Somewhere in the year 2000, my sister Nora called me and asked me if I had read this book.

Funny, I told her, a friend of mine had just recommended this same book the day earlier. I had never heard of it and it had a funny title. 

Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings by Lynn Grabhorn.

Before I had a chance to pick it up, within the week, a third person mentioned it to me, and so I was eager to discover what this book was to teach me.

I found that the message of the book — that how you feel determines what you create in your life –resonated with me deeply. While I have a powerful logical mind, I never really felt comfortable letting my mind guide my decisions. In my experience, this strategy would work, but only for a while. Eventually, I’d hit the brick wall, the dead end, the place where I’d be asking myself, “How in the world did I end up here?”

And at this point, I would make some radical change. A move. A break-up. A break-up and a move. A change in my career focus. But I’d notice that whatever direction I went in next, I would choose something that felt better. To me.

Very often this new direction would not make “sense.” It usually did not conform to the prevailing logic. Sometimes a well-intentioned person would try to talk me out of it. Often the short term costs were high. But inside, when I let my feelings guide me, I never felt more certain. And the little rebel in me liked leaving the system and exploring. I felt alive.

So trusting my feelings? Yeah, I could do that.

As I dove deeper in the book, I saw that many of the philosophies here were ones that had come to me naturally. And in fact, my coaching practice was just starting to take off and I began sharing my thoughts about living well in a newsletter. 

The book was not life changing (I did not love the writing style), but it provided a launching point for my study of the Law of Attraction. I eventually found my way to one of the primary sources of this information, the teachings of Abraham. 

I immersed myself in this study. While I loved it, I thought it might be too New Agey or Woo Woo for some people. After all, I had been trained as a social scientist. My late advisor was a brilliant man and highly respected in the field of social psychology and I had been taught that the truth lie in the data, the analysis. The truth was what the numbers said the truth was. While I never fully bought into that system of belief, some of those ideas had taken root.

As a result, I spent much of my time studying the quantum physics of attraction — the science behind it all. I would be the one to PROVE this to everyone. I would gather all this scientific information and write a book about it! Looking back, while the study of the physics was interesting, my focus on defending my belief in the Law of Attraction really reflected my own doubts. 

At the time, Thomas J. Leonard was still alive and the driving visionary in the coaching world (I beleive that the field has yet to recover from his death). Everything he created seemed to have a “Ville” attached to it (Coachville, EzineVille, etc…), emphasizing the power and leverage of being in charge of a community. 

One day I felt a hit of inspiration and looked up the domain name “Attractionville” and yes, it was available. (It seemed like 90% of the time when I had an idea like this, Thomas had already bought the domain name).

By this point I had been writing about Attraction and my experiences for a while and I found that most people resonated with the concept as well. Or they unsubscribed from my newsletter, I suppose. As awareness of attraction seeped into the coaching community and personal development world, people began to call me, wanting to hire me as their “Attraction Coach.” (For all of you coaches who feel the pressure to find your niche, my $.02 is to hold the intention and have your niche find you.)

By 2003, I had launched Attractionville as a community site where for people to connect and talk about Attraction. Over the course of a few years, I held many hours of classes on Attraction and gathered a good stash of resources (ebooks, audios, and videos). Like the majority of people out there, I was doing my best to take Abraham’s information and channel it through my own voice and experiences. 

Attractionville had several hundred members, but a serious design flaw. All roads led back to me. I was the web designer, tech support when someone lost their password, class leader, class designer, head coach… The pressure from setting things up this way eventually burnt me out as I felt like I had to deliver all the time. (Had social networking technology been available at the time, I think this would have been tremendously helpful, but my wounds were all self-inflicted). So after a few years, Attractionville had run its course for me (there’s still lots of great material there that I’m quite proud of, but I’m not sure quite what to do with it now…) and I watched a couple people with similar inspiration (like Bob Doyle) really run with the concept and do a much better job with technology and marketing than I did.

In a nutshell, everything was cool. I had found my niche, had a full practice of clients, was being asked to speak (I did a keynote on Attraction at the Coachville conference in Orlando). Just like that, The Law of Attraction was the zeitgeist in personal development and I was one of the leading experts.

And then, just like with the book Excuse Me, I started getting all these e-mails…

(Next: Riding the Wave)