I don’t care what your current financial situation is, what obstacles you might be facing or what challenges you have had to deal with in the past. Wherever you are, however much or little you have, you can change your life and your financial future beginning today.

Every person I have taught this system to has made more money. Some made a few hundred, some thousands, some millions, each according to their desire and willingness to change old habits and to try new things. More importantly, they have each experienced the greater freedom that comes with a rich mindset.

You will experience a way of living happily in the world no matter how much money you have. Simply follow my instructions and your life will begin to change for the better. In fact, you won’t be able to stop yourself; once your mind is directed towards wealth, it begins to have a domino effect, creating positive changes in your life and the lives of the people around you.

I have spent a decade studying the outlook of people who have the rich mindset, people who are rich not just financially but in happiness, too. Entrepreneurs including Sir Richard Branson, Sir Philip Green, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Dame Anita Roddick are just a few of those who have given me their time and answered questions that reveal their innermost beliefs and strategies for success. This dream team’s insights have helped to shape my system. Now they can help you, too.

Making money is just a skill but becoming rich is an art. This system is about both the skill of making money and the art of becoming rich.

HOW TO THINK RICH

Eighty years ago, one of the richest men in the world was the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. He was convinced that he had discovered the real secret of creating wealth and commissioned a reporter named Napoleon Hill to interview 400 of the richest people to see if they, too, had used this secret to create their fortunes. Hill spent the next 20 years meeting up with nearly every person on the list and discovered that, without fail, they had followed the same simple blueprint for wealth. The secret that Carnegie and all the great achievers used to create riches in their lives was simply this: all wealth is created with the human mind.

I often hear people say that the rich are just lucky, or that they work harder, or they are dishonest, but the truth is much simpler: the difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have learnt to recognise the value of their thoughts. There is a huge difference between people who “think rich” and those who “think poor”. “Rich thinkers” will be rich regardless of the size of their bank balance; they will always be living life on their terms. If they are temporarily low on cash, they won’t be for long, and they somehow always seem to find a way to do what they want to do in their lives.

“Poor thinkers”, on the other hand, may have big houses and wear fancy clothes, but their heads are filled with fears about the future and mistrust of those around them. Because they don’t know that they would be all right even if all their money disappeared, they are forced to try continually to protect what they have or to grab more from others.

Rich thinkers are not necessarily the best educated or the most gifted people you will meet, though some of them are; they simply think differently about money from most of society. They realise that making money is neither a mysterious process nor a cosmic reward; it is just a skill, such as learning to juggle or riding a bike.

Once you have mastered that skill you will be able to make money wherever you are and whatever is going on in the world around you. This is the first key to your success – recognising that your riches are not in some far-off place but that they are inside your mind.

REPROGRAMMING FOR WEALTH

There are only two primary ways we make sense of the world: consciously and unconsciously. Your conscious mind is the mind that you actively and deliberately think with all day long. The unconscious mind is your larger mind. It can process millions of messages of sensory information every single second and contains all of your wisdom, memories and intelligence. It is the source of your creativity and perhaps, most importantly for our purposes here, it stores and runs all the “programs” of automatic behaviour that you use to live your life.

Sometimes we need to upgrade our old, outdated programs if we want to change and upgrade our lives. Until your unconscious mind is programmed for wealth, nothing you learn, know or do will make any difference in the long run. You cannot overcome your unconscious programming with logical arguments or even hard work. It is only through the creative application of your imagination that you will reprogramme your mind for wealth.

THE POWER OF FOCUS

One of the fundamental principles in my book is this: you get more of what you focus on. If you focus on poverty and lack, you will tend to get more of that in your life. If you focus on the wealth that you already have, you will tend to get more of that as well.

It’s vitally important to reprogramme your unconscious mind so that you are continually focused on what you want to create; in this case, greater financial abundance. As you begin to feel rich and see yourself as a wealthy person, you will watch your financial abundance grow. As you become richer in your thoughts, you will experience more and more freedom in your life.

This is not about “faking it”. Because people often define being rich as having a lot of money, they think the way to feel rich is to act like a millionaire. They buy expensive clothing and flash cars in an attempt to make themselves feel rich. This often backfires. You may feel rich pulling up to Royal Ascot in your rented Rolls-Royce, but how rich will you feel when the credit card bill arrives and you’ve no idea how you’ll pay it?

Forget faking it: it is by cultivating the internal experience of being rich that your rich life truly begins.

RICH MOMENTS

There are essentially two ways to do this. The first is by spotting what I call “rich moments”.

Stop for a moment and think about something in your life that brings you a sense of pleasure, satisfaction and meaning.

Did you think about someone you love? An activity you enjoy? A beautiful sunset? Your health? Most people are surprised that those things that bring the greatest sense of richness to their lives only rarely cost a lot of money.

Here are some of the rich moments I’ve had today that had nothing to do with money: listening to a CD I love that brings back happy memories; spending time with my friends; taking a walk in the park with my dog. We all have moments like this every day, it’s just that we are conditioned to ignore them. Make it your mission to find lots of areas of your life where you feel rich every day. Start by looking for anything that makes you more aware of the abundance and riches in your daily life. In those moments when you get pleasure from your work, buy something you like, give a donation to a favourite cause, or even walk into a restaurant knowing that you can afford to order anything you want, you are having the exact same internal experience as a billionaire.

The second way to create riches from the inside out is to create your own associational link to what it feels like to be living your highest values. When you are in connection with your highest values, you will think your richest thoughts and naturally be guided to take the actions that lead to outer riches.

© Paul McKenna 2007. Extracted from I Can Make You Rich (Bantam Press, £12.99), which is available from Times BooksFirst for £11.69: 0870 1608080