Can self-esteem make you sticky to your desire?

Love lasts forever. But if you want to keep that loving feeling, listen to this week's episode of our Magnetic Me podcast.

It’s Valentine’s Day this week, and to amp up the good love vibes in my house, I decided to do something nice for my family. I’m an avid baker with quite a bit of experience under my belt, and my husband and kids love it when I pull out a bowl and a spoon. Because we’re in the coldest, i.e., least fun part of our winter here and because I love them, I decided to do something that would bring some enthusiasm into our household. I made sticky buns. Yes, those ooey, gooey morsels of goodness baked with just the right amount of warm cinnamon, sticky caramel-like sugar, and affection. Let’s just say they were well received, and I got a stamp of mom awesomeness for it. ;)

Robert's terribly un-sticky situation and his colossal breakthrough.

As I was baking them, my mind, of course, wandered to Law of Attraction as it does. I started thinking about how some of us go great guns with it. We can easily manifest more things than we could need. Then there are the unfortunate ones who manifest it and lose it all. For instance, I know someone who used the Law of Attraction to manifest a lottery win. Robert had been working with it for a while mind you, and one day, he wanted to have a million dollars show up through the lottery. Not too different from many of us would-be creators, right? And he did a great job with his goal because within two months he won a million dollars on a quick pick ticket he bought at a rural gas station. Here in Canada, the money we get from a lottery win doesn’t need to be reported, and you don’t pay taxes on it. Might you think he was all set and good to go on with his life with not a lot of financial difficulties, right?

 Wrong. Robert ended up losing most of it in a series of mundane, but overall tragic events. Soon after he won it, his wife left him and sued him for half the money. She got it too. Then Robert was in an accident. He's a farmer, and his accident left him unable to do a lot of work on his farm. His recovery took a long time. Robert hired some people to come in and do some of that work for him. Robert's a grain farmer and the parched summer on top of the dry summer before was disastrous for his crops. In the end, it left him without much income. Long story short, within 18 months, all the money was gone. Robert's ex-wife had moved to Florida and bought a home there with some of the winnings. He was stuck at the farm in a worse financial position than he was before he won the money. He said he felt duped and couldn’t figure out why this would have happened.

Me being, well, me, I just had to ask him some questions. One of the things that came up right away was that he felt like a failure. I asked Robert when this feeling had started, and he said he’d always felt that way to a degree. Upon further questioning, he told me about his dad and how he’d felt like he’d never measured up to his father’s expectations of him. As you can imagine, his low self-esteem had extended into every part of his life. He had berated himself for his high school grades, his marriage, and even his work. He’d taken over the family farm from his dad. He’d never been able to make it quite as successful as his dad had. Everything about his life was a constant reminder to him of his inadequacies.

When he heard about Law of Attraction, it hadn’t exactly seemed like the most reliable plan, but he needed to do something to keep the farm going. He continued to work hard and added LOA as a piece of an idea he had to help him get ahead. He was good at manifesting, probably because he understood detachment. He didn’t have the time to interfere too much with what LOA was doing anyway, and he started seeing some subtle but very consistent improvements. The place where he was going wrong was that he couldn’t seem to make his manifestations last.

As soon as money came in, it went out and then some. Equipment would break down; the cost of things went up just as they were needed. Basically, anything that could go wrong did. Things just never got to the tipping point where it put him into a good position. Robert never felt he deserved the good things that were happening for him.

The miracle of having crazy good self-esteem.

Self-esteem is our perception of ourselves, having confidence in our abilities, and knowing that we can do what we set out to do. Our image of ourselves is created by us when we’re very young, and our subconscious mind absorbs what’s going on around us very quickly. The more messages we get that things are hard, the more we believe it. The ways people react to us and to what we say and do has an influence on how we think of ourselves as well. If others, especially those that are supposed to love us, don’t treat us nicely, we can get a very negative message about ourselves. Robert had fallen victim to this scenario.

Robert had seen the success his dad had in running the farm when he was a kid. There was always plenty, so Robert knew that there was an abundance of what was needed somewhere. Combined with his ability to detach, it brought him a lot of good stuff. Despite that, he found himself exhausted by the constant ups and downs that manifesting brought him.

Robert never felt like he was good enough to have the money he needed. Once it was there, he felt a bit panicked about it. He didn’t know what the right thing to do to make it last as long as possible was. There were so many possibilities, and he didn’t want to make a mistake. He never got the chance to figure that out either because his wife knew what she wanted to do with it. She took advantage of the situation and ended up with the top end of the stick.

When I started working with Robert, I got him to focus on his self-esteem. It wasn’t always easy for him because he’d been telling himself for a long time that he wasn’t as good as he needed to be. He tried many things to overcome this idea of being less than his dad. Some of them worked better than others for him, but he stuck with it. Within a year, Robert started noticing some of the excellent ideas he was having, and he acted on some of them. He started being more “sticky” to what he was manifesting. There’s even been another lottery win since then. Not as much as before, but he felt really comfortable with the number he chose to attract. Robert's still careful with the money he has, but he now invests some of it in other ventures, and he's learned a lot about how to treat himself with it. For the first time, he’s planned a vacation to a tropical destination just to see what it’s like there. His sense of abundance has changed, and these days he's feeling a more direct connection to it. 

If you’re struggling with how you feel about yourself, my message to you is this. The Law of Attraction is working for you right now. It’s working with what you believe you can have. Once you think that you can have what you want, it will come. Create beliefs that will not only help you attract what you want but also create expectations that you can use it to its best advantage. Knowing that you can handle it, will prepare you to have it and make sure that you can enjoy it.