Give Your Business Direction by Harnessing the Power of Pre-Paving

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Does it sometimes feel as though your business isn’t going how you’d like it to?

In such cases, we can feel out of control and powerless.

That’s why I’m such a big believer in the law of attraction to create success. I’ve been using it for over 7 years now and have seen amazing results from it.

Here’s the central problem: when your business goes in a direction you don’t like, you react negatively to it.

That’s natural, of course. We have (or should have, at least) a clear vision for what we want, and when things veer off-track, it’s normal to get frustrated.

But the problem is that this can easily lead into a negative cycle.

Your business produces results you don’t like, so you get frustrated or discouraged. That discouragement attracts other sub-par results, which just feeds back into your frustration and the cycle continues.

If you want to break that cycle (or prevent it in the first place), you need to take control.

You need to decide the results you want to get, and pre-pave your business to produce those results.

What Is Pre-Paving?

Pre-paving is basically turning the above process on its head. Instead of your business producing results and you emotionally reacting to those results, you set the tone emotionally by deciding how you want to feel, and your business (and life in general) reflects those feelings back to you.

Are you not getting as many clients as you’d like? Instead of getting discouraged, and then creating a whole story about how people won’t pay you for what you do, or how the economy is bad now so people can’t afford it, or any number of other things you might tell yourself, you decide you’d like to be having more clients.

You think about how that’d feel. What would a business with more clients be like? Would it give you extra freedom? The satisfaction of doing what you love? The enjoyment of getting paid more and even being able to pay yourself?

Every time you notice your business isn’t doing as well as you’d like, you deliberately return to the vision of how you want things to be instead.

And pretty soon, reality will shift to match that vision. The clients will start to come in. You’ll feel that freedom, satisfaction, enjoyment.

How I Recently Did This by Accident

Recently I was looking at my mailing list and wishing I had more subscribers. I’ve not yet been focusing on it a lot, so haven’t been getting too many subscribers.

I had managed to get about 70 or so subscribers from a previous business’s audience who followed me over to Possible Promise — but other than that, it was stagnating.

I thought to myself, “I’d really love to have 100 subscribers.”

Now I said above this was accidental because I wasn’t meaning to pre-pave. I didn’t think there was any way 100 subscribers could be possible, until I really focused seriously on growing my list, which I just wasn’t inspired to do yet.

It was just a number I thought I’d be happy with as a short-term goal. Since I didn’t think it was possible though, I just let it go.

A few times, when I saw the size of the list, I just thought about how it’d be cool to get to 100 subscribers, and then I’d let it go. Again, none of this was on purpose.

Fast forward about a month and I just so happened to check my list. And how many subscribers did I have? No joke, exactly 100.

I think it worked so easily because I wasn’t attached to it. I didn’t even think it could happen, but nor was I very upset about it. I wasn’t really emotionally invested either way. It was just something that’d be cool if it happened, but my happiness wasn’t hanging on it.

That’s really the best way to do it, but I fully acknowledge that’s hard for the things we really care about. For some things, our happiness really does seem to hang on the outcome, so it’s a bit “stickier”, if you will.

What If You’re Attached?

I have tons of stories just like this that I could probably fill a book with. The point is, it works. Pre-paving is a great strategy for quickly getting the results you desire from your business.

The question is, what do you do when you are attached to the results, so it’s all the more upsetting when it’s not going your way?

It’s hard to cover this in one post, because that, in a nutshell, is the whole work of the law of attraction. But I can give a few brief tips.

1. Stop Complaining

The first thing to do is to try to not complain.

It’s important to acknowledge how you feel and be OK with that, but don’t get stuck in it.

Some people just complain endlessly about how things are so bad, why that’s to be expected, and all the reasons why it will never change. And of course, they aren’t surprised when things continue to go badly for them.

You have to turn things around, but it’s hard when negative momentum has you in its grasp. But if you keep complaining, you’ll only increase that momentum even more.

When you make a deliberate effort to reduce your complaining, you stop giving so much energy to those unwanted results, so they will start to fade away.

2. Find the Silver Lining

One thing that helps to turn around that momentum is to find the silver lining. Things are bad, but find a reason why it’s not as bad as you thought — or maybe it might even in some way be a good thing.

Don’t deceive yourself here. You want to find something that actually feels true to you, not some empty platitude. When I was trained in NLP, they called this reframing: finding a different way to look at the situation that is more empowering yet still rings true to you.

Here’s an example. When I was first introducing my bookkeeping services, it took a few months to get my first client. I of course wanted the clients to come flooding in, but instead I had just the one solitary client at first.

But after a while, I realized I was actually glad I hadn’t received a flood of clients up-front. I was still building my confidence with QuickBooks and bookkeeping in general, and had I received a bunch of clients early on, I would have been overwhelmed. Instead, I had a month or so to get used to how things worked, and then when I felt more confident, more clients started coming in.

Had I instead gotten frustrated and focused on how hard it was to get new clients, I’m sure things would have gone very differently.

3. Build the Confidence That Things Are Always Working Out for You

This might be hard at first, but after doing this for several years, I’ve built the confidence that things are always working out for me. I know that when I stop focusing on the negative so much, things start to naturally work out in my favor.

Now it’s almost become an expectation, which gives it even more power and certainty.

I’ve been in situations where I had no idea how it could possibly work out. When things used to be particularly bad, before I even knew about the LOA, there were times when I literally didn’t know how we’d have enough money to get through the month. I’d say to the Universe, “OK, I don’t know how you’ll work this one out, but you always do, so do your thing” — and it always did. Money would show up almost miraculously, in the nick of time.

When I look back at my life, I see that everything has been perfectly orchestrated for my happiness. Again, I could fill a book with stories of all the ways things have worked out miraculously for me. If that’s been the case up to this point, then it will continue being the case, even if I don’t always see it in the moment.

You have to have the confidence that you’re meant to be on your path. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have the desire you do. And that means, if you just let go and trust, things will automatically start working out for you.

It’s fun to get more deliberate, and pre-paving is a great process to do exactly that. But when things are going wrong and you don’t know which way is up, just letting go and trusting is the most powerful way to turn things around.

Decide What You Want to Be True

The point with all this is that you have to stop reacting to life, and start proactively setting the tone of what you want instead.

If you don’t like how things are going, don’t just take it, and especially don’t complain about not having any choice. It’s up to you to change it.

And you change it not through a lot of hard work and effort, but through deciding how you want your results to feel, and feeling that way now.

This is the essence of pre-paving.

Where do you want to be in a year from now? What results do you want your business to be producing? Feel that now, and the perfect path to making it happen will reveal itself.

The sky is the limit. Anything you want is possible, provided the desire is authentic and inspired.

This isn’t limited to the big things, either. You can use this on a day-to-day basis.

• Does a task feel overwhelming? Stop, recenter yourself, and decide how you want it to go instead.
• Is a client not respecting your boundaries? Take a step back and feel what it’d be like to have a better relationship with that client.
• Are you nervous about meeting with a prospect? Before going into the meeting, feel how it’d be for them to be receptive to what you have to offer.

You can use this for anything and everything. The more you remember to let your intentional feelings lead the way, the better your results will be on every level.