is just my small, humble contribution in understanding and applying a much greater truth than my mind can grasp, hopefully to stimulate you to take advantage of The Secret in making an even bigger interpretation and application of it in your own life. The choice is yours. But if by chance you are idling your engine in a parking lot somewhere, consider cranking up the radio and revving up, because there is an open road ahead.



1. All positive change starts with acceptance and appreciation.

What does this meant? Simply put, you won’t ever get what you want until you learn to want what you have, or at least start focusing on something positive that you do like and appreciate about a situation, even when you prefer not to even. Granted, the stronger your distaste of the situation and your discomfort, the more difficult it is to see a grain of hope and enjoyment in it to appreciate; but life has rules and this is one of them.

Appreciation of where you are and what you have right now is the first change that allows something “better” to enter onto the scenes. Think about this: Are you inclined to keep giving gifts to someone who doesn’t accept and appreciate them? Heck no! Why should life be any different? Gratitude asks for more gifts in the right way and gets them. Your present perspective about this will have a lot to do with how much of The Secret’s power is unleashed.

2. You get everything you ask for.

This statement is fairly easy to agree with when good things are coming your way. But it may be a hard pill to swallow when you are unemployed, broke and starving, getting divorced after 25 years of marriage, suffering agony from physical or mental illness, painfully homeless from a natural disaster or in the middle of some other serious personal tragedy. We don’t want to take credit for causing our own bruises, broken bones and bleeding. But regardless, there is always a valuable lesson in the worst of “earthquakes” that happen to us. And the harder the test, the bigger the lesson and the more the benefit. You are looking out for your own good in the long run, even when you may not realize it at the time. Time does sooth all pain.

The real trick is to resolve to accept responsibility for being in whatever unpleasant situation you may be in right now and then start catching yourself in the act of perpetuating that situation by certain thoughts and feelings you are having. If you are being accused of being too self-absorbed or self-centered, how are you spending most of your time? What exactly are you thinking about yourself? How do you feel when someone points this out to you? What are you not appreciating about this situation? What are you actually asking for with your thoughts, feelings and behaviors? What are you attracting with what you are thinking, feeling and doing? What aren’t you thinking or doing to become less self-absorbed? What lesson are you failing to hear? Why aren’t you listening to the simple answers of your inner voice?

3. Catch yourself with your own hand in the cookie jar.

We were given self-awareness for a very good reason and it is a very useful tool. Many think that growing our awareness is what life is really all about. Being aware of a problem—such as having excessive debt, experiencing a conflict with another person at work, struggling with an unhappy marriage, suffering from depression or back pain, or being overweight—and how your thoughts and feelings may be perpetuating these problems, is a big part of the solution.

In fact, the more aware you become of your own discomfort from a situation you don’t like you begin to see the only person who can do anything about it—you. With conflict and discomfort comes the challenge and motivation to make a positive change to improve the situation. Sometimes a choice to change something you are doing to contribute to the problem (a wrong approach?) has to be made and that is a giant step towards applying the secret to gradually get into a better reality. Increased awareness of the power of choice is a powerful reality repair tool and a wonderful gift to appreciate.

4. You can’t change something you don’t understand.

The Secret’s power is relatively useless when you aren’t taking the time to truly understand an uncomfortable situation you are now apart of, which you want to change for the better. In these situations the tendency is to try and run away from the discomfort when you need to be running towards it to get to better know what it is all about. Prayers often wrongly ask for the burden and pain and the uncomfortable situation itself, to go away all on their own. And we wonder why that doesn’t happen?

The more time you take to see why you are in a situation that you don’t like and then find out what you are thinking and doing to keep yourself there, the more about the situation you will learn to appreciate and not need to change. I know that sounds odd, but it is true . This frees up a lot of energy to change the things that do need changing, which usually turn out to be much less than expected. Unfortunately a common tendency when people are in holes is to keep digging, which only makes the hole deeper.

5. Nothing happens overnight except sleep.

We have all been duped by a world gone mad with hyper-warp speed and instant need gratification. If we can’t have huge success overnight, then we are forced to settle for something much less and be unhappy doing so. That is why a microwaved TV dinner doesn’t taste as good as a two-day Thanksgiving meal does. We may be making some progress in little incremental gains, but we can’t slow down long enough to see and appreciate these small improvements. Of course, positive change that will attract a better reality always has to start with acceptance and appreciation. That is life rule number one.

The thing about impatience for immediate results is that it just creates a much bigger need for more patience, because life happens on its own schedule, not ours. And we probably really wouldn’t want it any other way because we like pleasant surprises and we know that is what we will get if we keep trying. Accepting and appreciating these realities is a huge gain that can be noticed right away. And this may very well be the understanding that paves the way to take advantage of The Secret’s power to work its magic.

6. Be clear on what you want.

It is hard to get what you want if you don’t know what you want, clearly enough to ask for it and get it, without any confusion or misunderstanding. This may seem silly, but ask yourself if you can define highly desirable things like happiness, success, contentment, peace of mind, meaning, making a difference or any other “treasure in the land of plenty” with any degree of precision and certainty. Probably not unless you have worked a great deal on it.

You may have great difficulty being clear on exactly what you want. But the more you try to define these things that you think you want, the clearer they will become to you to ask for and get. And learning to ask for what you want is not easy. It has to be stated in positive terms and asked for in the right way, for the right reasons, and at the right time. That may take heaps of understanding, patience and practice.

7. Things are moving along better than we think.

This statement may seem like a contradiction to all the above and the hardest reality of all to accept, appreciate and understand—especially if we really don’t want to be where we are. But let me make a suggestion. After you have lived for awhile, stand back and take a look at a big slice of your life from a distance. What you will probably see is that where you are is about where you need to be, and that happened in spite of your many personal interventions with reality repairs. And if you aren’t really sure where you are now, look at where your feet are pointing and all the past footsteps that got you here.

This is not to say we are just puppets on a string living out pre-arranged lives of destiny that we have no control over. We do have free will to make choices every living second. And if we suddenly wake up some morning and realize the awesome power of choice, we start having more access to that power to change the few things we come to understand that need our right choices. And these choices are usually the simple yes-no ones from our moral consciences, and not the rambling complex thoughts and unsure feelings we get tangles up with in our crazy psychological consciences.

Successful reality repairs start with the realization and acceptance that things are actually moving along much better than we first imagine. When we don’t have that perspective, we are just idling our engines in a parking lot somewhere. It helps to flavor this critical realization with general gratitude and appreciation of something positive about the situation you are in and the life you have created—good and bad. Follow this up by owning responsibility for where you are and what you have or don’t have. Then you are in a better position to see the few important realities that need repairing, from the many that don’t.

With these changes comes an increased awareness of what you are doing to stay hostage in undesirable realities that do need changing, and require better understanding of all the circumstances, exercising more patience, and being more clear on what you want and aren’t presently getting, and why and what to do about that.

From where I am presently doing my own looking, there seem to be only two realities that need my personal help in repairing: (a) becoming more sensitive to moments of opportunity to help others see the truth of the secret and apply it to improve the quality of their lives, and (b) standing up and taking action to stop the few things that bring tears to God’s eyes. What realities in your own life are you now seeing that need repairing? There really is an open road ahead.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security, Business Success Coach, Sport Psychologist, Writer and Photographer from Issaquah, WA. He is author of Passwords To The Prosperity Zone, You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, and The Bow-Wow Secrets. This article is the beginning of a new book, Reality Repair: Fixing What You Don’t Like. Bill can be reached for comments and questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net