I left you the last time in Part I with a discussion regarding “purpose” that talks about the importance of finding your purpose before you can live it. This next discussion is about my favorite subject in regards to wealth and abundance, and it will take some out of the box thinking. So, sit back, relax and take your brain out of gear and park your mind in the limitless possibilities of ‘intentions’.

Before we talk about intentions, I would like to discuss how we arrive at our decisions about our intentions. Have you ever thought about how strong negative associations are? Have you ever wondered why they can cause such havoc in our lives? In an article in Life Science, it states that “emotions are embedded in our brain when it comes to making decisions”. Wow! So emotions rule the brain. That’s important. In other words, how stongly I ‘feel’ about something will influence the decisions I make, regardless of what is logical. What does this mean to someone who is looking to create wealth and abundance in life? Read on and you’ll find out…

In a brain-imaging study reported in a USA Today article, subjects were posed with a gambling opportunity framed in two different ways. One group was told they could keep 40% of the money or gamble. The other group was told they could lose 60% of the money or gamble. Even though the odds were identical, those who were told they could keep 40%, gambled 43% of the time. Those who were told they could lose 60%, gambled 62% of the time. The volunteers who were more susceptible to the framing effect of ‘losing’ money gambled more even though the odds were the same. And what was signficant about this group is that there was greater activity in an emotion- and learning-related brain region called the amygdala. People most immune to this framing effect of ‘losing money’ had increased activity in other brain regions, the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex.

What was interesting about this study is that when people were thinking about ‘losing’ money, the activity in the brain that deals with these types of emotions flared significantly. The emotion tied to this flaring was strong and therefore, the reaction was strong….more gambling.

Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California, was quoted in this article as saying “that people who lack emotions because of brain injuries often have difficulty making decisions at all. Since the brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, these are what drive people’s choices in life.” Think about this in your life. Does the fear of not being successful or ‘losing’ money, drive you? Could it be that whenever we ‘think’ of it, the activity of that part of the brain, the amygdala, flares up and encourages the activity of being ‘without’ money? So as long we keep thinking about ‘without’ money, we create the reality of it. Does it actually drive our behavior as in the gambling study?

If this is true, then what about the opposite? What if we stopped thinking of losing money but instead, thought only of making money? If our every thought in the day is about how successful we are and how much money we’ll make, then the part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that deals with this positive emotion lights up and influences our decisions in a positive manner. The decisions we make based on this positive association will drive our behavior in the direction of the positive emotion. These decisions, or ‘intentions’ as I like to call them, will create our reality.

Let’s go a little deeper. What I have observed in life is that most people don’t know what they want — but they sure do know what they don’t want. The unfortunate reality of life is that most people are unable to formulate positive outcomes and are victims to their own negative ‘framing’, just as in the gambling study. Some of the participants who were aware of the identical odds and their decision-making said, “I know, I just couldn’t help myself”. Perhaps it was because they were lazer focused on what they didn’t want, losing money, as opposed to what they did want.




Most people, when asked to describe what they don’t like about their life, can give great detail about what they want to be rid of or what they don’t like. This is because they have a very strong emotion (they can’t help themselves) associated with the negative condition and this is what their brain reacts to. Most people may not have even thought about what they do want being so preoccupied with what they don’t want. It could be theorized that maybe our species survived by being able to keenly identify negative conditions in the environment and avoid them at all costs.

But in order to live a life of wealth and abundance, it involves more than just surviving. It involves making positive choices regarding decisions about how we want to live our life. These decisions lead to ‘intentions’. I like to think of the ‘decisions’ as the rudder of our sail boat and the ‘intentions’ as the wind.

In my next article, we will talk about how we can create intentions that literally lead to wealth and abundance. See you then.

Have you read Part One and the Intro to this article? If not here are the links:

Intro
Part One

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