DR RICHARD CAWTE

What does being rich mean for you?  Do you have a clear idea, because a lot of people say they want to be wealthy, but don’t really have much idea of what that means.  The word wealth stems from the Anglo-Saxon “Weal”. 

Here’s what is says in the dictionary about it:

1. “Wealth, riches, possessions”
2. “Welfare, well-being, happiness”
3. “The welfare of a country or community: the general good”

Wealth is all the things that we normally think of: riches and possessions; but it is also a lot more than that.  It includes a sense of well-being, which is obvious if you stop to think about it.  After all there is no point having money if you do not have health to go with it. 

I wonder how many of us were taught that it also means the welfare of our community and a sense of the general good?  So, you are only truly wealthy when you have a sense of the common good, when you are helping your community as well as your self.  Not many of us get taught that at school.  We tend to think being wealthy means flash cars, big yachts and huge houses: which is a part of it, but not all of it. 

It makes sense to me, because it is one of the simple pathways that you can read about on this website: the pathway on which each gift you make is also an investment in your self.  A lot of “western” societies have become far to “me, me, me” in the way they look at wealth: it’s all about the “stuff” (and as a friend of mine says, “If all you do is collect stuff, you end up with stuff all!”) and not enough about respect for each other. 

I was born in a place where people have very little “money” – in fact they used shells as currency when I was there – but my mother could happily leave me in a pram outside a shop whilst she went inside and if when she came out she found I wasn’t there, she knew she did not have to panic.  One of the villagers would have taken the pram off for a walk whilst she was in the shop, and they would be back any minute. 

Now, that’s true wealth – the real trust in every member of our community. 

So, who is the wealthier person?  The person with millions in a house that is alarmed and covered with CCTV and insured up to the hilt, or the person who lives in a culture where a baby can be left in a pram without fear? 

It’s probably a case of balance, as ever, but in my opinion the so-called civilised world has the balance all wrong.  Riches are not found in the number of digits in your bank balance alone, but it helps to have enough money to relax…and if you have a lot of money, you can do a lot of good things: you can help a lot of people…which will not only make their quality of life better, it will make you feel good too.

Defining what wealth means for you is one of the first steps along the path the health, wealth and wisdom.  If you haven’t done it before, I suggest you write it out now.

Understanding the psychology of wealth.

You might be surprised at what you really think about being rich, because most of us get conditioned to think it is not a good thing.  Think of all the expressions you know about money: how many of them are positive? 

We talk about the “stinking” rich and the “filthy” rich.  We learn that it is easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven.  We’re told that money doesn’t buy us happiness, that the best things in life are free, and even that (the love of) money is the root of evil…

For most of us these ideas about wealth run deep in the subconscious and affect our ability to be successful.  Usually people have no idea how much they have been affected by these thoughts that have been impressed upon them.

The proof is in the frequent stories of lotto winners who several years after winning millions are back on the dole, or back in their old jobs, having blown the lot!  Something inside them has made them divest themselves of all that money, and my guess is it is their lack of comfort with being “rich”, because they only have the material wealth, instead of creating the balance of health, wealth and wisdom that leads to deeper fulfilment.

My reports and mentoring services are designed to help you to unlearn all the negatives we are taught about wealth, to remember that the original definition of wealth does include happiness, a sense of community and doing things for the common good: to know that wealth means your own well being, in other words your health, not just having a lot of money. 

Some of the areas I cover are these simple Laws of Attraction:

Focus on what you do want, not on what you don’t.

The way to get what you want is to focus on it.  A lot of people spend their time focusing on negatives.  The daily news is a good example of this: it always focuses our minds on the terrible things in the world instead of on the millions of good things happening every day.  That’s why I always ask my clients to stop watching the news for a week and then tell me how they feel.  They always feel better!

If you let yourself focus on the negatives, that’s what life will bring you, because life is like a mirror: it reflects back what you think. 

When you choose to do something that you really enjoy, you can chat about it with your friends on the phone, in the pub, or wherever it may be.  It is easy to focus on it, because it is a part of who you are and what you truly want for your self. 

Don’t listen to the daily news.  Focus instead on what you want.  You’ll find it brings you all kinds of rewards as well as the financial ones. 

You get what you expect.

Imagining life as you want it to be, instead of focusing on what you don’t want, means that you start to expect good things and when you begin to expect good things they come knocking at your door! 

You really do get what you expect in life, so start to expect the best – from yourself, from your kids, from your friends, and even from people you have never met.  It’s much more fun to be expecting good things instead of bad ones. 

For instance, instead of saving for a rainy day, which means that you can be sure it will pour on you just when you don’t want it to, why not save for a sunny day?  You’ll be expecting the best that way, instead of expecting the worst, and so you’ll open up the way for better things to come to you.

Your ships come in over a calm sea.

There are plenty of opportunities out there.  The deal of a decade doesn’t happen once every ten years, it happens as often as you want it to.  Life is not about opportunity, it’s about choices: the choices you make each and every day.  Are you choosing to welcome new opportunities or have you already decided that things never go your way, that someone else is always the lucky one?

One thing is for sure: if you are in a permanent state of high stress, worrying about money, fretting over how you’re going to pay the bills, you will find it harder to bring the wealth that you want into your life.  It’s a simple rule: it doesn’t matter how many ships there are out at sea or how full of goodies they are, none of them can get into the harbour if there’s a storm raging. 

We all have plenty of ships out there in the seas of opportunity, but often we are so anxious, so worried, that we create too much turbulence for them to get to the dock.  To become a magnet that attracts what you want in life, you need to say farewell to worry and stress.  After all, when did you last see a worried magnet?

Let go of the rope!

One of the ways to be truly rich is to stop the tug-of-war with your fears, or with other people.  When you resist something, you cause friction inside you, which in turn causes dis-ease, which is what make people unwell. 

See yourself more as water (after all, a lot of you IS water!) rather than solid.  You can run your fingers through water, but water washes away mountains over time. 

Being non-resistant does not mean being a doormat: it means knowing the power of maintaining your poise, your balance, and letting go of the rope of struggle.  When you let go of your end of the rope, there is nothing for anyone else to pull against.  So the struggle is over!

Walk up to your fears.

Stress is usually caused by fear.  Maybe you’re afraid you’ll loose your job, or that you won’t be able to pay the bills next month.  Maybe you’re afraid that if you don’t work hard you won’t be rewarded, or that someone else will get the promotion you so desperately want.  Maybe you’re afraid of being successful just as much as you are of being a failure? 

Once again, if you remember how you were when you were young, you’ll recall that you were not nearly so scared of taking risks, or trying something new.  You had to learn new things all the time, so you just got on with it.  As we get older, it gets harder and harder to break the patterns we get into, but it’s not impossible.  You just need to walk right up to your fears and look them in the eye.

If you walk away from something out of fear, you take it with you.  One of the things I help my clients do is to face up to their fears, but not in a way that is uncomfortable.  I don’t believe that we have to “move out of our comfort zone” in order to achieve success. 

Stay in your comfort zone!

In fact, I help people do the opposite: move right into your comfort zone, because by doing that, you find you’re doing what comes naturally, and you find that you’ve walked up to your fears in the process, and that the monsters you created in your mind are really just poodles you can handle easily!

Do it with a smile.

When you’re in your comfort zone, it’s easy to smile. 

To me, that’s what life’s about.  If you ask me how I measure wealth, I’d say that you can measure it in how many times you smile each day. 

It makes good business sense too.  There’s a great Chinese proverb (I love those old proverbs!) that says: “A man who cannot smile must not open a shop” and that’s absolutely right.  When you’re doing something that makes you feel good about yourself you are more likely to smile, and that is attractive to other people. 

For some reason people seem to think we have to be serious to show we’re working hard.  When the boss comes in to the office, everyone stops messing around and joking and pretends to be very serious.  It’s one of the things we all have to unlearn, because you can bet your bottom dollar that when you’re doing something that makes you smile, you’ll spend more time doing it, and you’ll be successful as a result. 

So, it really does pay to be light-hearted!

Wealth Mastery is Being Well.

When you are doing what makes you feel good, you will be well: it stands to reason!  One of the little-appreciated laws of attracting wealth is that when you truly master your self, when you know who you are, you can then be yourself well – in other words, you can act as your self in a new way: a way that is far more fulfilling than any other way you may have tried before!

That means you’ll enjoy health as well as riches, which will give you more time to enjoy sharing your life with those you wish to and be comfortable with quiet moments on your own too.