If we harbor negative thoughts, either consciously or subconsciously, we cannot use law of attraction to manifest desirable conditions in our lives. Negative beliefs also affect our abilities to make clear and productive choices, to set positive goals and certainly to achieve these goals. They affect our beliefs in our own abilities and skills, the way we view the world, and what we believe life holds for us. We can cross our fingers and make a wish, but our intentions will remain outside the realm of possibility as long as our beliefs limit us.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say birth is the beginning. At that time, you began to learn and form core concepts for how you would view and deal with the world, by gathering information from experiences, environment and conversations. As the needs of an infant are, at first, the very center of its existence, whether or not those needs are answered in a balanced way begins to teach optimistic, or pessimistic, expectation. Whether or not desire and effort are rewarded with "manifestation," or futility determines their expectancy of future gratification. Were your needs met in a healthy and balanced way? 

As you grow and develop, life experiences serve to further instill that early learning. Do you have expectations of success? Or do you find that you give up on your goals or resolutions before succeeding, certain that you will fail? Can you find a theme, or pattern, running through your life that might suggest some deep, and very early learning of futility, hopelessness, or powerlessness? Perhaps over time, your parents or other authority figures told you that you wanted too much, were too demanding, or dreamed too much, perhaps to compensate for their own inability to provide what you needed or wanted.

You later relegated the learned early knowledge to the subconscious to free the conscious mind for new skills and ideas. What you learned at six months, at one year, three years and so on, was no longer recognized as acquired knowledge. Those thoughts became automated. You don’t need to stop and think, you just know. This habitual thinking serves as our default thinking on a conscious level. Subconsciously, negative programs developed that direct thoughts, perspectives, choices, actions, and interactions with others. Essentially, this forms our rule book for life on this planet, totally unique to each of us. While life is a continuum of learning, you can instill positive and effective programs that can counter any negative beliefs you learned .

All of your experiences, starting at birth, set an undercurrent in your mind, regardless of what you believed you consciously desired as an adult. Your subconscious mind had installed core programs that either provided unlimited access to the world, or a small box that you kept banging your head on when you jumped too high. Too many of us feel the lid of a very small box! When, later in life, we chose our attitudes, beliefs and thought processes, we often chose those with which we felt most comfortable. Unfortunately, in this case, comfort due to old familiarity led to the same small box. Choice remains a powerful tool that requires wise and careful use. You chose the thoughts on which you focused. Choice allows you to change that, now!

While we may combat negativity by re-learning, people rarely put in the conscious effort to change themselves so completely. They have created a strong identity and spent a lifetime validating those beliefs through experience. We like validation and we’ll take it any way we can get it. This applies to negative, as well as positive experience. You probably know of people who relive their negative experiences by sharing them with anyone who will listen. Why would people choose to re-experience an event that caused them pain the first time? They provide validation to themselves, and seek validation from others. With each person they tell the story, they say "see I was right." If the person confirms that idea, all the better! We all do this. And there’s a time and place for it–in the wake of some events, we need confirmation and support. We need to feel that people care, sympathize, and understand our perspective. But if we would work toward a new perspective based on new judgments and beliefs, we would then see life circumstances differently, and begin to experience a new reality. You must consider the possibility that you have been wrong–about men or women, about bosses or employees, about money, the government, the system, love, others and/or yourself.

Through the process of self-healing, buried subconscious programs will rise to the conscious level. These beliefs and thoughts will often be uncomfortable. Strive for honesty with yourself. Everyone has their own "junk," whether irrational or ugly. Simply allowing that junk into your conscious mind begins the healing process. With your full acceptance, forgiveness, and non-judgment, these thoughts release. Each time you recognize some underlying issue that corresponds with your experience and acknowledge responsibility in creating it, you further the ongoing process of revelation and healing.

Hopefully you see how the two levels of creation, both active choice/action and passive law of attraction, interplay in creating every life situation. The process of healing reshapes yor thinking, and then your life. Begin to ignore your default thought patterns, until positive thinking and productive choice-making becomes habitual. As you attract new and more positive experiences through law of attraction, opportunities for success will present themselves. You will learn to seize the options that are most productive. You will form new relationships that support your goals. When all your actions are congruent with the goals and visions you have set in place, you will be unstoppable!

If you let go of those core and limiting programs you learned from day one and the experiences that validated those beliefs, you will experience transformation. It is NEVER too late to let go of negativity and false beliefs, and that is all that stands in the way of the life you want.

Your choices and actions work with the law of attraction to form what you see around you. While you state your desires via affirmations, visualization exercises, and vision boards, you must support your intentions through your choices and actions. This is how you convey your serious intent to others from whom you seek help or opportunity, as well as from the Universe.

When you begin your holiday shopping for your children, you ask them for a wish-list. You verify their list to observe their real interests, before spending money on something that might just sit in the closet. When you look for validation, you’re really looking for serious intent. You can observe their real interests by watching how and where they spend time and energy. This is the same way you relay your intentions to others. This is the same way you communicate serious intent to the Universe, when you attempt to manifest using the law of attraction.

Once you have set a goal, you need to do your part by following through in ways that support that goal. Praying for, or affirming an outcome, only to spend time negating that affirmation is counterproductive, and you will not see positive results. Use your valuable resources to move you closer to your vision. Commit to your goals through action.

This requires developing unbiased awareness. Awareness allows you to you to look objectively and non-defensively at yourself, removed from your normal perspective. What motivations do your choices and actions suggest? Through this unbiased lens, you can see the negative or destructive underlying programs or belief systems that have been driving your choices. When you move out of habitual pattern and begin to make conscious choices, you will be empowered to make truly positive changes.

Do you allow negative thinking to dominate your mind? Do your thoughts and spoken words support your conscious vision or contradict it? Do you share negative conversations with friends, perhaps to catch them up on your day? Affirmations are a method of conveying your desires of intention, but if you speak them only a few times a day, and spend the rest of the day contradicting them, you will not yield positive results.

Do you invest in yourself, in your vision, or spend money perhaps opposing that same vision? As an obvious and easy example, say you affirm for energetic and vibrant health. Then, you purchase cigarettes. Even worse, you smoke the cigarettes. Perhaps you ask to develop your own inner guidance and then put money into psychics.

Where do you expend your effort and energy? If you have affirmed for a healthy and fit body, but do not expend effort into the exercise required or make unwise choices on diet, you aren’t serious about that goal. Perhaps you have a goal of self-employment. You need to research your interest, network with others, and learn what you need to make it a part of your world. Eventually, you will take proper action, armed with guidance and opportunity that the Universe supplies as you move toward bringing that goal into manifestation.

With whom do you spend your valuable time? Simply do not put time into events, people, situations, or activities that have no place in your vision. Begin to cut negative or unsupportive affiliations. It may sound harsh but you need to remove people who are critical or unsupportive. By the same token, if people from your past do not fit, you need to think about limiting time spent with them, or letting go altogether. For example, if you want to strengthen your significant relationship, but you hang out with single or non-single friends who spend their time at bars looking for opportunity with the opposite sex, you might find that counterproductive to your intentions. Find friends who have or share similar goals.

When you give some thought to this, you might see how you contradict your own intentions. Realize that you affirm intentions by the spoken word, but also by action. You can see from the relationships in your life, that people relate their needs and desires to you in just this way. Would you assist someone that asked for help, if you saw them resist your efforts? Or worse, not make any effort to help themselves? When you declare your serious intent in all ways, the Universe will respond by providing opportunity and success.

Your personal success on any level requires taking action. Recognize that you have to ask to receive, but you also need to be serious about what you want, and commit to your own success, before you will receive. You simply cannot hope for the law of attraction to bring the changes that you want without your cooperation. Rubbing a lamp does not count! If it lightens the mood and keeps you happy and entertained, it certainly has value, but you’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to your success.

Become more conscious of the choices and actions you make on a daily basis that shape your life circumstances. Imagine the positive changes that will begin to take place with only a change in your own behavior and choices. Then imagine how much you can accomplish by using the power of law of attraction. 

Focus on the desires you want to manifest. Develop the commitment, wisdom of choice, action, and self-discipline to effectively utilize your resources to support your goals. Remain mindful of the spoken and written word. Talk about what you want, not what you don’t. Do not spend time, energy, effort, thought or money in areas that will not help you reach your future goals. What has no place in your ideal future vision, should not be included in your present in any way whatsoever. Consciously practice this until it becomes automatic and ingrained. And it will, with committed and diligent practice.

Do you have a vision where you’re going in life and what you want to achieve? If you could paint your life exactly as you wanted beginning today, what kinds of experiences and ideals would you choose?

If you haven’t framed out a life vision or set goals, you’re manifesting a default reality. Your subconscious programming determines these condtions. Without a guiding vision, you find that events and choices happen almost by accident. When you reflect back upon some major life decisions such as marriage, career choice, children, or where you reside, you may have a sense of wonder about how you chose a particular path because you cannot recall exerting conscious choice. Because of your own pattern of choice-making, or lack of it, you may fear life changes, as if some dreaded outcome awaits you after each turn.

A desire for change requires you to develop clearer vision. Setting a goal will activate your internal guidance system while a point of positive focus will fuel law of attraction to bring opportunities to you. Guided by your internal wisdom, with your cooperation by choice and action, you will move in the most expeditious way possible, towards your goals, visions, and ideals.

On a conscious level, goals help you plan and make choices on a daily basis. Think, for example, if you set a basic goal for a desired target weight. That goal provides a scaffold for meal and exercise choices. You may want to explore diets or exercise options, and thus set in place more specific goals, but you would have set a very general and needed framework for action to bring you to your vision of a healthier and slimmer body. You know if you choose to eat a certain type of food, say doughnuts, that your choice contradicts your goal. While you can eat a few anyway, you know that it does not support your vision, and if you do so repeatedly, you will not reach your goal.

When you have framed a goal, you can more easily make choices based on whether or not they bring you closer to that goal or keep you from attaining it. In the same way, a general long-term goal of sucess, achievement and happiness will provide a scaffold for intelligent choices and action. Success and happiness does not happen by accident.

Without a vision, you have nothing to move toward and no true direction. How can you make decisions when presented with choice? Random choice will bring you closer to the unknown.

Realize that you cannot receive guidance if you have not provided direction. You cannot ask for directions when you do not know where you are going. Your internal guiding system works hand-in-hand with you once you have developed a vision. If you want more active control of your life, you need to set a course. Have faith that you could not have a dream without the inner wisdom and ability to get there.

Vision marks the first step in the process of transformation. Once you set your goals, make conscious and intelligent choices to move toward them. Your intuition works with you in powerful ways even when you are not aware of the possible outcome of choices. You will find the more you honor intuition, the stronger that inner voice becomes. Law of attraction will bring amazing and synchronistic opportunity, but it cannot work alone to change your life. When you cooperate with universal law, you empower yourself to become a conscious creator.