How women can gain power

According to The Wall Street Journal in 2011, “Women represent 40% of the world's labour force but hold just 1% of the world's wealth.”  These figures have since been disputed but however we juggle the statistics, we are still left with a huge gender wealth gap.

This is not new, throughout history the vast majority of wealth and power has always been in the hands of men.  Patriarchal religions claim it is the “will of god”, while more scientific men will claim it is just nature. Men are naturally more competitive than women and so of course they will end up with more of the wealth and power of our world.  

Women are also the child-carers and patriarchy claims that women should be looking after the children and home while the man earns a living.  Though this has changed nowadays with women trying to hold down a part-time job and look after her children at the same time.

So in our competitive patriarchal world, what can women do to change this and gain wealth and power?

Feminists have encouraged women to learn to be more competitive and some women are able to do this.  They have gained wealth and power by behaving like competitive men.  But although we have had famous and successful women throughout history they have always been a small minority.

One of the biggest obstacles for women is giving birth to children.  Successful career women either have to decide not to have children.  Or marry a rich man so she can afford a nanny. Marry a man who is willing to be a house-husband.  Or become superwoman and somehow manage a career and look after her children at the same time.

This all makes it very difficult for women to have successful careers. There has to be a better way.

The way women can gain wealth and power without having to compete directly against men is through positive thinking.  The problem is that we that we are told that this is all airy-fairy, and in the real world we have to work hard to gain money.  This would be wonderful if this was true, but this is not what happens in reality. 

Yes, it appeals to our sense of natural justice that the people who work the hardest get the most money.  Yet if we look around the world we tend to see that the people who work the hardest are the least rewarded.  There are billions of people who are working long hours every day and hardly get enough money to live on.  While we have billionaires who have loads of leisure time and never done a hard day’s work in their lives.

So how do people make vast amounts of money?  The most common way it is done is to, “to choose your parents wisely”.  In other words, the people with the most wealth in the world inherited it from their parents.  Most people born in poverty stay poor.  Very few poor people ever end up as billionaires.

So whatever way we look at it, the only way ordinary women can achieve great wealth and power is through positive thinking but how can they make it work?  Many people who buy positive thinking books start doing affirmation ten minutes a day and give up when nothing seems to change for the better.

The big problem with positive thinking is that we all have both positive and negative thoughts all the time.  So if we spend ten minutes a day using positive affirmations, it is only ten minutes compared with about 16 hours a normal person stays awake during the day. 

As many positive thinking books tell us, “we create our own reality” and we create our reality through every thought we think throughout the day and not just the ten minutes we have doing affirmations.  

So doubt in the whole process is the first hurdle we have to cross.  Positive thinking would be easy if we felt sure it works, we would just repeat positive affirmations all the time and patiently wait for the results.  But if we don’t have any faith in the process, we are looking for signs it is working and think negatively if we cannot see any progress.  So we end up stopping the progression with too much negative thinking.

Another problem with many positive thinking books is they don’t always agree with each other.  Some authors claim that positive thinking is only about motivation, to use affirmations to motivate us to go out and get things done.  Although this can help, it puts women back in the situation of still competing against men for wealth and power. Fortunately there are other books which completely disagree with this idea.

There are positive thinking books with titles like, “Life Was Never Meant to Be a Struggle”, By Stuart Wilde and “The Lazy Man's Way To Riches”, by Joe Karbo.  Books like this have a more laid-back attitude to positive thinking.

As mentioned before hard work and determination are not the ways to gain wealth and power.  Yes, it is natural for us to assume that the people who work the hardest will receive the most money, but this is not what happens in reality. 

So if we don’t have rich parents, how can we make lots of money?  Most of the time it seems through luck, being in the right place at the right time.  Yet, many positive thinking authors will claim it is not just luck but positive thoughts that make us lucky.  But it is also more than just luck, positive thinking can make us more likely to exploit any opportunity when they arise.  

Using positive thinking to create luck can be a trap, because some people use positive thinking with gambling and that can be disastrous.  Doing this is not recommended and should only be tried by people who have been previously successful in making positive thinking work for them. 

The point about, creating our own reality, is that we do this whether we are practicing positive thinking or not.  Our reality is created by the day-to-day by all the habitual thoughts we have.

Religions teach us we must have faith and belief but don’t tell us how to acquire it.  What they don’t explain is that a belief is a thought we keep on thinking. In other words it is habitual thought. 

Religions are very good at instilling beliefs into their followers and they do this through indoctrination.  That is to say, they repeat the same idea over and over again until it became a habitual thought in their followers, and that is how beliefs are created.

This of course works best in children.  The Jesuit maxim is "Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give we the man".  So if we can indoctrinate children at an early age, this indoctrination will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Religions are not the only organizations that do this.  Political parties and advertisers do the same thing.

Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany, once candidly admitted, "If we tell a lie big enough and keep on repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”.  Unfortunately, all political parties do the same thing, and the reason they do this, is because it works.

Mother will leave their children in front of a TV to watch children’s programs thinking they are safe.  What they do not realise is that advertisers target children’s programs and brainwash their children into desiring unhealthy junk food or useless and expensive toys.  So the children start off life with unhealthy eating habits and an erroneous belief that expensive material goods will make them happy. 

So in our modern world there are religions, political parties and advertisers all trying to brainwash us into beliefs that do not benefit us.  So wouldn't it be better if we take charge of our own lives and brainwash ourselves into having the beliefs, that will make our lives better?

So we can brainwash ourselves into have any belief we want through affirmations.  So what affirmations should we use?

This is a matter of personal choice as people want different things, but mostly people want money, good relationships and good health.  Most positive thinking books focus on making lots of money, because that is what people are most interest in and are more likely to buy a book about this.

Some positive thinking books say that affirmations have to be very positive and the most positive statement we can make about money is to say to ourselves, “I am a millionaire”. (Or billionaire, depending on how ambitious we are.)

The problem with this is that although it is a very positive statement, most people will see it as being untrue and won’t use a statement like this.  So it is better to use affirmations that we feel more comfortable with.

We can say, “I want to be a millionaire,” which is a true statement.  Yes, it is not as positive as say “I am a millionaire”, but it is a statement we can’t argue with. 

We can then build on this and say things like, “I desire to be a millionaire”, “wouldn't it be wonderful to be a millionaire,” then visualize and think about what we can buy as a millionaire and what it would do for our lives.  After awhile we can use the affirmation, “I am millionaire,” but only when we feel comfortable with saying it.

It helps to be playful with this and enjoy it as a fun thing to do.  Though this can be difficult if we are heavily in debt and don’t have a job.  Then the true statement would probably be, “I desperately want to be a millionaire”.  But this can be a help if it connects us to our desires.

Thoughts became more powerful if they are connected to a strong emotion and desire.  So if we desperately need money, then we can connect with that powerful desire as we say our affirmations.  Though, this can be difficult for many people, as these desires can not only be desperate, but painful as well. 

Desire is a powerful force and needs to be used in a positive way.  Desires that are unfulfilled can easy turn into hopelessness, despair and depression.  For this reason many people actively try not to think too much about what they want.  It is easier to accept the life we have, rather than have unrealistic dreams.

So yes, the sensible thing to do is to never desire more than what we think we can achieve.  But if everyone was to do this then nothing would change.  It is the unrealistic dreamers who bring changes to our world.

Certainly it is the attitude of most women in the world.  Yes billions of women are being oppressed by patriarchal religions and customs but most women feel completely helpless when faced with masculine power.  So it is easier to just complain about it and nothing else.

This then is the big advantage of positive thinking for women.  They don’t have to go out on the street to demonstrate and be beaten up by men.  They don’t have to get involved in the, “dog eat dog” world of patriarchal politics and business.  They can simply use their minds to get what they want.

Positive thinking doesn't even need faith or belief to make it work, all that is needed is persistence.  It can just be statements about the things we most desire said every day as often as possible.  As mentioned before, beliefs are only habitual thoughts, so by just repeating affirmations often, will create new beliefs.

Another hurdle is that if a person is willing make affirmations about their desires, then what also comes to mind, is how they can be achieved.  This is another trap. 

There is a saying that the, “Devil in the detail” and thinking about how to achieve what we desire, can bring up a lot of negative thoughts.  So if we use affirmations about becoming a millionaire, but only have a low-paid job, then the whole thing becomes unrealistic when we think about how to achieve this.  This then creates a negative feeling of hopelessness.

But if we look at the lives of people who have gone from, “rags to riches,” we find a lot of luck involved in the way they became rich.  Luck plays a huge role for any poor person in becoming wealthy, and luck can be created through positive thinking.

So positive thinking is a whole new way of thinking about the world.  It doesn’t require force or struggle, all it requires is persistence and patience and the ability to receive what we have created through our thoughts and desires.