I Spent Ten Years Picturing a Clothing Label and Achieved Nothing

About twenty years ago I wanted a clothing label. Designs, logos, people in London wearing my stuff, me in total control of the lot. I could see it clearly. I carried that picture around for roughly ten years and achieved absolutely nothing with it.

Then one day I walked past a print shop on the high street and asked what it would cost to put my own logo on a t-shirt. About thirty dollars. Which, if you know anything about business, is terrible. You cannot pay thirty dollars for a shirt and then sell it to somebody.

I did it anyway.

That one daft decision is the reason I ended up with a company shipping clothing out of the Philippines to the UK, America, Japan, Australia and Hong Kong. Not the ten years of picturing it. The thirty dollars.

The thing that was actually stopping me

Alongside that picture of the clothing label, I was carrying something else. A quiet, steady belief that it was very difficult and somebody like me could not do it easily. Too hard. People like me struggle with things like that.

Both of those were true for me at the same time, and only one of them ever got a vote.

This is the thing nobody names when they talk about the Law of Attraction. What you consciously want and what another part of you expects are often not the same thing.

You have heard it in other people, and if you are honest you have heard it in yourself:

• I want the relationship, but I do not trust people.

• I want the money, but money means responsibility.

• I want to be visible, but being seen means being judged.

Look at the shape of those sentences. The first half is the wanting. The second half, after the but, is the expecting. And the second half is usually the one running the show.

In NLP we have a word for being lined up with yourself. Congruence. It just means oneness. When what you want, what you expect and what you actually do all point the same way, you are congruent. Most people, most of the time, are not. That is not a defect, it is the normal human condition. But it is worth being able to see.

Where's the milk?

Here is a question I ask clients, nearly every single time. Six months from now, what do you want to have manifested? What do you actually want?

And nearly every single time the answer comes back as a list of things they do not want.

So I pause, and I ask this:

Do you usually walk into a supermarket with a list of all the things you don't want?

Picture it. You are standing at the entrance with a list that says no bananas, no milk, no tinned tomatoes. You are going to be in there a very long time, walking in circles, handling everything you do not want, and you will come out with a trolley full of it.

The milk is at the back of the shop because somebody built it that way. That is architecture. And your week has an architecture too, made out of the things you keep naming. Attention follows what you name. To say “I do not want to be anxious” you have to picture anxious. To say “I want to stop being broke” you have to picture broke. Your attention stays exactly where you did not want it.

The two laws nobody mentions

I came across the Law of Attraction at about eighteen, in a book by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Most people meet it through the film, which kept things simple for a mass audience: you attract what you think about, the end.

The fuller version has three working parts, not one, and the two that get left out are the two that do the work.

Deliberate creation is the doing. Sitting in your house thinking about a million dollars will not get you a million dollars. You have to go out and do something, often something small and slightly stupid, like buying a thirty dollar t-shirt. Notice what happened in my story: the belief did not change first. The action did, and the evidence from it loosened the belief afterwards. That order is far more reliable than waiting until you feel certain.

Allowing is the receiving, and it is the one that quietly sinks people. I know someone who has wanted a relationship for fifteen years. She goes to the networking events. She goes to church. She is doing the work. What she does not do is let anybody in, because every real person gets measured against a picture in her head and comes up short. The wanting is real, the doing is real, and the allowing is missing.

It shows up with money too. People who want the business but flinch at the customers. People who do not actually want the million because they are scared of losing it, or of what their family would ask for. A part of them has quietly decided it is safer to stay where they are, and you cannot keep that decision and the million at the same time.

One question, asked a hundred times

If you take one thing from this, take the question.

What do I want instead?

Five words. It is an interrupt. Every time you catch yourself describing what you do not want, you stop and you ask it. I am afraid right now — what do I want instead? I feel negative right now — what do I want instead?

Nobody else needs to know you are doing it. You do not need to announce it or explain the process to anyone. And it is not a technique you use once and tick off. Asked once, it does very little. Asked a hundred times, in a hundred small moments, it starts to change where your attention goes by default.

One warning, because I would rather be straight with you than sell you something clean: when you are in the middle of something genuinely awful, “what do I want instead?” can feel like an insult. If somebody says “think positive” to a person in real pain, the reply is not polite. Ask it gently and often rather than forcing it. Slow down, take a breath, go for a walk, then ask.

Where to take this next

I ran a room on this and then turned the whole thing into a book, because it is too much to hold in one sitting. It is called Wanting Isn't Enough. Fifty-five pages, ten chapters, one exercise at the end of each, and a thirty day practice plan with a tracker you can print.

It is not mystical and it does not promise you the universe is listening. It finds the pattern producing your current result, and shows you how to rebuild it.

Get the book — $17

And if you want to start before you buy anything, do this today. Write down one thing you want. Next to it, write what a part of you actually expects to happen. Then look at where the two disagree. That gap is the whole game.