So for years I’d heard this trend about ‘attracting money through connecting to it energetically/vibrating at the same frequency as money etc etc’- and quite honestly I just wrote it off as a pile of BS. I’d tried to do it- I even read ‘The Secret’ a few times! And after looking at it from all angles- turning it over, around, and upside down like some sort of frustrating Rubik’s cube that the only way to solve was to pull it to bits and reassemble it* I called bullshit. It also always seemed to come from female creators, and I felt vaguely disloyal for not understanding what the hell they meant- after all, wasn’t I as a woman supposed to be attuned to my ‘divine feminine power’? But still, bullshit. (I do want to take a moment to say that if you relate to the vibration/energy of money wording and it works for you then I’m truly happy for you- I just couldn’t find a way to use those words and still feel like it was something that I could have work for me)

And then I heard it again from someone who I knew had a strong academic background and is genuinely walking the financial talk and I thought ‘bollocks- I’ve got to get to the bottom of this’. It was bugging the hell out of me that I had this nagging feeling that there was actually something to it but the thing that put me off was that it was wrapped up in this sparkly fairydust kind of wording that I couldn’t relate to in the slightest.

So I started pulling the idea apart and (spoiler alert!) I think I actually understand what they mean- and even better, I think I’m starting to see how it works in my world- and funnily enough fairies and their sparkles have nothing to do with it! (Disclaimer- this theory is still a work in progress so there may be a few things I don’t explain properly- but if you can’t relate to the ‘energetic attraction/vibration of money’ thing either and this helps you then we’re still winning!)

My theory: The RAS + Expectation + Confidence = Sparkly fairydust (AKA the ‘law’ of attraction / energy of money / vibration of money)

Ok, bear with me- we’re about to get a bit sciencey!

The RAS.

There’s a thing called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that is a bit of our brain that has many important things to do. One of the many superpowers it has is that it filters information- basically keeping us from a constant state of overwhelm by filtering out most of the incoming sensory information (ie things that we see, hear, and feel). If we don’t need it or it’s not relevant to us, our super kind RAS basically marks it as ‘to be ignored’- some experts have suggested up to 99% of incoming information gets marked this way by neurotypical brains!!!

Need an example? OK- think of the time you were looking to buy a car, and thought ‘gosh, I never see any of XYZ model around anywhere’- then you go out and they were suddenly everywhere? That was your RAS changing it’s focus- the cars were always there but you never had any reason to notice them before so they went in the ‘to be ignored’ basket, then once there was a reason to see them it put them in the ‘notice’ basket. (I probably just got put on a neuroscience watchlist for the crude way I explained that, but it’ll do for now.) The thing to remember is that this process requires NO CONSCIOUS INPUT from you- you’re not even aware that it’s happening but it is- every waking moment!

Next: Expectation and confidence- same / same but different.

Expectation and confidence can be a kind of self fulfilling prophecy generator: you expect something to happen, you’re confident it’ll happen, and it suddenly happens! Why is that though? Do we have magical powers that we aren’t aware of, that act like some sort of magic wand? I suggest not- but maybe something almost as powerful!

At it’s most basic, expectation is simple: Based on the thing happening a certain way in the past, I expect that in the present it will happen that way again; and then when it does, I expect that when I’m in the same situation in the future it’ll happen the same way again. An example: I expect that I know basic maths because I’ve known it since I was a kid, so when someone asks me what 2+2 is I’ll quickly and confidently answer 4. Take it another step further though: I’m not hugely confident in my algebra skills, so if someone asks me to solve 3(x-2)+4=19, I’m going to have to think about it a bit longer, and my answer will probably be something like “I think it’s 7?” (Apparently it is- I asked chatGPT 😉). The person that I’m talking to in the first example is likely to feel very confident in my first answer, but probably not so much in my second one- and they certainly aren’t going to rely on it to make any big decisions without checking it themselves first.

So how does this apply in ‘attraction of money’ scenarios?

Lets look at sales situations: If I’m confident I know my stuff and expect to be able to help solve people’s problems, when they talk to me they’ll pick up on that and they’re going to trust me and probably make certain decisions confidently based on what I’ve told them. However if I’m not confident or sure of my answers, then it’s likely they’re not going to be sure either- they’re probably going to take some time to assess it some more, and if they’re still not sure, then the default decision is likely to be ‘no’, because the safest option for most people is to stay with what they know. Joining the dots between confidence and expectation: if I’m confident in giving my answer because I feel I know all the information that will be relevant to someone’s decision and am confident that it’s in their best interests, I’m going to expect that they’ll say yes to what I’m offering them- because why wouldn’t they? All my body language is going to convey that I know what I’m talking about and that I believe this is the best solution for them. My tone and my words are going to line up with this, and so that person is much more likely to say yes to me than if I wasn’t confident and wasn’t expecting them to say yes. (More relevant science stuff: communication is 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, and only 7% of words spoken.)

Back to the RAS.

There are certain situations where we’re going to have a higher probability of success than others. Once we’ve identified what the common factors are that marks something as likely to be more successful (even if it’s only subconsciously by our RAS), and we’ve identified it as what we truly want**, our RAS is going to ‘scan the room’ for those factors- in reality thanks to our RAS we’re probably not even going to notice the ones that don’t make the cut! We’re then going to approach those ‘higher likelihood of success’ situations with confidence, expecting that they’re going to end up with the result that we truly want, and once we get a yes our confidence gets greater, our expectation is higher, our RAS is fine-tuned even further and on and on we go to greater and greater levels of success!

Now tell me, if you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes does that look like you just ‘manifested’ all this success?

So I really hope that resonates with you and helps you in some way- there’s a hell of a lot more that’s probably relevant that I haven’t gone into for the sake of keeping this as simple as possible but if you have any thoughts or other bits of information I’d genuinely love to hear them, because I’m confident I’m onto something here!😉

*I haven’t done that myself of course, I’ve just heard of people doing it- I mean, that’s cheating after all, and who does that? Not me, definitely not…

** there’s a whole other can of worms that could be opened up here and I don’t have the space to go into it now but suffice it to say that what someone thinks/says they want can be very different from what they truly want at a subconscious level. For the process to work as I’m describing it here I’m using the assumption that someone truly wants the outcome that they want more of, but if you want to read a good article on why someone might be wanting an outcome but subconsciously self-sabotaging their own efforts to get it, here’s one I found that has some great information: https://www.calm.com/blog/self-sabotaging .