05. The Law of Correspondence

Under the Laws of Life

Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world; it corresponds with your dominant patterns of thinking.

This is an extraordinary principle. It explains most happiness and unhappiness, most success and failure, most greatness and meanness in life. After years of study in this area, I still stand in awe before this powerful law, like standing and looking out over the vastness of the Grand Canyon.

Just think! Your outer world reflects your inner world in every way. Nothing can happen to or for you in the long term until it corresponds to something inside of you. If you want to change or improve anything in your life, you must begin by changing the inner aspects of your mind.

Sometimes this correspondence is called the "mental equivalent." Your greatest responsibility in life is to create within yourself the mental equivalent of what you want to experience on the outside. The fact is that you cannot achieve a goal on the outside until you have first created it on the inside.

It is as though your life is a 360-degree mirror. Wherever you look, there you are. Your relationships, for example, always reflect back to you the kind of person you are on the inside. Your attitude, your health, and your material conditions are a reflection of the way you think most of the time.

This is hard for most people to accept. Most people think that the problems in their lives are caused by other people and external circumstances. They are shocked and angered to be told that they are the primary architects of everything that happens to them. They want others to change. They want the world to change. But they do not want to change themselves.

The Law of Correspondence is a foundation principle of virtually all religions and schools of thought. It is really great news. It is the key to personal freedom and happiness. It is the high road to great success and fulfillment.

You can control only one thing in the world, and that is the way you think. However, when you take complete control over your thinking, you take control over all the other aspects of your life. By thinking and talking only about what you want, and by refusing to think or talk about what you don’t want, you become the architect of your own destiny.

How you can apply this law immediately:

1. Look around you for examples of where your outer world of experience is a reflection of your inner world of thought, emotion, and belief. How does your current situation in your business or career reflect your innermost attitudes and convictions toward your company, your coworkers, your products and services, your customers, and your goals? Be honest.

2. Begin today to build the consciousness, the mental equivalent, on the inside of the life you want to enjoy on the outside. Visualize and imagine that your business and career were perfect in every respect. What changes do you need to make in your thinking to create your inner world in such a way that it is consistent with what you want to experience on the outside?

Summary

All the business laws you will learn in this book are logical extensions of the Law of Cause and Effect, combined with the Laws of Belief, Expectations, Attraction, and Correspondence. They contain a single message: If you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life.

And since there is no limit to how much better you can think, there is no real limit to how much better your life can be. It’s totally up to you.

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).