What is the Law of Attraction? How Does it Work?

Are you curious about the Law of Attraction? Do you wonder how does LOA work?

The Law of Attraction has been the reason for every success in human history but also every single failure.

It is a natural law which is constantly working in the background in all of our lives regardless of us consciously noticing it or not. But exactly, what is the law of attraction?

What Is the Law of Attraction?

Simply put, the law of attraction is the law of cause and effect – where our thoughts are the causes and our external experiences and conditions are the effects.

With a proper understanding of how the law of attraction works, we gain the power to influence and maximize our success, happiness, growth, and potential.

But let’s take a step back.

Does the Law of Attraction Work?

Consider this: Would the law of gravitation continue to have an impact on your life if you had not been taught about it in school?

Would the laws of motion still exist and influence the movement of all matter if Isaac Newton hadn’t discovered them?

Yes, they would continue to work and impact us in the same exact proportion as they always did. We are no more affected by the law of gravitation than we were three thousand years ago.

But, because we acknowledged those natural laws and studied the way that they operate, we enabled ourselves to fly beautiful aircraft weighing 300 tons, 30,000 feet in the air, and built cars powerful enough to reach 0-60mph in 2.5 seconds.

We acknowledged those laws, studied them, aligned our behavior with their operations, and used our knowledge of them to work with them in harmony to be able to do things we could have never imagined we could do.

The law of attraction requires of us, the same exact thing.

It continues to operate in our lives in the background. But once we learn how it operates, we can align ourselves to it, living with it in harmony – so that we can do things we could never have imagined.

 

How Does the Law of Attraction Work?

The law of attraction operates directly with your thoughts. It dictates that your external reality is a direct reflection of your internal reality.

Law of attraction is constantly taking the thoughts that you think and showing you a life experience corresponding to the nature of those thoughts.

The origin of every circumstance or situation in your current life has its roots in a thought pattern of yours from the past.

This is because the thoughts that you entertain on a consistent basis form opinions and beliefs, which become deeply embedded in your subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is where 95% of your cognitive activity is occurring throughout your day. This means that 95% of the decisions you make, the way you act, and the things that you do, are automatically determined by the subconscious mind – which is pre-programmed and directed to act a certain way by your deeply embedded thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.

As best selling author Brian Tracy describes it,

“Just as your conscious mind can be thought of as the gardener, planting seeds, your subconscious mind can be thought of as the garden, or fertile soil, in which the seeds germinate and grow.”

So if you’re generally a very positive and optimistic person and you often focus on positive thoughts such as happiness, gratitude, growth, and love, then your subconscious mind, working with the law of attraction will continue to attract to you, positive experiences and events.

But if you would identify yourself as a negative person, often entertaining thoughts of fear, anxiety, worry, or jealousy, then the law of attraction will continue to attract to you, experiences containing a similar vibrational frequency as those thoughts.

That is what your internal reality consists of. Your thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and emotions all come together to form your predominant mental attitude, which then determines the events, circumstances, results, and people that you will come across in your future.

Where Did the Law of Attraction Come From?

It Started With Mind Over Body

The law of attraction grew out of New Thought, a 19th-century American movement built on one big idea: your mind shapes your life.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a clockmaker and mental healer from Maine, is generally regarded as the founder of the New Thought movement. He believed illness started with mistaken beliefs, which meant the cure started in the mind too.

The Phrase Gets a Name

Most people credit the phrase to the 1870s. But historian Mitch Horowitz traced the first recorded use of the phrase back to 1855, in Andrew Jackson Davis’s The Great Harmonia.

A few decades later, Prentice Mulford became the first to lay it out as a principle for everyday life. He argued that your thoughts shape your health, your success, and your opportunities.

It Goes Mainstream

In 1906, William Walker Atkinson made it the centerpiece of his book Thought Vibration, built around the idea that like attracts like.

Four years later, Wallace Wattles applied it to money in The Science of Getting Rich.

The Secret Brings It to Millions

Then came 2006. Rhonda Byrne released The Secret as a film and then a book, and the law of attraction was suddenly everywhere. Oprah devoted two episodes to The Secret that year, and Byrne has said Wattles’s book inspired it.

7 Keys to Living the Law of Attraction

So what can you do about this?
How can you make sure that your behavior is properly aligned with the powerful law of attraction for your benefit?

Here are some daily practices you can implement right away to align yourself with the law of attraction and start seeing results.

 

#1. Start and End Your Day with Positive Thoughts

The subconscious mind is most easily influenced in the morning right after you wake up and at night right before you go back to sleep.

During this time, it is easiest to reprogram your subconscious mind by thinking positive, good feeling thoughts. Pick up a notebook and write anything positive that you are currently feeling in addition to all the things that happened during your day for which you are grateful.

Making this a daily practice will condition your brain to start seeking out positive aspects of your life instead of constantly focusing on what didn’t go right or according to plan.

 

#2. Be Appreciative of What Is

Learn to accept what currently is. Do not struggle with your current situation. Know that external situations and circumstances are never perpetual, they are constantly changing.

You carry the infinite potential to design your future any way that you want to. But first, you must learn to accept what is and be appreciative of it. Be thankful for what you are going through even if it is tough because it is going to teach you valuable lessons which will shape who you are in the future.

Additionally, be thankful for what is good in your life.

 

 

#3. Only Say “I Want” & “I Am” Statements

The law of attraction is inclusive. This means that it brings you more of what you focus on. So if you always find yourself saying things like “I don’t want to be overweight” or “I wish I wasn’t poor,” you are actually doing yourself a disservice.

You cannot escape your current situation of lack by focusing on lack. Instead, you must divert your focus towards abundance. For example, replace those statements with “I want to be healthy and fit” or “I want to be wealthy and abundant” or “I am healthy, wealthy, and successful.”

Every time you catch yourself saying “I don’t want this,” take a step back and ask yourself, “Okay I clearly do not want this, what is it that I do want?” This process is called pivoting. It was developed and is taught by the widely renowned law of attraction teacher Abraham Hicks and it will work wonders.

We are often blind to the fact that we so often focus on the things that we do not want. This only works against and gets us into a further mess.

Practicing pivoting will change your vibrational stance of focus from that of lack of abundance. “I want” and “I am” statements will help you visualize the good feeling you will get when you have what you want, rather than the lack of having it right now.

#4. Watch Your Focus

Us humans have a natural tendency to think negatively. So throughout your day, make a conscious effort to realize the balance of your thoughts and shift that balance from negative to positive. Set reminders on your phone if necessary.

Create a habit of constantly noticing your thought patterns. Become the observer of your thoughts and notice which thoughts you generally tend to focus on. This will be tough in the beginning because our minds are quite turbulent and it’s often hard to catch ourselves within thought.

But, every time that you bring your thoughts back under your conscious presence, you learn more about the activity of your mind, and through that knowledge, you gain stronger control over it.

 

#5. Visualize the Life You Want to Live for 20 Minutes a Day

Visualization is the act of creating vivid mental pictures in your imagination of what you want your future to look and feel like.

If you study any of history’s most successful individuals, what you will realize is that they were all absolute visionaries. They visualized their success clearly within their minds before it ever happened.

This is because your subconscious mind is designed to bring you towards the direction of the picture and feeling you continuously paint within your imagination. Think of your imagination as your workshop in which you will sculpt what you want your future to look like.

The clearer the image is, the clearer your results will be.

 

#6. Meditate Daily

Meditation accelerates the law of attraction because it is a great way to declutter your mental space. We live in a time during which we are constantly being bombarded with information through other people, advertisements, news, and especially social media.

This large amount of information causes a lot of mental turbulence which makes it difficult for us to focus on what really matters and to find peace of mind.

Setting aside time to meditate for just a few minutes each day will positively influence your mental focus and your behavior. You will gain a clearer perspective on what you need to do to attain your goals. Also, you will become more grounded and learn to properly respond to situations rather than mindlessly reacting to them.

 

#7. Expose Yourself to Positive Media & Positive People

I am sure you have heard of the saying, “You are the sum of the five people who you hang around the most.” Well, that is absolutely true.

But, it doesn’t stop there. Your thoughts, opinions, emotions, and beliefs are also constantly being influenced and affected by what kind of media you consume.

Remember, you want to flood your mental space with positive thoughts. To accomplish this, start to expose yourself only to those things that fuel your positivity and begin to cut out all the negatives.

For example, instead of watching the news inform you about how many murders or robberies occurred in your town last week, watch some TED Talks on YouTube.

In addition to that, surround yourself with people who are a positive influence in your life and spend less time with ones who provoke nothing but negative emotions within you.

The quickest way to become more positive and successful is to spend most of your time with people who are more positive and successful than you.

Best Law of Attraction Books

The more you educate yourself about the law of attraction, the better your understanding of its operation will become – and the more you will be able to leverage it to your benefit.

So listed below, I have listed three great books that have greatly influenced the way that I think and have given me amazing results.

• “Ask And It Is Given” by Esther & Jerry Hicks
• “Money And The Law Of Attraction: Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness” by Esther & Jerry Hicks
• “The Master Key System” by Charles F. Haanel

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What Is the Law of Attraction in Your Life?

It is the law of cause and effect; a natural law that cannot be challenged or altered. It will continue to impact your life even if you disregard it.

But once you gain a thorough understanding of its powerful operations and align your behavior to work with it in harmony, you will experience incredible power.

You will realize that thought is your greatest asset and that in its possession, there is absolutely nothing out there that is out of your reach.

This cause and effect equation is what determines the results we see in our life. You can change any effect you want, all you have to do is first tend to the cause.

If you build a beautiful inner reality, your outer reality will have no choice but to reflect it. This then means that you can be, do, or have anything that you desire. The only limitation is the one that you impose on yourself.

Always keep in mind that if you want to build a life of abundance, you can afford to only think thoughts of abundance.

Leave the rest to the law of attraction.

Ready to put all of this into practice? Start by turning big daydreams into real life.

Or if you’d rather keep your goals in front of you every day, here’s how to build a vision board you’ll actually use.

Last Updated on September 26, 2026

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