THE PROSPERITY ZONE: A TREASURE CHEST OF HEALTH, WEALTH AND LOVE

by William Cottringer & Mary Bien

What does everyone want? That is an easy question to answer. Health, wealth and love. These are the “Big Three” on everyone’s wish list. These things are located in a treasure chest within your Prosperity Zone. Where is this magical place and how do you get there? The secret access code to your Prosperity Zone involves understanding and applying three somewhat paradoxical laws of life.

THE LAW OF ILLUSION:

Things are not always as they appear.

Sometimes up is really down and yes is no. Much of the truth you see depends upon where you are standing. There are no realities other than relative perceptions, and yet people often act on distorted perceptions as if they were as factual as they think gravity always is. Sometimes, failure is really a disguised opportunity to start over again with better information, good questions are more important than clever answers and change can bring about genuine security and stability.

Most important, we often embrace priority reversals without questioning them and end up as a dog getting wagged by its tail or the cart before the horse. Oddly, the discomfort from these illusions is what actually helps improve our visual acuity so we can see more clearly what is and what isn't. You have to experience the discomfort of failure before you succeed so you can learn to stop doing the things that keep you from being successful.

A common sculpting technique is to chip away all that the object of the sculpting isn’t, so that what it is can gradually get uncovered and revealed from all the plaster. Sometimes the most perplexing problems in life require exposing many wrong solutions before the right one becomes apparent. This is sort of a process of elimination.

Take love for example. We often have to experience the discomfort of what love isn’t over and over again before we are fortunate enough to discover what it really is. In this sense the true quality of something might be defined best by it’s opposite. Health, wealth and love are three things that can be better understood by first experiencing all the things they aren’t, so that what they are, can shine through without confusing distractions.

Many people fail to get what they want because they are not clear as to what they want or can’t ask for it clearly enough. They become frustrated and unhappy. Health, wealth and love are real things that have to be defined precisely—as to what they are and aren’t—before you can make any progress in pursuing them. The clearer the definition, the quicker you get to it.

THE LAW OF EFFORT:

The relationship between your efforts and the results they get is a complicated one.

Sometimes the more effort you put into something the better the results; but other times the harder you try, the further behind you get. It is often a mixture of quality of approach and quality of effort that gets the best results.

The bad news: To have health, wealth and love you have to pay some dues. The good news: The more effort you put into these things—both quantity and quality of effort—the more abundant the harvest. The only luck involved in getting these three things is in becoming more sensitive to critical moments of opportunity vs. danger. Such sensitivity is increased through the concrete actions you take to cultivate the harvest.

If you want love, you have to do a few things to get it. First, you have to understand and define love clearly enough to ask for it. Then you have to make an effort to become more lovable yourself so you can attract love. This may mean learning how to share yourself more, practicing more self control, or letting go of some of your rigid expectations as to what is okay and not okay. Finally, you have to actively seek love where you are most likely to find the kind of love you want. This might require risk, but the more effort you make, the more you will become sensitive to moments of great opportunity vs. moments of danger.

If you want health, you have to eat right, exercise, sleep, reduce stress and hang around other healthy people. If you want wealth, you have to earn more, invest more and save more. This may mean finding out your most valuable skill or talent, developing it fully, and finding a way you can apply it easily and frequently to make the most money. Or it may mean you need to increase your income by a second job and reduce your frivolous spending habits. The results are always the same. You get back twice what you give. Life is a bank that only offers withdrawals after deposits. But the interest is high.

After you learn the wisdom of going ahead and “paying your dues,” you begin to find out that it is not always how much you are doing but how well you are doing it that matters most. You usually get better results by thinking about the quickest and easiest way to do something, before you waste too much energy attacking the problem by trial and error. This is learning how to work smarter. There are plenty of good sayings that bring home this point such as, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and “a spot of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”

Working smart is often finding the path of least resistance. The point here is that it is much easier to go with the natural flow of the river rather than to try and swim upstream against the current and gravity. But you have to see the natural flow of life before you can join it and this takes sensitivity and good timing. The end object is always to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be—whether it involves having more health, wealth or love—and there are usually smarter ways to do this than you first imagine.

A good example in following the path of least resistance is to let go or simply give up an unproductive habit that is actually keeping you from being where you want to be. Maybe it is eating junk food on the run, window shopping on payday or trying desperately to fix a broken love relationship that just may need some healing time. You are not wasting energy trying to do something new, you are just conserving valuable energy by not doing something that isn’t working for you.

THE LAW OF GESTALT:

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

All our various parts—our thinking, feeling and behavior—can each accomplish much on their own, but when they are in alignment with each other and work together in unity, they can get miraculous results collectively.

Much of our unnecessary suffering in health, wealth and love matters is brought on by the entanglement of thoughts, feelings and behavior. Sometimes your thoughts result in unpleasant feelings and unproductive behavior and it is easy to get caught up in the trap of trying to think your way out of situations you behaved yourself into. These three things—thinking, feeling and behaving—are inseparable for all practical purposes; where one stops and the other starts is anyone’s guess.

To be successful in health, wealth and love, your thoughts, feelings and behavior all have to be in complete alignment. It does no good to have healthy thoughts if your behavior doesn’t actually include the right diet, exercise, sleep and stress management habits. And it is a waste of time to try to program your mind to have positive thoughts if your feelings and behavior aren’t working together to carry those thoughts out.

So how do you get these things working in sync so you can think, feel and do something in unison and get results? Your attitudes, beliefs, expectations, understanding and judgments help determine what happens to you. For instance, if you have a positive attitude, believe you can do something and expect to be successful, you will work harder and smarter to do the things that will help bring about success. On the other hand, if you have a pessimistic attitude, doubt your ability and expect failure, you will sabotage yourself by not trying very hard to do any of the things that might lead to success. Even if you are "realistic" and expect mixed results, that is precisely what you will get.

Believe in Health, wealth and love and expect to get those things. Then think them, feel them and do them without a whole lot of time intervening in between. When you start thinking too much about your feelings and behavior you get distracted from your goal. And when you wait to feel right so you can act right, you are not thinking straight. The key is your perpetual striving to achieve balance.

By understanding and practicing these three life laws, you will have an abundance of health, wealth and love. Then you can teach others how to get these things and end up having even more.


William Cottringer is a success coach, college teacher and writer from the St. Louis area. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese &Eat It Too. He can be reached at ckurtdoc.charter.net Mary Bien is a certified hypnotherapist and ordained minister. She can be reached at marysgarden7.cs.com