Sometimes adversity persists until you finally make peace with it. Finding a seed of equal or greater benefit it contains can help that happen. As you find the seed and nurture it, your energy shifts, and sometimes that’s when you’ll see the adversity itself finally begin to shift as well. Discover how life is like a series of cogs and gears, and what you can do to experience traction instead of friction.
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Originally recorded in Mesa, AZ on March 2, 2019.
TRANSCRIPT:
Announcer: Welcome to the Rare Faith Podcast where the solution to every problem is only an idea away and where the same activity with just a little more awareness always yields better results. Award-winning best-selling author Leslie Householder bring some of her best information to this inspiring series of life-changing episodes that you won’t want to miss. Show notes for this episode can be found at ararekindoffaith.com.
Leslie: My name is Leslie Householder and my class title is “Adversity and the Seeds of Equal or Greater Benefit”. So that’s our topic for today. And I am excited about this topic not because I love adversity but because I love the fact that there is promised within every adversity a seed of equal or greater benefit. And sometimes we just need to be reminded that it exists to help us find it in the adversities that we face. So we are gonna talk a little bit about of course adversity. Raise your hand if you have ever had adversity. A few of you have never had adversity so you’re here in preparation. No I’m just kidding. Adversity you know it makes me mad sometimes. I know, I know that the principles promise that there is something good in every adversity and I don’t always love that concept I just rather do without the adversity, thank you very much. Right? We feel that way sometimes. But the more we look for and recognize the gift hidden in each adversity, the more we can move out of the adversity we’re suffering with. And sometimes we get to a point where we finally find the gift in it and we don’t need the adversity to go away anymore because the gift is worth it. And then it goes away because it’s taught us the lesson that it needed to teach us. Napoleon Hill said that every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
And so as one of my mentors years ago said, Bob Proctor taught us that if things are just a little bit bad, then by this principle they’re only just a little bit good. So if things are catastrophic, then they’re tremendously phenomenal. And so he shares a story when he was in a room with one of his mentors who was Earl Nightingale many years ago. And I think it was Earl in this particular story that looked at Bob in this room full of students and said, “Bob” pointed him out and says “You are the luckiest man in the room.” and Bob looked around and he didn’t feel very lucky. He was broke, he was sick, I think he had just been through a rough relationship situation, and he wasn’t feeling very lucky at all. And his mentor said, “Bob, you’re the luckiest man in the room because you have the greatest opportunity.” And what that means is that because he was the worst off, by this principle every adversity has a seed of equal or greater benefit, then the benefit that is available to him was greater than anyone else’s in the room. And so we are lucky to struggle. We are lucky to struggle.
So let me introduce myself a little bit. This is my family. My husband I married years ago, 1991. And all I really wanted was to just become a stay-at-home mom and raise my family. And this is something that my husband wanted for us too, it was something we agreed on before we got married, and we’re like “Great we got this figured out. This is how we will do life.” And we married. We married young and we trusted that if we could just have enough faith that everything would work itself out. We had no idea how we were going to afford getting married and raising a family where we didn’t have an income to work with besides just odd jobs and trying to go to school and everything. And everybody’s got that story where you’re struggling through school. But what I couldn’t figure out is why everybody else struggling through school managed to have a camcorder to tape their baby, managed to have a car that started. How’d they do that? You know? We felt like we were behind this 8-ball and could not get in front of it. So fast-forward about seven years, by this time we had gone through several you know job losses, medical problems, my second baby was born with a heart defect so all the medical bills and everything that came attendant to getting his help and everything. And my husband lost his job, at the time we were living in Utah and he had a job working as a mechanic. No, no, no, that was later. I think he was working at a gun safe shop doing their upholstery. And we were trying to also build a business on the side, trying to get in front of this money problem. And one day in the winter he’s crossing the street to go talk to a neighbor about this business opportunity and he slips on some black ice and he falls on the ground and he hits his hand like this and it just wrenches his shoulder and he breaks his shoulder blade. Well you can’t have a broken shoulder blade and do this upholstery thing that he was doing. And so they said “Alright take six weeks off and when you come back, we’ll try to place you.” Essentially ”You’re let go, good luck to you.” Right? In so many words.
And so what was interesting is during that season there was a snowstorm, a big windstorm that whipped up all this salt from the salt flats in Salt Lake City. Whipped it up into the air it got caught up in the clouds so that when it snowed, it left this sheet not just a white snow but of salt everywhere. It was, it was a mess. So he’s home, he’s got this broken shoulder blade, he’s unemployed, we’ve got these two babies, I think we had number two by then, pretty sure. And he’s looking at all the snow that’s melted and this white blanket of salt that was left on everybody’s windows, houses, cars, doors, it was everywhere. On the sidewalk, it was a mess. And he saw an opportunity. And so he went and picked up some window-washing material and to start asking the neighbors if they would like their windows washed. And of course everybody needed their windows washed. And so he went around and started washing windows. Now he had enough strength to just do what he could with his healing arm. It wasn’t as strenuous as the upholstery kind of work. And so he started making some pretty good money and we’re like “Oh my goodness this is, this is a blessing in disguise that he broke his shoulder blade and lost his job and this horrible snowstorm is a seed with an equal benefit to us financially.” You know? And we’re starting to see this negative-positive, negative-positive polarity going on. But he came home one day and calculated how much he had made doing these windows and he thought you know “What if I did this full-time?” And I think right about that time we were making maybe twelve thousand dollars a year and this wasn’t in the 1950s. It wasn’t not long ago, but we were really struggling to make ends meet. And when he calculated he thought, “If I did this full-time I could make $70,000.” And we’re like “Sounds like you found your passion.” Right? “It sounds like you found your new career.”
And so he finished that, that year. We went to the summer he started doing windows for some of the Parade of Homes. He got a lot of good referrals, he was doing really well, and we were pretty excited about that. Well here comes winter again and you know it dawns on us “This is not the best career for winter in Utah.” And so we’re like “We’re from Arizona, let’s go to Arizona.” And so we’re like “Great.” So we upped and moved to Arizona so that we could do windows year-round. Well the culture was different. The market was different. What was working in Utah, getting referrals and everything just wasn’t working here. And the best he could manage to do was hire on with the window washing company. We lived in Mesa to hire on with the company out of I think it was Phoenix. And we were driving a 1978 Grenada, Ford Granada. And he would drive that to Phoenix to check in, and then he would be sent out to go do his jobs that they had lined up around the valley. $10 an hour, our own gas, and it just wasn’t this $70,000 a year thing that we were looking to make. This is actually where we lived when he had that job. It’s a little two-bedroom apartment in Mesa. It was kind of depressing, it just wasn’t the dream home where I saw myself raising my kids. We are not smokers and I’m sensitive to cigarette smoke, but it was a little four-plex and cigarette smoke would come through the outlets in the walls from the other tenants. And so it was a it was depressing to me and my kids.
And I remember one day coming outside of this apartment to find that my broom had been broken in half. Well I’d already been struggling with depression, never got technically and officially diagnosed because the one time I went to a doctor to get help ticked me off. I just got out of it, you know because I was depressed and mad. So anyway I left that, came out and here’s for my broken broom and when you’re faced with the problem, you look for a solution, right? What would you do if someone had broken your broom and you didn’t have money to replace it?
Audience member: Fix it.
Leslie: Fix it. How?
Audience member: Duct tape.
Leslie: Duct tape. Did you know it never even crossed my mind? Never even crossed my mind. Any other solutions?
Audience member: Borrow from a neighbor.
Leslie: Borrow from a neighbor. No I just decided to be mad and so I called the police. I was that neighbor. You ever had a neighbor like that? I was that neighbor just because I was so wound up and so upset. This is not what life was supposed to look like when we married, having faith that everything was going to work out. It was it was dark, it was hard, it was exhausting, it was like “Can we ever catch a break?” So we started attending events where speakers would teach us how to think positive, how to build a business, personal development, business development, things like that. Because we had friends that could see that a lot of our problems could be resolved if we would just think differently. You know? A problem comes up, you call the police on the kid who breaks your broom. That’s not how you end your problems, that’s how you create more problems. I didn’t understand that and so I was very reactive to life. I was very reactive to the adversity that I felt like kept showing up. I didn’t understand how to be proactive and intercept that cycle. And so we were going to these events and each time we’d attend one, we would get a negative truth like “Oh my gosh yes. If we think positive, things will go better. Okay I’m going to think positive.” And we come home and we’d feel good for a few days and then we’d get this other late bill in the mail, or we get this other car problem that needed a repair. You know it was just like I couldn’t make a connection between the way I was thinking and what was showing up. I didn’t see a connection. So I was just angry all the time. And finally after I counted it up, I counted up more than a hundred of these seminars. And they were just little, little things here and there, sometimes they were bigger things, sometimes they were “Oh there’s this event in Florida. You need to find a way to get there.” “Okay well we’ll find a way to get there.” And we sacrificed a lot to get this education because I really believe deep down that there was something to it. There was something to the way I think having an effect on my circumstances. But why can’t I make that connection and why can’t I intentionally think something and have it affect my life in a positive way like I believe I can?
So along comes this one event, it was going to be in Ogden Utah at the D Event Center, and they brought in this guest speaker by the name of Bob Proctor. And he was the first speaker that talked on these principles of positive thinking in a way that wasn’t just rah rah, really loud and you know animated. He was kind of dry actually. And the first time I heard him I, I missed it because he didn’t have my attention. But the second time I heard him I was ready, I was hungry, and I was sitting on the edge of my seat, my husband was sitting on the edge of the seat because we believed that what he was going to tell us was going to change our life. We believed that because the one that we had missed before, we were there, I was kind of tuned out. Probably focused on how much money I spent to get there and worrying about my kids at home and not really paying attention. But it was after that event we could hear the whole crowd just in a buzz about what they had learned. And we’re like “Wait a minute, what did we miss? What did I miss?” What do you say? You know just spent two hours on a concept, how do I recap that for you? You know and so I’m like “Oh man I got to hear him again. I got to hear why these people are still talking about it months later and not just three days later.” That was new. And so we went back, heard it, the lights went on, we got it, and we’re like “Is that all it is? It’s so simple.” And we went home and tripled our income in three months with just a shift in our mindset. And I can tell you all the ways it doesn’t work because of those seven years that we were getting pieces that couldn’t quite make it work.
Boyd K Packer has a quote that kind of explains the concept in a nutshell and I don’t have it memorized. You can look it up. He said, “There are two kinds of faith. One of them operates ordinarily in the, in our daily lives. It’s the kind of faith that assures us the Sun will rise, that dawn will come, that growth will occur, growth will happen. It’s how we relate ourselves to things that are scheduled to happen.” But he says “There’s another kind of faith, rare indeed, and it’s the kind of faith that causes things to happen.” He says, “It is worthy and unyielding, and directed and channeled it has a great effect.” And it became my passion to study and learn about it and practice it and see if I could figure it out to where I could, I didn’t set out to teach about it, I just wanted two things to change for our own life. But when the lights went on we had that huge breakthrough and we realized how simple it was I thought “Well why, I’ve been reading all these books that talked about it, I’ve been going all these events that talked about it, why didn’t they say it like this?” And that’s the book I wrote. And so I-
Audience member: [Inaudible]
Leslie: Thank you. What I originally set out to do was to teach what I had been taught from that seminar that I attended. I trained with Bob Proctor to facilitate his programs but I had five kids and one on the way I think at the time, my husband was working two hours from home so sometimes we didn’t see him except on the weekend. It was just a little bit chaos at our home. We were living in a two-bedroom house. I mean we’d gotten the principles and we tripled our income, but it didn’t really appear like much had changed in our life, we were still working through some things to get our life the way we wanted it. But I started teaching seminars and it was really hard to put them together. Kind of exhausting getting them set up, showing up, having babysitters, the whole bit. And I thought, “I’ll just write a book and let that be my seminar.” So that’s what the Jackrabbit Factor is. I knew it had to be different. I knew it couldn’t just be a list of “Here’s how it works” because I’d read all those books. I needed to create an experience so that a person could read in two or three hours a story and get lost in the story and have that shift that takes the principles from your head to your heart. What took us seven years to make that shift I wanted to create that shift for a person through a story and in just a few hours. And it’s funny because ironically it did well enough that there came a demand for seminars after it came out. And I wasn’t trying to do that. Some people write books so that they can generate people for their events. I was writing the book so I wouldn’t have to do events. And so it did make it easier when I was ready to get back and teach that there were people who understood the principles and wanted to learn more.
So after all that happened we moved from, I mean this is several moons later but we got our dream home using these principles and we had left California with almost about $250,000 cash that we were able to put down on a home here in Arizona. The timing was good with the way the market went like this, right before it went like that, and we were able to write it and get into a home that we loved. Now I, I used to be kind of embarrassed to share this because it’s like “Look at me, look at my house.” But I can show you this all day long because we don’t live here anymore. We went through the recession like everybody else. And principles had gone really, really well you know. We were using them and things were going well and I got this passion to share what we had learned. But when the recession happened, by this time my husband had quit his job, we were doing this together full-time, we had our seven children, we were homeschooling for some of those years, and we also had started to invest in real estate at the top of the market. So when that all tanked my business is doing well, real estate is doing awful, and I’m like “Are we successful, are we not? I don’t know. It’s a mess.” And we ended up well, I’m gonna have to condense. I’ve got way too much to share in a short period of time so I’m going to condense. But because of the recession I, I started trying to use the principles like “Okay I know that in every adversity is a seed of equal or greater benefit and this is a big adversity so there’s a big benefit here somewhere.” But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find it except for the personal growth and the character building. You know. I’m like “No I need something better than that. I need some tangible results here.” And I believed that if I just thought positively enough or if I thought right enough, according to the laws and principles that I’m going to cover here in a minute, that we could turn a bad investment into a good one.
And it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it is what it is and the gift contained in it takes you over in this other direction and that’s what it did for us. But because of what we learned through the recession, and I did find out that the principles are still true. Yes they do still work. And when we got to the end of all that we had to work with, we, our credit was, we’d racked up all our credit, there’s nothing left. There, we had, I used all of our savings. There’s nothing left. We’re just trying to hold things together knowing that things would turn around eventually. We didn’t see the signs and know how bad this recession was going to be. You know everybody’s suffering in 2009/10. We were a couple years ahead of you guys. We were we were suffering a couple years ahead of that. And some of my best articles were in that you know I blog also. Rarefaith.org. But some of my best material came out of the hardest, hardest days because I’m coaching myself. I’m writing like I’m teaching someone else but what I’m doing is I’m coaching myself on how to think today right now through this. This is how I need to think. And by the end I could feel the shift.
And there was a, I was going to share this but I’ll throw this in because of the timing. When we were at the end of all we had and it was our anniversary weekend and we had like $200 left in the bank, we had about $15,000 we needed to come up with in the next two weeks, no paycheck in sight, seven kids to feed, and we didn’t know what we were gonna do. I said ”Honey it’s our anniversary. Could we just go out to eat?” We hadn’t let ourselves for like a year because of the money. “Can we just go out to eat and pretend like everything’s okay for two hours? Could we just pretend like everything is fine for two hours and enjoy a meal?” He’s like “What the heck. What the heck.” So we went out to it was actually Macaroni Grill over off of Stapley before they closed. And we ordered, I found the receipt this week. Last, we were going through cleaning out our office and I found the receipt from Macaroni Grill, I bought like a $2.00 soup for my anniversary. I think he got salmon. He’s like “What the heck.” We bought, we paid for it, we enjoyed the two hours. What we did was we sat there and asked ourselves ”Alright I have no idea how we’re gonna get through this week. Have no idea how we’re gonna get through this month. Do you think we’ll have it figured out in ten years?” “Oh sure we’ll have it figured out in ten years.” “Well then let’s talk about what we’ll be doing in ten years. Let’s just go there. Let’s just live there for two hours.” “Alright, cool.” “So our kids will be this age, that age, they’ll probably be doing this and that. We’ll be doing, we’re still going to be teaching these principles?” “Yeah it’s what we do.” “Okay so even if we’re doing it out of a van.” You know. “Well this is what we do.” And so things changed. We shifted. Something inside of us shifted from being in despair and fearful to “This is going to be awesome.” Right? We shifted our mindset in that moment. We go and pay the bill, we leave the restaurant, he’s opening my door to let me into the car, and we hear this noise behind us, turn around, it’s the server running after us waving his hand. And he runs out and he says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Because it’s your anniversary the manager says the meals on us.” We’d already paid the bill and they voided it. I’ve got the receipt to prove it. Who does that? Have you ever heard of that happening? I’m not sure we even let them know is our anniversary. They may have just overheard, I can’t remember for sure. But in that moment we were reminded that mindset is everything. That if you stay in the right mindset that the things you need are there for you as you need them.
And ever since then I have tested it, tested it, tested it, and it proves to be true. The trick is not doubting. That’s the hardest part is not doubting. You can have a tiny, tiny little bit of faith, see it, see it done, feel it like it’s already done and just don’t fear. That’s the formula. The formula is don’t fear. It’s hard to say, “Don’t fear” and not think of fear so that’s why we focus so much on “Think positive” and stuff like that. The books that I have, and they’re all free downloads, you can download them for free at my website. I do have paperback copies for those who like them in hand, but those will help you not doubt. They’ll help you know what you need to know so that you don’t have to doubt. So what we learned in each breakthrough is that the outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state. Men do not attract that which they want but that which they are. And what we want to be are people who are not living in fear. How many times do we hear “Fear not”? It’s not just so that you’ll feel better, it’s because as long as you don’t fear, life can keep supplying what you need as you need it.
So the Laws of Success. This is something that we learned that helped us with those, that first breakthrough and getting through the recession and everything is understanding how to think when you don’t know what to think. When things show up opposite of what you want them to be. And we’re gonna go through each one of these one at a time really quickly. The Law of Perpetual Transmutation says that circumstances and things are perpetually coming into or going out of form according to your thoughts. And I have this picture here of the clouds because clouds are kind of a visual representation of this process in my mind. You see the guy at the top and you see the clouds, they’re kind of big and wispy, they’re beginning to form, or maybe they’re moving out of form. We don’t know which way they’re coming but they’re, they’re kind of vague. Most of the time when we want something to be a certain way, we have a vague idea of how that’s going to look. And as we have vague ideas, there is an impulse that is put out into the world around us that activates things, circumstances, resources to begin to cause those things to form in reality. So if I get an idea of how I want things to be, I can think “I don’t want debt. I don’t want debt. I don’t want debt.” But that doesn’t tell what you want instead. You need to focus on what you actually want, not what you don’t want. Not what you don’t want. So okay, so you don’t have debt. Now what des life look like? What does life look like when you’re in that relationship you want to be in? What does that look like? What does it look like when the relationship with your kids is what you want it to be? It’s not “I don’t want so much fighting around the home.” Okay well what does peace look like? See it on the screen of your mind. Paint it in your imagination. As you paint it and you see it, and it’s gonna be a vague because we think vaguely, right? It’ll be vague, but if you can imagine what its gonna feel like when it’s like that and let that emotion happen, it’s that emotion that sends the pulse.
You know that there’s energy, you know you walk into a room and if someone’s angry you don’t have to find out by asking. You can feel it. Can you not? You can feel when someone is angry. You can feel when someone is happy. And the world responds to us human beings according to our emotions. The elements respond to our emotions. And so a cloud can start to take form out of the vapor in the sky, it can begin to take form, and then it can move out form. Or it can take form and gather and become a billowy cloud and it can get heavier and heavier until it begins to rain. In the right conditions it may become snow and ice. But this is transmutation of one kind of thing into all kinds of forms. And our thoughts are the same way. They begin as vague but as you continue to believe, as you continue to reject doubt, it may happen, but it’s what you do with it when it happens. You just kick it out and gain knowledge so that you have a reason to kick it out. But the circumstance is that dream you have of being on that vacation with your family. Everything you need to make that happen is beginning to form as you’re imagining it. Are beginning to organize themselves as you imagine it, as you feel it. And when you say “Oh that’ll never happen.” Then it begins to dissipate and you never saw evidence that you had an effect on anything. And that’s why it’s so easy to doubt.
The Law of Relativity: This is a really good one in terms of adversity. Your situation is not fundamentally good or bad until you compare it to something else. I challenge you to think of a situation that is fundamentally bad and if you can think of anything that’s worse than that, then it’s only relatively bad. But compared to something else, it’s relatively good. And it’s important to understand that you can do this with every situation in your life. And so if you’re facing something bad or awful and you apply this law, you’re going to be looking for ways it could be worse to help you feel better about it. Because as you feel better about what is, your emotions change and life begins to respond to you differently than it was when you were being angry about it.
The Law of Vibration: Your thoughts control your, okay let me back up a little bit. So would you agree that at least according to ninth grade science, everything around us is vibrating on a molecular level. So the table, the chair, if you were to look at it microscopically and could see the atoms and molecules, they would be vibrating. So everything vibrates. We are vibrating. Our flesh and bones are vibrating. And as we change our thoughts, our rate of vibration, what we vibrate changes too. We can change our thoughts and add emotion and it doesn’t only change what gets attracted to us, what shows up in our life, but it also changes the ideas and solutions that come to your mind. I like to say that the solution to every problem is only an idea away. The solution to every problem is only an idea away. You think you need money to solve that problem. No, you need the idea that will get you the money to solve that problem. You think you need these resources to solve that other problem. No, you need the idea that will get you the resources. Whatever it is you think you need, you can boil it back to, no you need the idea that will get you that. And just like a radio broadcast, the solution to your problem is already in this room. Think about that for a minute. So KEZ is that 99.9? Is 99.9 in this room right now? I can’t hear it. Can anybody hear it? What we have to do to hear it is turn on a radio. If we could turn on a radio, did the radio suck the music into the room? Did it attract the music? No. It just made it audible and made audible what was already here. And the solution to every problem is already here. Sometimes it’s easier to tackle the problem when you realize “I don’t have to go across country to figure this out. I can be right here in my room. The idea I need is already in this room and I know it. How do I tune into it?”
This is what we do at Genius Boot Camp by the way. Three-day workshop, it’s a ton of fun, I hope you guys join me sometime. But what we do is we take you through exercises where you see what you’re trying to solve as solved. See it solved. Feel now how you’re gonna feel once it is solved. How is that going to feel? That’s not always the easiest exercise but we do that. Once you can see it and feel it, you have just turned your dial and the idea is that you get on that, on that level are going to be different than the ideas you were getting when you were wrapped up in fear, worry, and stress. Because so often it’s like Albert Einstein says “You cannot solve” Oh how does it go? Help me out. “You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking you were at when you created it.” We try to do that though. We’re in worry and fear about the worry and fear that we’re living, and so we try to solve that from a place of worry and fear. And we just keep perpetuating it because we haven’t jumped out of that level of thinking to a higher level of thinking. It’s on a different broadcast. It’s just a different radio station that we’re tuning into.
Law of Polarity: Everything has an opposite. A bad situation is equally good. So as you look for the good, more good will continue to come your way. I like this picture. It’s a picture of a forest fire, which as you’ve heard releases seeds to bring new growth. Burnt soil and burnt foliage is some of the richest, carbon-rich for any growth. So Law of Polarity. And I told you my husband and I tripled our income in those three months. We came home from that event and started looking at everything that was bad with new eyes. We’re like “Man this is awful. This is really bad. You know what that means? That means it’s really good. Let’s find out why it’s really good.” And it changed our thoughts. It changed how we felt. And what do you think we were tuning into. Now we’re tuning into seeing it for the good that it was. And as we started doing that, we were staying out of fear a lot more. And the resources started coming, the opportunities started coming, and things started to flow. Things will flow as you live these principles more than they do when you don’t. As you fight them, I mean we’re constantly affected by these laws whether or not we understand them, whether or not we know they’re there. Just like gravity. I don’t have to understand gravity but life is safer if I do understand it, right? I’m not gonna go on the edge of the cliff and wonder what might happen if I just kind of step off. I know gravity. It’s good to know so I won’t do that stupid thing. Same with these laws. It’s better to know them so we don’t accidentally do stupid things.
Law of Rhythm: The tide goes out, the tide returns by law. So when you feel down or when life is hard, be assured that it’s temporary. And what do you think happens if you know that something like that is temporary and you start looking for it “Is it over yet?? You’re looking for evidence that it’s over. By the Law of Perpetual Transmutation you’re gonna have an effect on that happening sooner. That’s why it’s so good to look for the upswing. You can expect an upswing. By law it will happen. Nobody goes to the ocean watching the tide go out and thinking “Oh my gosh we’re running out of water. Where’s the ocean going?” Nobody worries about that. So why do we worry so much about our life when it starts going downhill? Our brains project forward and think “Oh it’s going downhill. I see the end of that and it’s not pretty.” Well it doesn’t have to go all the way out. It comes and goes.
Law of Cause and Effect: Action and reaction are equal. Oh and by the way, all of these are in my book Hidden Treasures, which is a free download. So just make sure you stop by my booth to get card so that you can get this. Action and reaction are equal in opposite directions. Trust that each action you take toward your goal initiates a reaction back toward you even when you don’t see one happen right away. Believe that your action has put unseen- oh I spelled that wrong. I’m sorry. Has put unseen things into motion. And so when we were working on a business years ago after learning these principles, I used to think that I had to go the distance, that I had to go the extra mile, that I had- that nothing happened unless I was doing something. And what this taught me is that me being in my room, imagining the success and feeling excited about it is doing something and it’s causing a reaction. It’s arranging, it’s orchestrating, it’s, it’s causing people in other places to have questions that will eventually lead to me where I can provide answers. You know that things are happening even if you’re not physically making them happen. And by believing it, Law of Perpetual Transmutation promises that things are.
Law of Gestation: This one is super important because every living thing has a gestation period from conception to completion. Idea seeds are living things as well. So we need to be patient, allow it to fully form, trust that it is growing even when you can’t see evidence. The first time I tried this “Picture what you want” thing, it was actually to spite the seminar speakers that I’d been hearing that from for so many years. They kept saying “Picture what you want, dream big.” And I’m like “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what do I do? Got that, but what do I do?” And finally one day I was so frustrated with how things were, this was in that apartment where I you know, called the cops. I’m like “You know what? I am so sick of them saying that. Fine. I will.” Like “I’m gonna spite them.” So I went to my room, I closed my eyes, I’m like “Alright I’m gonna imagine what- I want to be in a house of my own. What would that feel like? What would that be like?” So I close my eyes and I imagine myself coming home from grocery shopping, kids running up from behind me coming in, and I kind of pictured it and I imagine how that would feel enough to where it put a smile on my face. And then I, you know eventually had to get up and get back to life. Well I didn’t know I had done anything. I just thought I was escaping. In fact I remember telling myself “Oh Leslie has it come to this? Has it really come to this? Now you’re escaping.” You know. And I thought that was a bad thing. Well fast forward a year later, we were living in a home of our own and this was after those seven years of nothing working. And I didn’t realize what I’d done until I went and heard about Proctor talk about it and I’m like “Oh my gosh I did that.” But what’s cool about it is that I did that and I didn’t sit and wonder “I wonder if it worked. I wonder if it happened. I wonder if there’s anything going on. I’m constantly checking to see if I had done anything.” I didn’t. And that’s why it lived. You plant a seed and you keep pulling it out to see how it’s doing, you’re gonna kill it. That’s why you hear some people say “Set it and forget it.” Set it and forget it doesn’t mean you don’t do anything, because once you’ve set it properly, you’re gonna have these sparks of genius ideas that tell you to turn here, call that person, say this, say that. But you’re not stressed about whether or not you did something. Just trust that you did and don’t question it. Just trust that you did.
Alright so now how do we find the seed of equal or greater benefit in every adversity? Who knows what this is about. Raise your hand. Anybody? Oh cool I get to tell you a story. So a woman by the name of Corrie Ten Boom. She was in the German concentration camps during the war. And you recognize it. Okay. So she and her sister were reading in the Bible in their barracks and the guards were not pleasant. They were always present, they are always- there just was no freedom where the guards were watching. But they were reading in the Bible and came to a verse that said “To give thanks in everything.” And Betsie is like “We’re gonna do this. We’re going to give thanks for everything. So we’re grateful for this and this and this.” And they went down the list. “And I’m grateful for the fleas” that they’ve been complaining about because their place was just covered in fleas. And they were miserable from them. And her sister’s like “Whoa stop right there. I can be grateful for all those things but there is no way that I can possibly be grateful for these fleas. There’s no way that God could even help me be grateful for these fleas.” And she says, “Well but it’s a commandment we need to be grateful.” So they thanked the Lord for the fleas. And she’s like “I will never understand how this could be a good thing.” And it was some time later but I think Corrie was going to the central area to pick up something and overheard the guards, one of the guards was instructed to take some supplies to their barracks. And they’re like “No you realize that place is covered in fleas? I am NOT going there.” And so they had privacy. They had freedom. They had more privileges than any of the other prisoners in the concentration camp because of those fleas. Fleas equaling freedom. To give thanks in all things.
Successful people aren’t made when they use the Law of Attraction or Vibration as I understood it and sell their way to the top. Successful people are made in the moment of disaster when they choose to think right anyway. Life’s bumps. I like to think about life as a series of cogs and gears. How you are, where you are, and you have a need, and you are praying for help, or you’re seeking an answer or a solution to the problem you’re facing, and like in our case “Please help us get in front this money problem.” And so along comes an experience. Life delivers a new bump, a new hiccup, a new problem. Instead of giving me what I asked for, it delivers a new problem. And what I didn’t realize is that it’s on a gear that’s coming around and it’s like the tooth hits me. I’m like “Ow!” And what I didn’t realize is that that gear is coming to move me. It’s coming to move me where I will get what I was asking for. And so as life delivers challenges, those challenges move us towards the things that we’re asking for. And we don’t always see it that way, we see it as “Oh this is a, this is another hurdle in the way. This is another problem in the way.” But when we shift our mind and we look at it like “Okay this is bad, therefore it’s really good.” And you respond to it according to these principles. And then instead of fighting it, it’s not friction, its traction to get you where you need to go. And you resist them long enough, that’s painful. Until the gears wear down and they can’t move, you, you don’t want to get that hardened that you aren’t responding to life’s challenges in ways that bring you to where you want to be. So if you find yourself having a run of bad luck, it could be life just trying to lift you to a higher place. It says “Oh you’re sad? I got this. Here’s a gift.” It’s, it doesn’t look like a gift, it looks like a challenge. Right? “Oh here’s another gift. Here’s another gift. Here’s another gift.” We don’t see them as gifts, we think it’s a run of bad luck. But you shift the way you look at it, you say “Oh this is bad. I wonder what’s so awesome about this. I’m gonna find it.” Seek and ye shall find. Tune or turn your radar to looking for the positive and it you will find it and you pass the test. And these challenges can fall away much faster as we don’t resist them. Receive the gift, let it lift you. Receive it.
So final story I’m going to share with you. My daughter who is here with me today, I’m excited about that. When she was young, about seven or nine years old, she was in Orchestra. I think she was nine. And she used to go to Orchestra and she would go sit down and nobody would sit by her. And she came home crying. She’s like “Mom nobody wants to sit by me at orchestra.” She was feeling lonely and I said “Alright honey, let’s do this. I want you to imagine sitting by people and feeling so happy that you have friends. Let’s do that. Let’s try that out. Let’s imagine that,” And she was game. She’d let me take her through that exercise. And I’m like “Okay now when you go, just look for things to be different. You know and you’re gonna get ideas on things you can do so things will be different.” She was like “Okay, okay.” So she prayed that she would make new friends. And she gets to, she gets to class and she sees her normal spot and she thought “I should probably sit somewhere else.” You know to shake things up and maybe meet someone new. So she went to go sit there and then she chickened out and she went to her old comfort-zone place, sat down, and the other chairs filled in, and she was alone again. And then she saw a spider on her music stand. She’s like “Oh!” And so she shakes it off and then it lands on her and she doesn’t know where. And so she jumps up and she’s shaking it off and she’s looking for it and she’s freaked out and she’s like “I don’t even know where it went. I guess I better move.” So she moves over to another seat and just then two other girls walk in and flank her on either side and she had a great day. And so when I picked her up, she was so excited to tell me. She says “Mom. I prayed for friends but God didn’t send me friends, He sent a spider.” And that’s how it works sometimes. She didn’t move on her own. She didn’t do what would have made it happen on her own, so God sent a spider and it moved her. That’s the adversity with the seed of equal or greater benefit. So I just ask you, think about what are the spiders in your life and where are they trying to move you? What are your spiders? Where will you end up if you allow them to move you instead of resisting and fighting?
This is a dog who for whatever reason didn’t have front arms. I don’t know if they were needed to be removed or if it was a birth defect, but there was one day he was on a farm and a pig came along and stole his food. And he was mad. He was so mad, he jumped up and started chasing that pig on his back feet. And now he goes around and inspires children in schools for what our handicaps are and what it teaches us and what we can learn if we don’t let him get us down. So now he walks like a human because of what adversity? The pig stealing is food. Another state of equal or greater benefit contained in an adversity. Isn’t that fun?
So with that I’m gonna close. I hope you’ll visit my booth today. For everybody who is in this room, you’re invited to come pick out a free book and take it home with you. You can have either a Jackrabbit Factor, or Hidden Treasures, As a Man Thinketh, or Science of Getting Rich, or Killing Sacred Cows which is not my book but my co-author. I’ve got one of those left. It’ll be just first-come first-serve. If something runs out and you don’t get the one you want, we do have them available for a free download. There’s also a sign-up sheet if you want to attend one of my Genius Boot Camps where we go through these exercises and you get that genius idea you’re looking for. Sign up for my newsletter, it’s called the Rare Faith Newsletter. And we’ve got a Genius Boot Camp next weekend. There’s a few seats left and then there’s one in August. I’d love to see you there. With that I’ll close and thanks for coming.
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Announcer: This concludes today’s episode of the Rare Faith Podcast. You’ve been listening to Leslie Householder, author of the Jackrabbit Factor, Portal to Genius, and Hidden Treasures: Heaven’s Astonishing Help with your Money Matters. All three books can be downloaded free at ararekindoffaith.com. So tell your friends and join Leslie again next time as she goes even deeper into the principles that will help you change your life.
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