Five Keys for Magickal Success

Currently, I am in Irvine, California, assisting in a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) training. NLP is a set of tools that will allow you to communicate better with yourself (between the conscious and subconscious mind) as well as communicate better with others in order to achieve ecological goals. For the purposes here, ecology means good for me, good for you, good for the community.

One of the things being taught here is The Five Principles of Success. It occurred to me that these would work very well to encourage magickal success, too. Here they are:

1) Know Your Outcome
By outcome is meant “goals,” and in the context of this blog it means make the goal of your magick as specific as possible. I discussed one way of developing ideal goals for magick in my post from 2009. To read it click on this LINK. One thing I would add is focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. In other words, if you want greater health, focus on how you would like things to be when you are healthy; don’t have a goal of “not wanting to be ill.”

2) Take action
Plan out and perform your spell or ritual. Some people spend days or weeks agonizing over and planning what they’re going to do. This can lead to the “paralysis of analysis,” where you spend all your time analyzing what you want to do rather than doing it! Here’s a truth that is important: neither you nor I nor anyone else will ever design the perfect ritual or spell. But we can do the best we can with the knowledge and training we have. Seek to do your best and do it!

3) Have Sensory Acuity
One you have completed your ritual or spell, pay attention! Are you moving closer to your goal or are you getting farther away from it? Use your senses to determine this. If the magic seems to be working and thing are moving in the direction of achieving your goal, let it work. If it’s not working, cancel the effect of the magick. You can use a ritual that simply cancels what you originally performed.

4) Have Behavioral Flexibility
Doing a ritual because it’s in a book or someone told you to do it even though you have learned that the darn thing doesn’t work for you is foolish. Many people fail at magick because they merely repeat what others have done and continue to repeat it even though it just doesn’t work (for them). There is a saying that a sign of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different outcome. I like to think none of you reading this are insane, so show some flexibility! If something doesn’t work for you try something else. Learn from the lack of success and redesign the magick so it will succeed. Even if you don’t achieve the desired goal from performing a spell, it’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it and just give up. So don’t give up and don’t blindly repeat what doesn’t work. Instead, figure out why something didn’t work and change your ritual so it will work.

5) Operate from a Physiology and Psychology of Excellence
This is somewhat fancy language to take the attitude of Chaos magicians who say, “Fake it ’till you make it.” If you don’t believe you’re entitled to the goal (psychology) or that your magick won’t work (physiology—you don’t physically do the magick) there are two possible outcomes. Either you won’t achieve your goal (the magick didn’t work) or you can’t reach your goal (you never even do the magick).

Assume that it will work.
Believe that it will work.
Act like it has worked.
It    will work.

What do you do to
assure yourself of magickal success?!