The economy, the mortgage crisis, the credit crunch, the sky is falling.

Sound familiar?

With the release of my new book The Secret Code of Success, I’ve been interviewed by scores of media people who ask the same question: “How can you be so positive when things are so awful?”

And I’m like, “What do you mean, awful?”

The Secret Code of Success reveals the seven hidden steps that the Naturals of Success have been doing all their lives without knowing it. These people (I call them Three Percenters) always seem to find a way to prosper, no matter what the doomsayers are predicting.

As I remind the media: “Even during The Great Depression, some people got rich. Who do you think called it ‘Great’?”

When everyone else is panicking, the Three Percenters start licking their chops – because they instinctively know that there’s gold in them thar panic!

Here are five ways to have an abundance mentality when everyone is saying all is lost:

1. Focus on people, not things.

There are five essential Systems that must operate optimally in order for you to live prosperously. The first and most important is your People System. Why? Because people have all the money!

Ironically, when you put people first, the money comes as a natural result… provided, of course, you follow the other steps.

2. Let go of your high – and low – expectations.

You can see abundance even in the face of not-enoughness. The difference lies in your expectations.

Stop expecting people and things to change. False or misplaced expectations kill relationships – and your chances for true abundance. When you change your perspective of something, the thing you’re looking at changes.

3. Use AFFORMATIONS.

No, that’s not a misprint. Instead of asking, “Why am I so broke?”, try asking, “Why am I so rich?”

I call these empowering questions AFFORMATIONS – NOT affirmations!

For example, you’ve probably tried using an affirmation like, “I am rich.” And your brain says, “Yeah, right!”

Instead of a statement you don’t believe, ask an Afformation: “Why am I so rich?”

Asking an empowering question causes your mind to search for why you are, in fact, rich. That’s why changing the question can change your life.

Go to www.iAfform.com for a free 60-second Afformation Stress-Buster you can listen to anytime, anywhere.

4. Focus on what you HAVE, not on what you lack.

Many people are suffering from the disease of “not-enoughness”. This comes from focusing on what you lack, which produces…more feelings of lack.

Every morning, write 5 things you’re grateful for. Focusing on what you HAVE will build feelings of confidence and self-worth – because what you focus on, grows.

5. Find your Because.

Most people don’t know why they’re here on Earth. This leads to feelings from mild frustration to the depths of despair. It’s only natural that these feelings get exacerbated when times look tough.

Focusing on what’s wrong is really a bad habit you don’t need any more. When you Find Your Because, you’ll realize that not having “everything you want” pales in comparison to knowing you are being the best person you can be.

You sure?

Remember that last possession you just “had” to have? It’s probably sitting in your home or garage somewhere. And maybe you use it every day. Or, maybe it’s been a while…

Traditional success teachers have told us for decades, “Think about all the money you’re going to make! Think about the new car! Think about how rich you’ll be!,” and so on. They told us to visualize the things we want, and told us that would motivate us to take action to get them. That’s fine, but the simple question remains: why that didn’t work for most of us?

It’s because we human beings think we want things. But really, it’s experiences we want. We don’t want the Ferrari; we want the feeling of specialness and importance we think the Ferrari will give us. It’s not the mansion or yacht; it’s the feeling of being rich. Sure, we all want the finer things like cars, houses and our own island in the Caribbean. But after working with tens of thousands of people in my seminars and interviewing scores of multi-millionaire mega-successes, I have found, ironically, that the two essential experiences we human beings want are Significance and Contribution.

We want to feel significant to other people, and we want the feeling that we made a difference. Sure, we want a million dollars, and there’s nothing wrong with having lots of money. But each of my multi-millionaire friends has told me, without fail, that after the cars, the vacations and private jets, they kept asking themselves: “Is this all there is? What significance do I have? Have I really made a difference on this Earth?”

Traditional success teachers focused a great deal of energy telling you that you have to “work yourself into a white heat” over money. While there’s nothing wrong with having lots of money, experience has shown that people who put money before people tend to run into trouble. (Where do you think our current financial crisis came from?)

Here are four “A’s” to put people and experiences before things:

1. Acknowledge.

Why is Acknowledge the first A? Because human beings are starving for attention, appreciation, and acknowledgement. Research has shown that people will do more for acknowledgement than for money. We think we want money (and we do); but many people are shackled by “the golden handcuffs” – being “stuck” in high-paying, low-fulfilling jobs.

There are dozens of ways to Acknowledge the people in your life, at work and at home. What it really comes down to, though, is YOUR WILLINGNESS to do so. That’s because every one of us is wearing an invisible sign that says, “Please make me feel important.” The problem is, YOU have that sign too! That’s whyeveryone is waiting for someone else to make them feel important first, before they’re willing to do it for others.

2. Ask.

Do you find it difficult to ask the people in your life for support? When I ask my seminar audiences that question, more than 70% say yes.

What causes the fear of asking? It’s really the fear of rejection wearing a nice suit. “What if other person says no… what if they laugh at me?”

Yeah, what if they say no? You already don’t have the thing. So if they say no, you’re no worse off than before.

Many teachers talk about important it is to be persiste

The staggering realization I made in The Shower on that fateful morning in 1997 was that you create your reality in two ways: by the statements you say to yourself and others, and by the questions you ask yourself and others.

Traditional success teachers have focused a great deal of energy telling you that you should change your statements, in the form of “affirmations”. But until The Shower, no one had fully realized, or shown how to harness, the awesome power of what happens when you change your questions.

The 4 Steps to Create Afformations That Can Change Your Life

Step 1: Ask yourself what you want.

In Step 1, you can use goals you’ve previously written, or start from scratch. You decide.

Please note that traditional success teachers stopped right here! They told us to “set your goals”, and then say “affirmations” that attempt to convince your brain that you will have what you want… sometime, somehow, somewhere.

For example, in Step 1, you might decide that your goal is to be happy, healthy and wealthy (hard to imagine anyone NOT wanting those things!). So, you would write: “I want to be happy, healthy and wealthy.”

And now, the breakthrough step…

Step 2: Form a QUESTION that assumes that What You Want has already happened or is already true.

In Step 2 of The Afformations Method, you ask a question that assumes that what you want is already so, has already happened, or is already true. This is the key to creating Afformations that can change your life.

Your Life is a reflection of the unconscious assumptions you make about life and your relationship to it. If you could find a mechanism that could record your subconscious thought-seeds and play them back to you, they might sound something like this: “Why am I so broke? Why don’t I have enough? Why aren’t I more successful?”, and so forth.

Well, a mechanism does exist that records and reflects your subconscious thought-seeds –that mechanism is called Your Life!

Step 2 of The Afformations Method is to begin to change your communication with the world inside yourself. This is the fastest, most effective way I’ve ever seen to immediately change the quality of your communication with the world inside of you AND the world outside of you.

Using our example above, you would ask yourself, “Why am I so happy, healthy and wealthy?”

Step 3: Give yourself to the question.

The point of Afformations is not to find “the answer”, but to ask better questions. When you ask better questions, your mind automatically begins to focus on things you’ve probably never focused on before. When you do this, the results will amaze you.

Let’s say you want to find a new restaurant in your city. You go to Google and type “restaurants” and the city you’re in. What you’re really doing is asking a question you don’t know the answer to, yet.

It’s the same with Afformations. You do not need to know, for example, why you are rich. You do, however, need to ASK why you are rich. Why? Because asking that kind of empowering question automatically focuses your mind on what you HAVE vs. what you LACK.

Once you ask a question of your mind, whether you know it or not, your mind automatically starts to Search for the answer without your conscious volition and virtually without effort on your part.

Which brings us to the fourth essential step of The Afformations Method – the one you MUST do if you want this method to work for you…

Step 4: Take new ACTIONS based on your new assumptions about life.

You are, right now, making hundreds, perhaps thousands of unconscious assumptions about life and your relationship to it. These assumptions form the basis of how you go through life – positively or negatively, with confidence or shyness, from lack or from enough, from Love or from Fear.

For instance, if you assume that life is for you, you will naturally take actions based on the belief that “things will work out for the best” – and your results will naturally follow. If you assume that life is against you, however, then your actions will be hesitant, based on fear and “why bother” – and your results will naturally follow.

The Afformation Method makes conscious and clear that which has, until now, been only subconscious and hidden.

For example, Monee had spent thousands of dollars on every exercise and “weight loss” program out there, but couldn’t lose weight. After reading my book, she started to Afform: “Why is it so easy for me to lose weight?”

In less than 90 days, she noticed that her clothes were fitting better. She got on her bathroom scale and it said she’d dropped 20 pounds! But she didn’t believe it, because she hadn’t done any “dieting” or even worked hard at it. So she went to her mom’s house and got on her scale. It said the same thing: she’d lost 20 pounds.

But she still didn’t believe it, because it had been “too easy”. So she went to her doctor’s office and got on the doctor’s scale. And her doctor’s scale confirmed what she herself didn’t believe: she had lost twenty pounds in 90 days without stress or dieting!

The point of Afformations is not to find “the answer” to your questions. The point is to change what your mind automatically FOCUSES ON. When you follow the four steps of The Afformations Method, you will FORM positive questions that assume that what you want is already true. When you do this, your mind has no choice but to find a way to make it true.

Can you see how this process must, by definition, change your life? I know of no other method that can yield such dramatic results with so little effort. Using Afformations, you can take direct, conscious control of your subconscious thoughts – change the questions, change your results, and change your life!

OK, let’s try it. Say to yourself, “I am rich.”

What just happened in your mind? Did you hear a voice… a voice that said: “Yeah, right!”

The simple truth is that most of us have been using “affirmations” for years, but we really don’t believe them. Why? Because you’ve been trying to convince yourself of something that doesn’t appear to be true in your life.

Traditional success teachers told us, if you don’t believe your “affirmations”, to repeat them a thousand…er, million…uh, kajillion times until you eventually, um, believe them.

Have you ever said or written or watched positive “affirmations” (for example, “I am rich, I’m happy, I have enough”)… and then had…

Absolutely nothing happen?

Me too. And about a squillion other people.

One morning in 1997 while I was taking a shower, I was thinking about how the human mind is always in the process of asking and seeking the answers to questions. For example, if I asked you, “Why is the sky blue?” – your mind would instantly start SEARCHING for the answer.

In fact, it would start searching for the answer WITHOUT YOUR CONSCIOUS VOLITION. In other words, your mind would automatically, without any conscious effort, begin to search for the answer to the question.

So I asked myself a very logical question. “If the human mind is always asking and searching for the answers to questions, why are we going around making statements that we don’t believe? Why don’t we cut out the middleman?”

Then I realized that if we say an “affirmation” like, “I am rich” – to which our brain replies, “Yeah, right!” – What would the question be?

The question might look something like this: WHY AM I SO RICH?

What was that?

WHY AM I SO RICH?

Try it. Right now, ask yourself, “Why am I so rich?”

Do you know what your brain is doing right now? Your brain is now SEARCHING for the answer!

Since Biblical times, and in recent movies like “The Secret”, we have been reminded that there is such a thing as The Law of Attraction, which I call The Law of Sowing and Reaping: “As you sow, so shall you reap”.

But what is it that we’re really sowing? We are sowing seeds of thought.

But most people are sowing lousy thought-seeds, which are in the form of disempowering questions like: “Why am I such a loser? Why can’t I do anything right? How come I’m so lonely? Why can’t I lose weight? Why don’t I have enough money?”

When you sow seeds like that, guess what you reap? The fruits of what you’ve sown – which means your life shows up as what you’ve been unwittingly asking!

And that’s how, on that fateful morning in April 1997, I discovered and named the process of AFFORMATIONS. Afformations are my discovery of empowering questions (NOT “affirmations”) that cause your mind to focus on what you REALLY want and what you HAVE, and stop focusing on what you don’t want and don’t have.

Here are some examples of Afformations that my students have used with amazing results:

Brandon, an insurance salesman in Salt Lake City who’d spent $30,000 on self-help programs with few results, started using this Afformation in May. In 30 days, his sales tripled – and by the end of the year, his revenues had increased more than 560% and he was named Agent of the Year.

Mary, a realtor in Minnesota, had tried every diet program out there, but couldn’t lose weight. She began asking this Afformation – and lost 22 pounds in less than 90 days without stress or dieting. She went from a size 14 to a size 8 and began wearing clothes that hadn’t fit in over 10 years.

And one of my favorite Afformation stories…

7-year-old Adrienne from Alabama came home crying to her mother, Joan, sobbing, “Why does everyone hate me?” Joan, who had read my Afformation books, told Adrienne, “Honey, you’re asking the wrong question!” She explained Afformations to her daughter, who started afforming, “Why am I so enchanting?”

Adrienne would repeat her Afformation over and over, out loud. Then one day, she came home from school with a picture one of her classmates had drawn – it was a heart with two little girls holding hands that read, “I’m so glad we’re friends!” When I asked Joan how long it had taken for Adrienne’s transformation to take place, she told me – less than one week!

Afformations are an incredibly powerful method I’ve taught people since 1997 to change your questions and change your life. In Part Two of this series, I’ll show you the simple 4-step Afformations Method to manifest anything you really want twice as fast with half the effort.

About the Author

Noah St. John, Ph.D. is Founder of www.SuccessClinic.com and inventor of Afformations. He’s also the author of the new book The Secret Code of Success: 7 Hidden Steps to More Wealth and Happiness (Collins).

You can get the first three chapters of Noah’s Secret Code Book (free) and connect with other Secret Code readers at   http://www.SecretCodeBook.com

For a 60-Second Afformation Stress Buster (free), go to http://www.iAfform.com