
How The Law of Attraction Turned Me Into An Arrogant Prick
If you’re a regular here you know I’m not a huge fan of the Law of Attraction, or rather the lame attempts by most of its supporters to explain it.
It seems from this guest post, neither is Mark Reagan.
Stories come in all kinds.
Many Hollywood stories follow the hero’s journey: a person is usually down on their luck, but they have a dream. They pursue that dream. And against all obstacles, that person – the hero – succeeds, and the dream comes true.
This is not one of those stories.
This story goes more like this: naive young man is duped by experienced mentor into believing whatever he imagines will manifest itself into his life and he will be very successful very fast.
The twist?
He becomes a jackass and fails.
Getting Suckered By The Law of Attraction
When I was in college, I struggled with a severe bout of depression. Unlike the sad rock/decapitated head blob from the old Zoloft antidepressant commercials, no clouds followed me around.
Instead, on the train home from school, I did my best not to break down in tears in front of everyone (spoiler: I failed).
That was actually great! The alternative, which I contemplated daily for close to nine months, was, instead of crying on the train, was to step in front of the train.
I’m no expert in depression, and I don’t know why I became depressed, all I know is I felt:
- Like I was worthless.
- That I was very talented and was completely letting it go to waste.
I don’t know how you can think you’re worthless and yet very talented at the same time, but I did. It was a magic trick, like cutting a woman in half. I pulled it off every day, and no matter how much my negative thinking cut into me, I always put myself back together.
Fast-forward two years to when I met the woman who would become my mentor.
I had come out of my depression,but I wasn’t great by any means. Sometimes I had melancholy moments (and sometimes I periodically still do, although they’re much shorter as I know ways to work with them).
After my depression and an awkward break-up, I started taking Salsa lessons. I did it in part because I wanted to, and in part to spite a woman.
White Men Can Dance
She said “white guys couldn’t dance,” (often true!) so I decided to take up the challenge and prove her wrong. I dabbled for a year or so, taking lessons here and there but nothing serious.
When a well known instructor moved to town I took a workshop from her. What followed after was one of the best nights of dancing in my life.
I didn’t think I could afford private lessons with her, but since she had just moved here, she had dropped her prices to get clients. I had also just gotten my tax return fresh from Uncle Sam.
So I signed up. First for 10 lessons, and then for another round and more.
My teacher was my exact opposite. She was short where I was tall. A skilled dancer where I was not. Dark hair where I was blond, and so on.
Most importantly, she was the opposite of me in terms of thinking: where I could be extremely negative (I called it “being realistic), she was nothing but positive.
She’d say things like:
“You’re going to be one of the best dancers here!” and, “Everything I touch turns to gold!”
I don’t think she knew the story of King Midas who wished for that same power, and how he ended up turning his loved ones into solid gold statues…
She had a way of telling you exactly what you wanted to hear. And for me, someone who had felt worthless? It was like I finally met someone who saw my true value.
I was hooked.
She was the kind of person who can get people to open up to her. She comes off as extremely trustworthy. More so, she knows how to make you feel good. And when someone makes you feel good repeatedly, they associate those feelings to them.
I started opening up to her.
She started giving me advice.
Law of Attraction Guru
I never had any life guidance before, not like this. In my head she gained guru status and could do no wrong.
She became my mentor and started teaching me the secrets of life.
Or more specifically, The Secret.
Aside from being a dance instructor, she also listed herself as a life coach. In fact, it was the first time I had heard of life coaching.
Her coaching consisted of:
Telling me what to do.
Providing advice that missed the mark.
Using astrology and gender-based “shamanism” as a coaching tool.
And yes, it was based entirely in the Law of Attraction.
(If you know anything about coaching, then this is the opposite of good Life Coaching, especially the “telling people what to do part.”)
One day, as we were chatting at Starbucks, she gave me an assignment. She brought up a website on her laptop and started telling me all about vision boards.
She had me create one and later interpreted it for me, bringing all of her middling cold-reading skills to bear.
And yes, I admit it: I WAS BLOWN AWAY.
“You mean, I can just put images on a board, focus on them and they’ll happen?”
“Yes, Mark, you jackass. They will!”
The Secret
Later she linked me to The Secret itself. I ate it up. Just piled that BS in my mouth and asked for seconds. She gave me that, too. It was a mixed bag of info. Some of the stuff was legit, like learning forgiveness. Other stuff came from Abraham-Hicks.
For a guy who had come from depression just a few years earlier, and who grew up poor? This stuff was incredible – life changing. My mood increased. I became more confident.
And I became an asshole.
For me, money’s never been much of a motivator. For her though? It was everything.
She looked at my first vision board and told me: “Be greedy!”
And I ignored my gut feeling and said, “Ok.” So I made a second one cobbled together from images on the internet. And a third, until I had one that was “greedy” enough, loaded with material possessions.
At this point, I was far gone down the rabbit hole. My teacher trained me as an instructor and I then even helped her design a new way of teaching Salsa.
I thought I was hot shit. Like being exposed to the surface of the sun hot shit. Every night I went out dancing, I knew I was the best dancer in the club.
After all, my teacher had told me I was.
I Was Delusional
I remember talking to a friend of mine at a party, telling him about my lessons and progress. I pulled out my phone and showed him a video of one of the greatest Salsa dancers in the world.
A multiple time world champion who had been dancing for more than a decade. I had been dancing for almost three years.
I showed him that video, and with a straight face, said, “At the rate I’m going, I’ll be as good as him in six months.”
Holy. Shit.
In Geoff Colvin’s book, “Talent is Overrated,”(al) he talks about the 10,000 hour rule – that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of focused practice (or about 10 years) to become a master at something.
As part of that 10,000 hours, you can get about 3 hours per day of focused practice, and anything after that is diminishing rewards.
I may have been practicing 3 hours a week.
But hey, I was focusing on my vision board. I was manifesting greatness.
My mind became a contortionist. If something didn’t fit with my new worldview, it bent backward to find a position that would work.
There were a few smaller Salsa nights I went to where maybe I was the best there. But that usually wasn’t the case. The best is also entirely subjective, and even objectively I usually wasn’t.
So how did I cope with being the best while seeing people who were clearly better?
In my head I told myself they sucked. I criticized them, picking apart their dancing like I was dissembling a puzzle – judging each piece I found lacking and ignoring the big picture they added up to.
I was also manifesting money.
By this point I was teaching my own Salsa class in a town about an hour and half away. My teacher got me the job – the studio’s current instructors were leaving, and I took over for them.
I was supposed to rake in the cash. After all, it was just going to happen! On my hour and half drive each way, I envisioned the riches coming to me. How the piles of money felt. How they smelled.
Speeding Up The Manifesting Process
I even made an appointment to view a $400,000 luxury apartment. My teacher told me to do that so it would be “more real” and manifest faster.
Other than the one class a week I was teaching, I was unemployed and living off school loan money.
She told me if I did all this, it would be easy.
For my class, I did close to zero marketing.
I didn’t know anything about marketing, except what she told me. And it didn’t seem that important, because:
- I was amazing.
- The universe was doing my marketing for me.
This creates quite the mental dissonance when the reality is:
- I barely knew shit at the time about Salsa and shouldn’t have been teaching.
- The car I drove got about 15 miles to the gallon. Between studio rent and record high gas prices, I was losing money just from driving to and from class.
This is a bad combination, and it led to a moment that cost me half of my students.
I was stressed out. I was worried. And I knew what my teacher would say to me if I told her that the Law of Attraction wasn’t working for me, because she had told me that about others: “If it’s not working for you, you’re not doing it right.”
This is what higher ups in pyramid schemes tell the people below them when they complain. When the system is designed to fail, what else would they tell you?
One day, I had a new guy show up to class. He was very smug, didn’t take instruction well, and left early without paying. His smugness resonated with me – being so smug myself but not recognizing it until much later – and it pissed me off.
Add that into my narrowed LoA world view – I wasn’t just a great dancer by this time, I knew I was also an incredible instructor – and the stress I was under and…
Stop Thief!
This guy didn’t just leave without paying, in my head he was a thief.
I exploded and told everyone he was banned from class.
The Salsa community in this town was small. Most of the people in class knew him. He told his story about what happened at a party that weekend, and the next week half of my students stopped showing up.
I lost half of my students over a measly fifteen bucks.
It was my fault, but I blamed him. I followed teacher’s example when I followed up with him, giving him a non-apology, which of course only to make the situation worse.
This was easily the most childish moment of my adult career, and it cost me. A month or two later, I was too broke to keep teaching in the distant town and I gave it up to focus on a new class closer to home.
So much for manifesting riches.
After this, the Law of Attraction and my teacher’s image started to unravel for me. In the loss of my class, LoA had gotten a pretty big blow and her credibility with it.
Her credibility took a further dive. Her overwhelming positivity revealed a toxic side: she was unwilling to hear dissent. By this time, the system of teaching I created with her and others was starting to be taught in a few other regions.
But the system had issues. Deep ones.
Any criticism about the deeper issues resulted in my teacher shutting you down.
Her leadership style was less about finding out what was really working, and more about what she already knew would work. With LoA and positivity on her side, how could it not?
She took me off the project I had been working on. After this, I brought up the communication issues our makeshift organization was having. She told me I “was being unhealthy.”
There’s a Tony Robbins example of too much positivity. It’s the person walking through their garden full of weeds yelling, “No weeds! No weeds!”
It’s the same mindset that people like Susan Cain, author of “Quiet,” write about causing the collapse of the economy a few years back.
The people who brought up the issues and problems were marginalized in their organizations and forced out so everyone else could plow ahead off a cliff without any “negativity” to hold them back.
But hey! The Law of Attraction and unrelenting positivity are things that are put forward as a life changing formula. All the riches and success you can imagine!
If It’s A Law, How Can It Fail?
Easy, it’s not. The Law of Attraction, in my eyes, is the brain’s confirmation bias attributing multiple psychological aspects to a single myth (Some of these aspects are awesome, like how visualization works and why it’s important to focus your mind on solutions and what you want rather than what you don’t).
Done with LoA, there was only one more thing for me to get rid of.
Fed up, I sent my teacher an email telling her I was done. I left the system I had helped make to give it a go on my own.
I was not an overwhelming success. In fact, I was barely profitable.
But I was happy.
And after dropping LoA, I found books like Don Miguel Ruiz’s “The Four Agreements,” (al) which gave me the opportunity to have something I didn’t before: integrity.
I read “The Power of Now,” and learned about mindfulness for the first time.
The Law of Attraction, I feel, is a recipe for disaster. Like a pyramid scheme, it’s built to fail. One way to guaranteed to bring yourself down is to create massive expectations that you can never live up to.
It’s what I had done while depressed, and with LoA I did it again, just in a different form.
David Rock has a great section in his book, “Your Brain at Work,” (al) about managing expectations. When we create an expectation in our head, our brain releases dopamine. When that expectation fails to come true, we have a dopamine crash and feel like shit.
With LoA, I created massive expectations for myself. When clear evidence was presented to me against those expectations, I denied it and became a self-righteous prick. But it caught up to me, and I had my dopamine crash.
LoA believers will probably see this and tell me I wasn’t doing it right. That I was manifesting what my vibrations were really focused on, or that I didn’t stick with it long enough.
And maybe that’s true.
But with the Law of Attraction I was unhappy and unsuccessful.
Without it, I found my own truth: that happiness is something I choose. It’s not a side effect of manifesting unlimited wealth and success, it’s a side effect of what I enjoy doing.
And unlimited wealth and success?
I just started my own Life Coaching practice. My success is in my hands, not the hands of a universe that’s going to deliver it to me if I raise my vibrations high enough.
As for my former teacher, I’m grateful for her. She taught me more than she will ever know. And as I work to build my own life coaching practice, I even have a brilliant example of what not to do.
There are life coaches out there who teach their clients LoA, but instead I think I’ll help them improve their lives rather than become delusional jackasses like I did
Author’s Bio
Mark Reagan is dedicated to helping people break through their internal limits and live up to their potential. Visit him at www.breakmylimits.com
What does science tell about the Law of Attraction? It tells that LoA doesn’t work. Do you need a proof by scientific evidence? Read this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanessa-van-edwards/law-of-attraction_b_2082921.html
http://www.heatherkappes.com/?page_id=68
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown
Just let scientists make their own work. For the sake of the truth, for the evolution of both our specie and our culture,please, don’t mix science with mystical woo.
People, I will always save my emotions. i’ll never force myself to think positive. I don’t need it. I’ve always earnt from my mistakes and sometimes even sufference was a useful tool for improving my life. I’ll never set aside someone because of negative thinking. I won’t fear to be contaminated by negative thinking, but I’ll listen people and I’ll try to offer my help. I don’t program my brain lie a robot, I just use my heart, in a natural manner. How dare can we struggle for discovering the right way to use LoA, while so many people are starving? Don’t be selfish. If we think that LoA is useful, then let’s try to use it for knowing ourselves instead of wishing a new car. My life is wonderful, my wishes are normal. Friends, I don’t need LoA at all.
Jerry Hicks passed away because of cancer. Although he believed in LoA he used the mainstream medicine for trying to heal himself. Why? Perhaps because several people used LoA and died faster then the ones who used the mainstream medicine (eg. Kim Tinkham)?
Best Regards
Hey Focault,
I agree with you, and thanks for the links!
Great Post Mark over the years i’ve tried all kinds of law of attraction techniques,purchased tons of books and coaching programs but none seem to work,until one day someone recommended this technique that made me manifest on of my dream goals that i struggled to get over the years in a matter of days!,i’m tired of seeing law of attraction “Gurus” not teaching what you really need to do attract your goals but they just seem to care about making money instead of actually helping people, i want to spread this information to as many people as possiblee,it will definately change your life once you try this out this simple tool http://subconciousmindzone.com/2015/06/15/subconscious-mind-tools
Well said. Thanks.
Thanks, Evan!
Awesome guest post Mark, thank you!
And also thanks for your work in helping promote it and your involvement in the comments, you rock!
Hey Tim,
Thanks so much, and thanks for the opportunity! It’s a lot of fun.
Hi Mark!
I guess I’m not the luckiest man in the world, but I had no single success just sitting and envisioning for my dreams. I remember when I asked my father to buy a skateboard, when I was 7 years old, and he made a deal with me. He gave two 400 page books and told me that when I read these books he’ll buy me a skateboard.
In my case, the law of attraction didn’t work, because it had to deal with my father first. And was a tough man!
Haha! Thanks for sharing that story. I had a similar experience – I wanted a wealthy uncle to buy me a Playstation when it came out. He didn’t, and I had to go mow lawns and work for it!
Thats’s funny!
Hi Mark and Tim, What a well written story! You suckered me in at “salsa” because there is nothing more fun than that :) I like to think that the universe is a perfect place, where we learn our lessons exactly as well should so that we go on our merry way to getting better and smarter (tactically) as we age. How perfect for Mark to meet this type of teacher at just the moment he did, taking him out of depression through physical activity and a new interest, yet telling him what to do, which was bound to blow up in his face and teach him that only he could discern what was right for him. Nothing like our best teachers being other people who show us what NOT to be and do. I found this very uplifting, made me laugh and smile, so thanks for that.
Hi Julie, glad it made you laugh.
It was definitely the right time for me to learn those lessons. It was a bit of a hard way, and it took time, but it’s really been an invaluable experience!
HI Mark – great post – I wrote a post around this subject some time ago and in doing so came across this website
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/quantum_quackery/ – might interest you.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for that article. I always find it interesting when people take a concept like this and then twist it to make it part of their world (although we all do this in some way with all our brain biases).
I hadn’t heard of the collapsing phenomenon before – that’s cool stuff! But yeah, no higher vibrational wave lengths attracting things to you.
Yep. Nice post.
Thanks!
Hi Mark,
I read your article with interest. What happened to you under the banner of LoA certainly was soul destroying and I’m glad you surfaced. The subject LoA was also one over which I got into a friendly “spat” with Tim, my favourite “Grey Matter Rouser”.
Here’s the thing: I believe in LoA! And that because my experience was so different from yours and instead of it being LoA, it was called “Creative Visualisation” or “Alpha Thinking”. I did seminal courses with teachers from South Africa and Australia. Perhaps the methodology isn’t quite LoA, but what I visualised materialised, in some memorable cases, but not always. I believe there’s a reason for that and it is roughly based on the philosophy “if the gods wish to punish you, they will grant you your wishes”. So you can’t materialise just anything – could cause bad karma, you know?
Anyway, here’s my first never forgotten example of a visualisation that materialised. I will make it brief: One day my sister and my brother-in-law arrived at our house in a gleaming white, big new Audi A6. I am generally not a jealous person, but when I saw their new toy, I was keenly envious and I went as far as telling my sister that. She was quick to retort “But Michael, why don’t you use your Creative Visualisation?? So I did – I visualised also driving the most recent, big Audi A6 model, and not my little VW Jetta, which really wasn’t a bad car at all.
Here’s the kicker. When you do the Creative Visualisations, you always end with ” let go, let God”. This basically means that you leave the outcome of your visualisation to a higher power. I did that…”big, new Audi A6″…let go, let God.
A month or two after starting with that, I was head-hunted from my 7-year job as Group Human Resources Manager to another company as General Manager Human Resources. Exciting first day and the Group Sales Manager comes to my office and she says “Oh, let me show you your new Company vehicle”. And it was (antici….pation) a brand new, big blue Audi A6! Now go figure, mate. I have more examples, but this one is the first one that rocked me in my socks.
So there it is. It doesn’t always work, as I mentioned and I also keep another quote in mind when I want to engage in it “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it”. You have to keep an open mind, but if you do – don’t let it be filled with other people’s stuff, which could just be rubbish.
Cheers, MW
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the thought-out reply!
One thing I really like here you wrote was framing it as a belief. I don’t mind other people’s beliefs, because they’re personal. What I disagree with a lot is the whole “law” part.
That’s an interesting story with the Audi. I’ve had a couple of similar incidents – I can say it’s confirmation bias, you can say it’s creative visualization, and I’ll respect that :)
It’s for different reasons, but I actually like creative visualization (I have a copy of Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain sitting on myself). I don’t think it’s going to make something manifest in my life, but I do enjoy the proven benefits of visualization, and focusing your conscious & unconscious mind on what you want is valuable (also, I think it’s fun and I like it as meditation :)
Thanks for reading, Michael!
Hi Mark (and Tim),
Okay…now I get it – and you are right: It is the “Law” aspect that is awry. If LoA were axiomatic, (self-evident, indubitable) i.e. its outcomes were undeniable, then only could it be classified as being a “Law”. And if it were, my visualisations would have brought about materialisations every time – and I would now be a Millionaire Astronaut or something that Hugh Heffner would be jealous of.
I have looked at the LoA concept in these blogs so often, but never really, really analysed what the definition of “law” actually is.
Another very interesting concept is that of the RAS – reticular activation system – in the brain, acting like radar when you are looking for something, filtering information subconsciously and letting you find or notice things you haven’t before – also sometimes wrongly accredited to LoA.
Cheers, Michael
Hey, finally we have found some common ground!!!!
Ah! Thanks for that. The effect of the RAS is something I kind of wanted to include here, but couldn’t remember what it was called!
Hey!
GREAT post! I am a lifestyle consultant myself. I use many tools to help people to achieve their goals, but the one thing I not only don’t promote, but actively rail against is the Law Of Attraction. I’ve lost friends and business relationships alike all to the Law Of Attraction and its host of self-proclaimed gurus and I’m currently helping innumerable clients cope with similar devastating losses. In my experience, there is a very formulaic pattern that people follow as they fall further and further into the abyss of the cult of the individual. It is absolutely heart wrenching to see this at work so often and to know that there’s nothing I can do but watch and hope for the best, knowing that likely, the individual in question will end up a brainwashed zombie spouting platitudes like “love and light” and “I release you with love” rather than ever having another meaningful interaction again. I recently had a friend of mine come to me, absolutely devasted and confess to me that her adult daughter had written her an email–and email for Christ’s sake–that stated that she could no longer be in her Mother’s life as she was sure that according to the LoA, her Mother’s husband, a man who had raised her from childhood, had brought his nearly fatal kidney disease on himself with negative thinking and low vibration and that she needed to “release [them both] with love” and allow them to move along their own paths so that their negativity wouldn’t drag her down.
In the mean time, the biological daughter of my friend’s husband was in the process of doing what needed to be done to donate a kidney to her father. The comparison here is so stark that it’s absolutely unreal. One daughter-out of supposed love and compassion-“releases” her Mother and Stepfather with “love” and with “light” and the other daughter literally goes and donates her kidney to her Father, which, sidebar-ended up saving his life.
The loss of empathy and compassion is incredible when it comes to LoA and you almost can’t believe in or follow any of its tenets whilst maintaining a sense of empathy or compassion, as it requires you to believe that everything going on in everyone’s life is either reward or punishment (cleverly packaged and fed to the “believer” via that whole “vibration” bs). You quite literally can’t have compassion or empathy any longer and as you know, being that you’re also a coach, loss of compassion and empathy can lead to sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies, if not full-blown personality disorders.
I also think that it’s worth noting that not being able to listen to, be there for or have empathy or understanding for the people in your life or the people in this world in general is nether loving nor of the light. If you want to talk “vibration,” suspending our disbelief on the existence of such a contrived notion for a moment, I’d say that the lowest possible “vibration” would likely be that which is unconnected to “love” and “light” and aren’t being narcissistic, sociopathic and lacking empathy about the furthest things in this world from “love,” “light” or having a “high frequency vibration?”
The concept of LoA is poorly constructed pyramid scheme nonsense. It is also juvenile and self-defeating and that’s fine if you want to believe in that sort of bs yourself, but it is not okay to do harm in this world or ignore the harm, evil and injustice that go on in it and that is where the path of the Law Of Attraction and the cult of the individual will inevitably lead you. I think it is so imports to continue to expose this hoax for what it is and I want to thank you for doing that.
I knew you’d be in here mate ;)
I think visualization is VERY powerful. In fact it’s been proven by science to work.
But as you know, I’m with Mark in terms of being irritated by the whole ‘Law’ aspect of it and the idiots like Chopra who try and use quantum mechanics to support his beliefs when he knows about as much about quantum mechanics as I do about grammar.
In other words, fuck all!
I read one of Chopra’s books, thought it was mildly interesting. Then I saw he had nearly 70+ books and was literally a snake oil salesman. Totally turned me off to him, even without his “quantum” BS and that time he told that critic on twitter to shut up.
He has also repeatedly baited Richard Dawkins after Dawkins got him to say in an interview that he believed quantum physicists have hijacked the term quantum physics. It’s funny as fuck. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. 3.30ish in.
Personally that tie with that shirt and jacket should be enough to make you realize there’s something amiss!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-FaXD_igv4
Wow. Lol. I can’t believe that actually came out of his mouth. Now that is done fancy mental acrobatics right there.
Hey Mark,
Your comment the other day about the salsa dancing makes perfect sense now :)
The whole guru / LoA / pyramid scheme thing is so dangerous. I have my own experience with a so-called ‘guru’ (details of which I won’t go into now). But, let’s just say that it’s when you are down, vulnerable and needing a lift that they hook you. The similarities in thinking to a cult culture are quite frightening – no dissent without being openly reprimanded, told you aren’t doing it right, if only you had followed the steps ‘exactly’ as you were instructed it would have worked. Basically, you didn’t have enough belief, Mark, so it’s all your fault :)
I think The Secret has almost legitimised what years ago would have been called con-artistry.
Thoroughly enjoyable post, Mark. Definitely worth a share
Hi Keith,
That’s exactly where I was when I got hooked. Funny thing with this, is that she did help me do better in certain ways, and that actually helped me break loose.
I’d be happy to hear your story sometime if you ever want to share.
So so, the pyramid scheme stuff, I just joined Instagram, and a bunch of the random people that are following me are in them and on Instagram to promote them (and a bunch are into LoA). I made this image yesterday, and they don’t seem to realize it’s about them as they keep following haha
http://instagram.com/p/4WtriEQzr7/
OMG, am I THAT guru?
E\xcellent post!
So good you commented twice!
The kid can write a bit.
E\xcellent article!
Thanks for reading Meredith! :)
*Whole-hearted slow clap* Yup.
LMAO – sums things up perfectly Jacques!
Jacques is really quite good at doing that!
*bows graciously* Thanks, Jacques! (Tim – will you remove my double post? )