In Manifesting Wealth, I discuss the importance of creating a wealth identity. Part of that process involves making the decision to live your life by design instead of by reaction. Living a life by design involves planning your life, which to my mind really means that you figure out what you really want and then decide how you'll go about getting it. For example, I realized in my mid twenties that I wanted to be self-employed by my thirties and here I am self-employed. I didn't necessarily plan out every step of the way to get to that point, but nonetheless I did decide to make self-employment part of the pattern of my life.
These days I'm more methodical about designing my life. Part of that undoubtedly comes from being a business coach. I help businesses plan their businesses by design instead of reaction and that consequently informs my own decision to plan my life. However, part of my reasoning comes down to the simple fact that I've made enough mistakes in my life based on impulsive decisions and reactions, that I've come to recognize that its much more effective to live a life by design and to carefully examine my choices and ask: "Is this really in line with what I want for my life?"
Where magic fits into all of this involves approaching your life as a narrative and using magic to help you shape that narrative. In my case, this means that a lot of my magical workings are done in context to my life, and how whatever occurs fits into the design I am manifesting. I don't do magical workings to solve problems, s much as I do them to proactively pave a path that is beneficial to me. A good example of this concept in action involves the creation of an entity called Cerontis. I created Cerontis over ten years ago with the explicit purpose of making me aware of opportunities I might want to take advantage of. Simple enough, but also profound because what it really involved was utilizing his services to help me discover opportunities proactively instead of reactively letting them happen to me.
When you design your life by magic what you are really doing is using magic as a tool to help you make intentional choices that fit into your design. A lot of my wealth magic work has been focused on helping me become more successful at working on my business, because I feel that its an integral part of the design of my life. While I certainly want to make a living from my business (and increasingly this is happening) I realize to effectively do this I need to design my business and really design my life around having experiences that will simultaneously teach me the skills I need to learn and help me implement those skills in a practical way that allows me to use them.
Look at your own life. Where do you want to be? what do you want to do? Who do you want in your life? Answer those questions and you've started to create your design. Now start doing magic to actually bring what you want into your life and do it with a mentality of design. Ask yourself: "Does this really help me manifest my design?" If it does, then do it...and if it doesn't, re-evaluate your magical working or your design or both. By taking such an approach you develop a proactive awareness that allows you to implement your design and live your life by your standards instead of continually reacting to whatever comes your way. You learn to filter out what you don't need and so you start to avoid it in favor of living your life by design and your magical work is geared in a similar way and thus helps you keep your life on track as well.
I was on the show Pleasure Saucer, where we discussed magic as well as some contemporary news. It was a fascinating range of topics.
Book Review: When: The Art of Perfect Timing by Stuart Albert
This is an intriguing book that explores how to apply timing to business and life experiences in order to better understand the flow of events and be able to plan for them and their pacing in time. The author shares six types of timing and provides examples of how these types of timing can be applied to understand the temporal aspects of a given activity. In addition, he nicely ties all of the types together and shows how a timing analysis can be done using each type of timing in conjunction with others. If there is one weakness in this book, its that while the author does provide examples of timing, he doesn't show readers how to use that knowledge practically beyond being able to do a timing analysis. However this book can teach you to appreciate time from an unusual perspective and that, in and of itself can be useful for looking at your life, business, and other practices from a different angle than you may have done before.