“It’s like magic, I am getting pulled towards my goals by an almost invisible force,” said Valita (not her real name) in our when she came to me as a leadership coach in London.

Robert Fritz in his best-selling work, The Path of Least Resistance, shows a model of how to pull yourself towards your goals in a way that becomes natural. This natural pull is the Path of Least Resistance but it is certainly not a passive state where you lie back and get pulled towards the goal.

In fact, actions and ideas come to you in how to take the next step, which may not make any logical sense with our limited conscious processing ability, but which the powerful unconscious mind will know are key steps to getting you towards the goal.

Patterns

Basically, there are two patterns and he focuses on two structural patterns. The oscillating pattern and the advancing pattern.

The oscillating pattern is where there are two forces that are pulling you in different directions. When you are closer to one of the forces, it starts to relax and the other force gets stronger pulling you back. A physical example is a rocking chair.

Example

For a leadership example, the goal of “I want to work hard” could be one force, and the belief of “I don’t have the capacity” could be another opposing force. When you are working hard the first force is satisfied and so eases off and the other force starts to take over. When you are inactive, the second force is satisfied and softens so the other force gets stronger. You, therefore, get into a pattern of working hard and inactivity which makes no rational sense but make structural sense with these two forces.

The aim, therefore, is to move into an advancing pattern. Here we take one of the approaches as outlined in the best leadership book. The law of attraction approach is to simply choose it. “I choose to work hard”. Repeat this mantra to reinforce the force towards the goal that you want to get to. I ask my clients such as Valita to repeat for 10 to 30 minutes the first week then for a few seconds on a daily basis. When the opposing forces arise, as they will, then something like an awareness process can help release these as usually their power comes from the fact that they are hidden.

So your aim as a leader is to increase the pull towards the goal, or as Robert Fritz would say, move into an advancing structure.