The Power of Asking for What You Want– Episode 439

I was speaking with a client last night and I told him the following story. It’s a great story, so I thought I would share it with you.

In 1987 I had a sales job that involved going into people’s homes and trying to sell them stuff. It was a very tough gig. It was the kind of deal where the managers of the business wore flashy jewelry, drove flashier cars, and yelled a lot.

I had just started on my own personal development journey and was reading books like “Think and Grow Rich”. I started to make a list of goals, and I decided that I wanted to drive a Porsche.

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Now, at this point in my life I was barely able to make my $250 rent, and this sales job was not helping. But I did what one of the books suggested and cut out a picture of a Porsche and hung it on my wall. I even knew enough to write it down, and it went something like this: “I’m driving a Porsche down I-10 listening to a Dire Straits cassette” (One of my favorite bands at the time, when everyone was using cassettes). Now, please keep in mind that I was in my 20’s, single, naïve, and a little bit of a knucklehead.

Somehow, a few months later, I managed to win a sales contest during a period of “feast” in my sales (as opposed to famine). The prize was that the winners would get flown from Phoenix, Arizona, where I lived at the time, to Huntington Beach, CA, where the owner of the company lived. We would sail with him on his yacht to Catalina Island off the coast of California, where he would treat us to a nice dinner and put us up in a hotel for the night. So we did. The next day, on the yacht while sailing back to the mainland, the owner of the company and I were talking. “So, Ted,” he asked me “What kind of car do you see yourself driving?” I definitely had an answer to that question so I told him. “I would like to drive a Porsche!”

So, we made a deal. If I agreed to open a franchise in Tucson in the next few months, he would put me in a Porsche today. “Sure!” I replied. He got on his boat phone and made a short call during which he asked me “What color?” “Red” I said.

When we arrived at Huntington Harbor, there, sitting on the dock, was a brand new, 1987 Porsche 930. Seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of the world’s finest driving machinery, red as the blood that flows through my veins.

The owner of the company handed me the keys, I got in, and immediately drove to my parent’s house in Los Angeles to show off. I asked my dad if he had any music for me to listen to, and he gave me, you guessed it, a Dire Straits cassette. I drove back to Phoenix on I-10.

True story. Looking back, what I find interesting is that I wasn’t amazed that someone had given me the keys to a Porsche 930 to drive as my own. It didn’t occur to me that I had manifested what I wanted using visualization and affirmation. All I did was ask and I got what I asked for. When I hung the picture of the Porsche on the wall, I wasn’t feeling anxious, or wondering how I was going to get it, or worried that I wouldn’t. I just hung it there, thinking that it was a cool thing to do, visualizing myself driving this car and having fun doing it.

But there’s more to the story. The car was not given to me. The owner (a multi-millionaire) leased it and gave it to me to drive. It was my responsibility to come up with $1100 each month which included the insurance and the lease payment. That wasn’t easy with the feast or famine sales job I had.

Be Careful of What You Ask For

A few months later, in the parking lot of a pool hall where I was hanging out (a place few respectable Porsche owners would want to go), someone mangled the rear window wiper and kicked off the driver’s side view mirror. I didn’t have the $350 deductible to replace them.

I was living in an apartment complex where I was parking a $75,000 car in the parking lot. One day someone smashed the side window in a failed attempt to steal the car stereo. About a month later, I got a flat tire, but I couldn’t afford to replace it, so I drove around on the spare donut tire until I finally turned the car back in to the owner, a mere six months after I got it. It was in bad shape, and I was glad to be done with it.

The Moral of The Story

What I should have asked for was an income that allowed me to own a Porsche as well as maintain it. Instead, I asked to drive one down I-10 listening to a Dire Straits cassette, which I did. I got what I asked for.

About 20 years later, I’m looking at my hypnotherapy appointments for the week and things are looking slow. I’m feeling just a bit of anxiety. I check my email and someone I hadn’t talked to in a long time sends me a link to a Tony Robbins video. It’s a good video where Robbins talks about the use of “incantations”, which are affirmations with lots of emotion. I wrote down verbatim one that he uses, and it goes like this: “The abundance of God’s wealth is circulating in my life now. It’s wealth flows to me in avalanches of abundance. All my needs and desires and goals are met instantaneously by Infinite Intelligence where I am one with God and God is everything. ” (By the way this is something I still say every day.)

After writing this down and tweaking it a bit to match my personal belief system, I proclaimed my version of this affirmation with all the passion and energy I could muster. I also added, “My passion is helping people. People that I can help are calling me for hypnotherapy appointments.”

Within two hours two people called me to book appointments. Was it a coincidence? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like it.

I began to wonder: Why are so many of us afraid to ask for what we want and what we need?

As children we ask incessantly for what we want. Then we grow up, learn how we think the world really works, and stop asking because of resignation, cynicism, fear of rejection and fear of disappointment. Sometimes we are taught, “If someone offers to give you something you should politely decline.”

What if everyone started asking, or even demanding, what they wanted, including: an end to poverty and war, quality schools, a working health care system, health, wealth, happiness, love?

Maybe it’s all true: Ask and you will receive. Knock and the door will be opened. Think and grow rich. What you focus on expands. When you visualize you materialize. The how’s are the domain of the universe. Energy goes where attention flows. You become what you think about.

Every once in a while, I make an attempt to go back to being naive. I try to go back and re-consider the things I learned in my 20’s not as truths, but as possibilities. Such as:

· I can get what I want /need even though I might not deserve it. (check out my podcast Episode 426: What You Deserve Has Got Nothing to Do with It.)

· It’s ok for me to ask repeatedly for what I want / need because I might just get it.

· I can get what I want / need even if I don’t have the money for it.

· I might not have to work hard for what I want and need. Maybe I’ll get it just because I asked for it.

· I can take action to get what I want/need even if I don’t do it perfectly.

· The Universe, God, Infinite Intelligence, whatever you want to call it, wants to help me get what I want and need.

· Maybe, just maybe, I am the Creative Power in the flesh. Maybe I do have the power to manifest whatever I want quickly, possibly instantaneously and I just don’t know it or learned how to do that yet.

· Maybe I don’t have to worry. Maybe I just need to ask and believe. Maybe worry and anxiety is the problem when I perceive that I’m not getting what I want.

It’s not easy to train your mind to have faith in your ability to create what you want when it looks like it’s not going to happen to you. But at 64 years old, I’m still in training. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for listening, I appreciate you. Are you having trouble believing you can get what you want? Are you having trouble taking the actions you need? If so, I invite you to request a complimentary consultation to explore if working together is the best path forward for you. You can do that by going to tedmoreno.com/contact. I’ll get back to you within 48 hours.

I have two quotes for you this week. First one is from Norman Vincent Peale:

“The great secret of getting what you want from life is to know what you want and believe you can have it.”

Here’s the second one: “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.” That’s Oprah Winfrey.

Have a great day!

Ted

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Are you having trouble believing you can get what you want? Are you having trouble taking the actions you need? If so, request a complimentary consultation to explore if working with Ted is the best path forward for you. You can do that by going to tedmoreno.com/contact.  Ted will get back to you within 48 hours.