Recently I watched a really great interview with lottery winner Cynthia Stafford.
In 2004, Cynthia Stafford decided that she wanted to win the lottery and began using conscious manifesting techniques to achieve this. In 2007, she won $112 million on the lottery which she attributes to her persistence in manifesting.
I love manifesting stories from people who achieved big success, mainly so I can learn from their experience.
You can get the lessons by watching the whole interview above, but if like me you’re not really a fan of watching videos, in this article I’ve summed up the main points that I took from this interview that can in fact be applied to any manifestation.
Lesson #1: Manifesting Techniques
In the interview, Stafford tells how she began her manifesting journey by reading Joseph Murphy’s book The Power of the Subconscious Mind. (Joseph Murphy was also trained in the Law of Assumption by Neville Goddard’s teacher & I highly recommend his book The Power of the Subconscious Mind.)
She says she used the following techniques to manifest her win:
- She wrote her intention down (essentially, she set a written intention)
- She made a vision board and looked at it daily
- She used affirmations
- She often visualised herself holding the lottery cheque, and she felt how it felt to win. She even visualised the exact amount she was going to win (which she did in fact win), which makes it even clearer that this was not a lucky fluke!
- She “got into the vibration of being a winner” as she put it — essentially, she created a new self who had won the lottery, and she became it (I have an article on that technique here.)
In my opinion, the manifesting techniques that you use are not that important. The main thing is that the techniques you choose are ones that appeal to you, and that you enjoy using.
You can find a list of manifesting techniques for manifesting any intention here.
Lesson #2: Persistence
Since it took Stafford 3 years to manifest that lottery win, there was clearly a lot of persistence involved in her manifesting process.
She said she trained like an Olympic athlete long term to remain in the state of the wish fulfilled of having won the lottery, on a daily basis.
I find this the most valuable lesson of all from her interview.
What I took from this is that if you have a big intention, you can expect to do a lot of inner work that may even take you years.
What kinds of intentions count as big intentions?
- Releasing “dis-eases” that you’ve had for a long time or which are deeply entwined with your story about yourself and your life
- Manifesting large sums of money
- Manifesting big success in your career, especially if you’re just starting out
You can expect these kinds of intentions to take a while…sometimes, but not always.
Lesson #3: You’ve got to want it for the right reasons
In order to be motivated enough to consciously manifest an outcome like this over a period of 3 years, you have to really want it and your reasons need to be powerful ones.
One of Cynthia Stafford’s reasons for wanting to win the lottery was because she had been given custody of several children of a family member, and then she had lost custody of them because of an assessment made by a social worker that the children would be better off in foster care, which Stafford disagreed with. In order to get the children back, she would have had to spend large amounts of money on a lawyer, which she didn’t have.
It sounded to me like a large part of her reason for wanting to win was to get the children back and have the means to look after them.
Her intention seemed to be about love. Personally I feel that this would have had a lot to do with her success.
People who want to win the lottery because they hate their job and hate their lives are unlikely to be successful. This is because of the law of karma.
Let me give you an example of this.
Let’s say that you are renting a house. The landlord asks you if you’d like to renew your lease for another year. You’ve had an awful time with rental properties in the past – every time you get settled, the landlord either decides they want to move back in, or the lease isn’t renewed for some other reason. You have children and pets, and moving with your kids and pets in tow is traumatic each time. Maybe you’ve moved your kids several times already in their short lives. So, when you renew your lease out of fear and trauma because you hate moving and don’t want to move again, the consequences of that will be that you create more things to be fearful about, when it comes to your living situation.
But if you decide to renew the lease because you’d like more stability in your life — you know you deserve that and you’re embodying stability in the way you live — you will create more of that stability when you decide to renew your lease.
So, whatever energies we’re focused on and dealing in, is what we will see more of.
If you make a choice out of fear, you will create more fear. If you make a choice out of hating your job, you will create more of hating your job.
We reap what we sow.
So, this is something to bear in mind. If you want to win the lottery because you hate your life and you want to escape it, you’re less likely to be successful.
Instead I recommend working on creating a life you love. Then you will be able to come at the intention of manifesting a lottery win with more likelihood of winning.
I also find that sometimes people want to win the lottery because they perceive that it would solve a bunch of problems for them (such as hating their job and needing to buy a house.)
But often it’s easier and quicker just to find another intention and work on manifesting that. So, if you work long hours in an uninspiring job with a boss you hate, manifest work that you enjoy for 30 hours per week, with a great boss, or being your own boss. (I have a free guide to the Law of Assumption here, which teaches you how to manifest intentions like these.)
Then once you’ve manifested work you enjoy, you can work on manifesting owning your own home. This will be much quicker and easier than manifesting a lottery win.
So, that’s just something to think about if you have a life you don’t enjoy.
Let’s get back to the other lessons we can learn from Cynthia Stafford’s story:
Lesson #4: Faith
Cynthia Stafford came from a Christian background and was a woman of faith.
She really believed she was going to win the lottery — her belief was so strong that she even interviewed financial advisors to help her manage the money, before she won!
In the interview, she quoted a Bible passage that had inspired her:
“For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.“ (Matthew 17:20-21).
Every time Cynthia Stafford didn’t win the lottery, she would tell herself “maybe not this time, but it will happen”. She didn’t get discouraged and she didn’t deviate from that sense of faith she had that she was going to win the lottery.
I don’t believe that total faith in your power as a creator is 100% necessary to manifest an intention (after all, the Law of Assumption is at work all of the time, whether we know it or not.) But having said that, I do think that faith can really super-charge our intentions and allow us to persist in our desires.
(If you’re a beginner and you’d like to build your faith in the Law of Assumption, try out Neville Goddard’s ladder exercise.)
Lesson #5: Feeding the mind with positive things
Stafford mentioned that she made it her job to feed her mind with positive information, and she read inspiring books about manifestation regularly to help her keep the faith.
If you are currently using the Law of Assumption to manifest an outcome in your life, and you don’t yet own a copy of either Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind or Neville Goddard’s Complete Reader, you need to get onto that.
I read a few pages of Neville Goddard’s work every night before I go to sleep. There is huge power in his words and the stories he shares in his work and any Law of Assumption student and conscious manifestor needs to be reading one of those books. Just reading my blog or watching someone’s Law of Assumption YouTube channel isn’t enough. It should be an add on to those works written by Goddard or Murphy.
Another great book to read is Frederick Dobson’s book Parallel Universes of Self.
Lesson #6: She reached the Sabbath
Stafford mentioned in the interview that after having used techniques to manifest her lottery win for a while, she stopped using them, and didn’t think as much about her desire to win the lottery. It sounds to me like she entered the Sabbath, a state that many conscious creators get to once they know their manifestation is on the way. You can read more about the Sabbath (and how to know you’ve reached it) here.
Lesson #7: Self-concept is important
I added this point a few months after I published this article because I found out that Cynthia Stafford (like many lottery winners) later went bankrupt and had to rebuild from scratch.
What can we learn from this part of her story?
We know from Neville Goddard’s work that your reality reflects your self-concept.
As within, so without — whoever you believe yourself to be, is what manifests in your external reality.
To manifest a large sum of money, Cynthia Stafford would have convinced herself that she was an extremely lucky lottery winner.
What she didn’t manage to convince herself of is that she was someone who was great at managing money and a long-term wealthy person.
It looks like she focused on the former (being the lucky lottery winner) but not the latter (being the wealthy person.)
Either that, or she had something in her subconscious mind or energy field that she was still unaware of, and which was emitting poverty and cancelling out her intention to remain wealthy.
This is the main problem with how many people these days are using the Law of Assumption. Most do not know the unfavourable ‘stories’ their subconscious mind contains. Most are using affirmations to “mow over a weed” in their “lawn” every day or every week. This means they are using affirmations to neutralise their long-term negative beliefs. Living that way is exhausting and it’s not how I teach people to use the Law of Assumption.
Using affirmations can be great, but not when people have limiting beliefs and they are not doing the work to pull those beliefs out at the root.
So, my experience with the Law of Assumption community is that not many people are pulling the weeds up at the root.
The subconscious mind often contains negative beliefs that come from childhood (which in turn often come from past lives.) If you’re just putting new favourable stories into your subconscious mind, but you also have negative stories, you’re just treading water. You’re not going anywhere. The two will be cancelling each other out.
In that scenario, you will need to do some inner work to pull out the weeds, so to speak. You may need to revise, or consider other forms of deep inner work.
Some people need to do deep inner work to manifest, and others don’t.
My guess is that Cynthia Stafford was someone who needed that kind of inner work but failed to do it. She was still living out an old story of poverty, even after she won.
Here are some articles which go into that further:
- How to revise (in my opinion this is the best way to remove limiting beliefs)
- How to work out whether you need deep inner work to remove negative beliefs as part of your manifesting process (this long article goes into the topic of karma) — this is something many people in the Law of Assumption community often do not address, to their detriment. It is the number 1 reason people struggle long term to create what they want and hold onto it.
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