Several years ago I was on a year long Law of Attraction course with Eva Gregory, Attraction Coach Extraordinaire.  I learnt lots of fantastic tips from her and the rest of my year long coaches but my favourite is the ‘Ideal Scene’.

Its so simple and so effective.  The first time I wrote this I was living in Long Island, New York.  To be honest I wasn’t in a very good space mentally, physically or emotionally.  I had spent the past 3 years at home with my two babies, and was exhausted, and certainly not in flow.  It was a desperate lurch to get myself back into the groove and out of the funk I had allowed myself to sink into, so I had an ‘all or nothing’ approach to it, and with hindsight I think that’s why the first year was so phenomenal for me – I had a huge list of things I wanted to turn around including the continent I lived in, the work I was doing, my relationship with my kids, my husband, myself, my diet and well-being, my emotional state, my community….a pretty long list!

So I just went for it, I figured, I have nothing to loose – its only paper and ink

What you do is write the date a year ahead at the top of the page, ie Jan 1st 2011, then you begin “What an incredible year its been!…” or something similar.  Then you write about all the different aspects of your life that you would like to see change, it could be your ‘perfect home’, your ‘perfect relationship’ or your ‘perfect job’ and ideally should cover all aspects of your life that are important to you – run into several pages and make it as rich and juicy and exciting as you dare!

Here’s the synopsis of how much stretch I put into mine: (bear in mind I was living in the USA at the time I wrote this and we were settled in a home we owned, my husband was working for a multi-national, and Singapore was nowhere near our discussion list, neither was leaving the US)

1. I wanted to live in Singapore
2. I wanted to celebrate my 40th birthday in Bali with ALL my family, and siblings
3. I wanted to be teaching regularly again
4. I wanted to be doing something worthwhile with my brain again
5. and a whole bunch of personal emotional and relationship balance stuff.

In one year, I achieved all that.  Some aspects were different to what I had imagined, and some took slightly more than a year to actualize, but in all cases I saw massive progress.  So you can see why I now do this every year!

I think part of the magic is in focusing yourself on what you want, and being honest about what aspects of your life are far from ideal.  For example, if you write ‘I had a wonderfully nurturing year with my husband and our relationship just grows from strength to strength’ and you choke on your tea as you write this – then you know you have some work in this area!  The same goes for anything you write, ‘my job fulfills and excites me, I created so much value this year with my projects and connections with my team that my boss gave me a substantial raise! I can’t wait to see what this year holds for me’…etc.  Just go for it, whatever makes you excited, passionate, whatever would make you deeply fulfilled and happy, get it all down on paper and create some energy around it.

Eva asked us to be very specific, eg, my boss gave me a raise of $20,000! but I have to say that personally I find such specifics limiting, I prefer words like ‘huge’ or ’substantial’ or ‘bigger than I could imagine!’  I also focus more on the kind of feelings I want, rather than the type of ‘behaviour’ I want, eg. I would prefer to write “my children and I continue to develop a loving and fulfilling relationship based on deep respect for each other” as it helps to be my guiding light – when I am shouting at my kids to ‘hurry up’ I can do a quick check, is this ‘loving’ or ‘fulfilling’ or ‘respectful’?  This is much more effective at changing behaviour then writing ‘my children are incredible, they are so polite and obedient all the time’ which sort of sets you up for failure right there and then

Once you have your Ideal Scene,then just move towards it, one step at a time, you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve in a year!