289: Creating a Life You Love (with Zehra Mahoon)

You are listening to the Vibrant Happy Women podcast episode number 289. We’re talking about the law of attraction and having more of what you do want in your lives. Stay tuned.

Hi, I'm Jen Riday. This podcast is for women who want to feel more vibrant, happy, aligned, and alive. You'll gain the emotional, physical, and spiritual tools you need to get your sparkle back and ensure that depression, anxiety, and struggle don't rule your life. Welcome to the Vibrant Happy Women Podcast.

Hey my friends, Jen here. And I am so excited for this topic today. Did you know law of attraction can affect your marriage, can affect your relationship with your kids? That it’s actually the cause of whether you have money or not? I truly believe this. And whether you call it law of attraction or you call it faith, or you call it energy, listen to this episode today and keep an open mind about what you have been attracting and what you want to be attracting going forward.

Before we dive in I have our review of the day from Shellbell 91. She wrote, “Every time I listen to this podcast I leave happier than when I started. I love how Jen breaks down different ways to be happier and change your mindset. Also, her honesty when talking about her life is refreshing. I recommend this podcast to many women in my life regardless of age or place in life.” Thank you so much Shellbell, I appreciate that feedback. I would love for you to leave me a review as well. Maybe I’ll read yours on the air. You can do that at jenriday.com/review.

Well, I told you we’re talking about law of attraction today and this is an episode that once I recorded, it left my mind whirling and I hope it will for you as well. I know there are many of us who are clear on what we don’t want in our lives. But have you ever pondered what you do want? And do your thoughts focus on the things you do want? Do your thoughts focus on the positives and what’s going right in your marriage, with your kids, with your finances? If the answer is no, this episode is for you. If the answer is kind of, this episode is still for you.

So, my guest for this episode is Zehra Mahoon from Toronto. You know I love my Canadians. So, I’m super excited for you to hear what she and I talked about. Let’s dive in.

Jen: I’m with Zehra Mahoon today. And Zehra is a low of attraction coach, manifesting expert and the author of 12 books on these subjects. After committing to completely transforming her self-worth in 2006 Zehra went from being massively in debt to creating a thriving business as well as healing her relationships. Zehra helps individuals to identify the blockages that are keeping them from achieving success. She helps them change their self-talk and develop new thinking habits that open up a world of new possibilities. Welcome to Vibrant Happy Women, Zehra.

Zehra: Thank you, I’m happy to be here.

Jen: I am so happy to talk with you. I love talking about law of attraction and manifesting. So, tell us, how did you get interested in those topics and become an expert of those?

Zehra: I was interested ever since I was a kid. It wasn’t called law of attraction way back then. But the thought process, the information was out there. And I was asking questions and nobody had the answers for me. So, I would go and read whatever was available and started following all sorts of different teachers, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, so many people, Abraham Hicks more recently. And I just started putting two and two together about why my life was so messy compared to other people’s lives.

And eventually discovered that there was a formula to it. And it was not haphazard because earlier I used to think this is haphazard. It’s a coincidence. Everything is a coincidence. And then I got to a point where I realized nothing is ever a coincidence. So, once I had that formula in place I discovered that my family was not really interested in learning from me because they were the first people I wanted to teach. So, I started writing my blog because I needed an outlet.

And then people started magically finding my blog and sending me questions that once I started responding to those I stepped into the role of coach. And from there I started as I was writing my blog post, accidentally made a very long blog post that ended up being my first book.

Jen: Oh, nice.

Zehra: That’s kind of how it progressed. And so, I guess I became an expert because I became really good at being able to help people find the answers that they needed to get unstuck from whatever it was that was holding them back and move forward in life.

Jen: Okay. So, give us a working definition of law of attraction.

Zehra: Your thoughts have attractive power. Your thoughts create and your emotions attract. But the two are linked so closely together that it is difficult to distinguish, it’s like chicken and egg, which one comes first, the emotion or the thought?

Jen: So, you said your life was a mess. What was that like and then how did it change with law of attraction?

Zehra: My life was a mess in the beginning. As I was a child growing up, I felt singled out. I lived in a very diverse culture in Karachi, Pakistan. And I went to a Catholic convent school. So, there was a very big divide between going to school and coming home to a Muslim family. So, I was always asking questions about what made my friends at school different from the family at home. Nobody was ever able to give me an answer. And it caused a lot of anguish which people didn’t really understand.

People around me didn’t understand why I was upset that my friends at school would go to hell because they were completely nice people. And it actually created a lot of fear and this feeling of how can God be so unfair that my friend, my very best friend is going to end up in hell? How can I prevent that from happening? And so even as a child I was asking all these questions and nobody was able to give me the answer at school or at home.

So, I started keeping things to myself and that worry just accumulated inside me because I wasn’t able to figure out why, why is it that two people doing the exact same thing get different results?

Jen: And so, you were bottling that up inside and how did that affect you?

Zehra: It affected me in the sense that things were always hard. Nothing was easy. Things were always hard. I felt, at work I felt I was passed over for promotions and things that I should have had. And then that was a question is why am I working this hard and not getting the fruits of my labor? Whereas this person who sits next to me who I know does not put in as much work as I do and is not as well organized or skilled as much as I am, get ahead of me in terms of monetary rewards. Why are they reaping higher better monetary rewards than I am?

So then again that bottled up and it created resistance. And so, I was then in an arranged marriage which became abusive. And I ran away from home and ended up becoming a single mother in a country where single motherhood is not appreciated, looked down upon and persecuted. And so, just the problems just kept adding up, and adding up, and adding up. And in the end it became so bad that there was no other way but for me to figure out how to fix it.

Jen: I love that you draw that parallel because isn’t that the truth? We learn so much from our messes. They push us in like a pressure cooker, something has to come up the other side.

Zehra: You just get to this point where you have to figure out how to change things around.

Jen: And it becomes a gift because I’m sure your thought process totally changed because of it. Now, tell us, how did you change?

Zehra: I knew that the problem was with me and not outside of me. And I think that realization is when change started because prior to that I was blaming my bosses for not promoting me, my now ex-husband for the abuse, my parents for not understanding what I needed. I was looking outside of myself, everyone else was to blame. And then I was also looking at myself and did not have the self-worth because I found fault in me, I’m not pretty enough, I’m not tall enough, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. I had this idea of perfection.

And perfection, as you know, does not exist but I had this idea of perfection that I used to compare myself with and beat up on myself for not being able to become perfect until I realized all of that was crap. And the real issue was that I needed to change the way I was looking at myself, the way I was thinking my thoughts, the way I was speaking my thoughts, the way I was looking at other people. And so, I kind of took a step back and started observing.

So, the first step was realization that something is wrong and it is wrong in the way I am doing things because obviously other people are getting different results, so it must be me, not them. And the second step was observation, stepping away from it and observing what I’m saying what’s happening in my life, what other people are saying what’s happening in their life. And sort of start slowly but surely change my dialogue and change the way I was looking at things.

Jen: Yeah, so it sounds like you were in a place that I would call victim thinking where everything that’s wrong in your life is from outside of you. And then the shift became looking inside of you, letting go of victim thinking. I guess it’s really taking a 100% responsibility for the outcomes of your life. And that’s a big shift but also really empowering.

Zehra: Yes, it is a big shift. It does take time. And this is why when people say – people come looking for a quick fix, I have to tell them there is no quick fix. This work takes time and diligence.

Jen: So, part of the work is we’re literally rewiring our brains but tell us more about the energetic side of that work.

Zehra: The energy changes as you change your thoughts. So thought is energy, thought is a form of energy. It is what we call our vibe. So thought gets translated into emotion and then it’s the emotion that we vibrate and that emotion has magnetic power which brings us the results that we get. So, if we start shifting our thought because we have complete control over our thoughts. We can manage our emotions. And when we manage our emotions our magnetic power changes. Now, having said that you can do it the other way around.

You can change your emotion which will change your thought, which will then create a different emotion and a different attractive power. You can do it either way, which is why I say it’s chicken and egg, you can start wherever you want in the equation and it just keeps going round and round. And that’s why when Abraham Hicks says, “The better it gets the better it gets”, well, the same applies on the downside, the worse it gets the worse it gets.

Jen: Oh my gosh, that is so true. Yeah. And so how do you, if you’re descending in a ‘it’s getting worse cycle', how do you break out most easily?

Zehra: What I did, and it happened accidentally, I didn’t know what I was doing but now I teach it because it works so well. Is that you have to find a way to stop thinking about your life. I had this realization one day that the reason my life was the way it was, was because I was not doing a good job of thinking about my life the way I should be thinking about it. And so, I thought my thoughts about my life are hurting me so I need to stop. And what I did in order to stop was that I went to the library and I picked up every audiobook on the self-help shelf that I could find.

I had three library cards and I used all of them and I think I came home with something like 40 programs. And so, what I said to myself was my thoughts are poisonous. I’m just going to borrow other people’s thoughts and I’m going to borrow thoughts from people who are wiser than me, have obviously done better than me. I’m just going to go borrow their thoughts which means that I’m going to listen to what they’re saying and instead of letting my mind wander to other subjects I am actually going to pay attention to what they are saying.

The result was that it took me, I think maybe a month and a half to work my way through all 40 programs that I had picked up. But it kept me busy and it kept me away from thinking about the problems of my life. And that’s the amount of time that it took for things to start changing. And then I had this realization, oh my God, things are changing. I’ve got to do more of this, which I am already doing. So, I just kept it up.

Jen: Yeah. And what changed? What was different?

Zehra: Everything changed. My relationships changed. My money situation changed. And as a result of those things changing my self-worth, my self-image, my confidence in myself changed. So pretty much everything changed.

Jen: Wow, that’s great. So now let’s say you’re working with a student and they come in, what’s kind of the path you’ll recommend for them to use law of attraction in their lives?

Zehra: It comes from understanding and having that awareness that it’s something that you are doing that needs fixing, not everyone else. You can’t change…

Jen: Oh, totally, yes.

Zehra: Yeah, you can’t change other people, you have to change yourself. Once you accept that that is the case, so with a lot of people the first step is that they are not quite ready to accept that they created the mess that they are living through, that they created the money problems, the relationship problems, they were contributing. Not to say that they were the only person contributing, because the other person was as well. But they did make a contribution towards that. And having an understanding of their own role in creating the mess is the starting point.

If you do not accept that you were responsible then you cannot accept that it’s something inside that needs to change rather than other people.

Jen: Wow. That’s huge. I feel it’s a journey where we’re letting go of this stuff. So, it was only until recently where I still was blaming my husband for things in our relationship. And I realized that wasn’t working. I had to take 100% responsibility. It was a funny thing but just that one shift alone saying, “I’m a 100% responsible for what this relationship looks like and feels like”, even a lot of people out there would say that can’t be possibly be true. But when I made the shift everything changed, not just for me but mostly I saw him change. It was so strange. So, what do you think was happening there?

Zehra: When you shift your energy which means you first shifted your thoughts then you shifted your energy, people cannot interact with you the way they did before because they have to interact with you based on your current vibe, not your historic vibe, your current vibe. People always respond to the vibration that we send out. This is why you’ll find that people who have sunny dispositions, what we call a sunny disposition, those people who are the life of the party, why are they the life of the party? People gravitate towards them because of their energy.

And so, people will only interact with you if your energy attracts them. And they will interact with you differently based on what you are putting out there. So, in that example of the person with the sunny disposition who is the center of attraction at a party, that person who came to the party who was down in the dumps, who was not feeling 100%, even their spirits will lift being in that circumference. So, you have an impact. You have power of influence over and around the people around you. You send them a different vibration then they react differently.

Because you see, if my vibration or in your case, if your vibration going out to your husband, as soon as you lay eyes on him, your vibration says you’re doing something wrong and I want you to change it.

Jen: Yes, I’ve been there.

Zehra: Yeah. And he’s picking up on that vibration you see. Then he’s going to respond saying, “What the hell is wrong with her?”

Jen: It’s so funny.

Zehra: When he sends that message out, what the hell is wrong with her, you’re going to pick up on it vibrationally. You won’t know the words that he’s thinking but you’ll pick up the vibration of it and you’ll say, “How does he think there’s something wrong with me? There’s something wrong with him.”

Jen: Totally.

Zehra: And so, it becomes a tennis match of each person picking up on a negative vibration and then throwing it back to the other person. And that’s how things get worse, the worse they get, the worse they get. Until someone breaks the pattern. And the person who breaks the pattern is the one who says, “Wait a second, this relationship is way more important than all these thoughts I’m thinking. I’m just going to put an end to this now. I am going to pick a different set of thoughts.”

And now the thought you are sending to your husband is it’s okay, whatever happened is okay. I don’t care that much, you are way more important than all of that. I still care about you. I care about what we have together. And now he’s getting a totally different vibration from you.

Jen: It’s totally true, yeah.

Zehra: Yes. So now he’s going to send a vibration that says, yeah, I hear you vibrationally and his attitude towards you is going to change. So, this is, we have absolute power of influence over each and every person who is interacting with us, we have power of influence. They play with us based on what we are telling them, not verbally. It is absolutely those non-verbal clues that are so important.

Jen: Absolutely. It’s so true. With your wallflower example, there are people like that when as soon as you’re in their presence you just feel a cloud. They don’t even have to say anything, you just feel it, before – I feel that responsibility piece was essential for me to change my thinking. Because before, without doing that I could always find something he needed to change. But the minute I said, “I am 100% responsible.”

And I tried this also with my kids. I’m 100% responsible for our relationships. Then there’s no blaming. I have to fix it. And then I have to think the better thoughts. It’s just a big shift but tiny too.

Zehra: It’s a big shift. I think everyone can do it. I think what it involves literally is a return to love. So, what happens is whenever we send out a negative vibration or we think a negative thought, we are actually stepping away from the vibration of love. Because when you blame, or you have guilt, or you have any negative emotion like anger, revenge, frustration with someone. All of those negative emotions send out a negative vibration. When you shift that then everything changes. So, you return to love.

Basically, you say my negative emotion is not important enough, I’m just going to return to love. I’m going to return to loving you.

Jen: Yeah. Now, I’ll be honest, I want to be really transparent. I didn’t shift immediately to I’m returning to loving you. But what I did shift to first was, I’m open to being friends again. But that was the shift I was ready for and then it went from there, yeah.

Zehra: I agree completely, Jen, because the analogy I use to explain this to people is to say, well, your car’s going in reverse. And it’s going in reverse really, really fast. And you’re hitting all sorts of things on the sides. You have to bring it to a stop, put it into neutral before you can start moving forward again. And that process that you just described of taking responsibility, that’s what it is.

When you take responsibility for your role in a situation, you stop going backwards, you bring the car to a stop. And then you neutralize your vibration in saying okay, no right and wrong, let’s begin again. And that place of neutrality is when you give up thinking all those negative thoughts that you were thinking before and you can consciously make the decision, okay, let me try and figure out what’s positive about this.

And a lot of times in the relationships that I’ve looked at, people look at things like well, we’ve been together for such a long time. We’ve had some pretty good times together. We have these beautiful children together. We’ve got friends that we enjoy spending time with together, we like going away on holidays together. So, there’s a recount of all those good things that have happened that help you to feel better and kind of move into that neutral position and from there you can start building again.

Jen: So, there’s the phrase ‘kitchen sinking it'. So instead of kitchen sinking all the things that are wrong with them, we need to do it with the things that are right with them. Yes, that’s great. So how would this work with money? I have heard so many money stories out there. I grew up with one which was you have to work really hard or money is the root of all evil. And then we all think, darn, I just don’t make enough or who knows. We have a lot of victim thinking around money. Talk to that and what you’ve seen out there and then what we can do to shift our thoughts there.

Zehra: Like you said, I mean I grew up with those beliefs as well. They were common beliefs and the media doesn’t do any favors to our children either because even cartoons vibrate with those beliefs. Those beliefs are rampant. They are embedded in all sorts of places. And so, children come across those beliefs not only from their parents but also from the media that they’re absorbing around them. And it becomes our programming. It’s like any other thing, if you think negatively about money then money is going to be a difficult subject for you because you have a relationship with money.

And just like you have a relationship with a person, you also have a relationship with money. If thoughts are like boomerangs, so you send it out and it comes right back to you then if you are sending all those negative energies towards money, those negative energies are coming back to you in the form of lack of money or lack of financial success. So, we have to just understand that again, we can take control of our relationship with money. We can stop and we can disown all those beliefs that were never ours, we picked them up from other people.

So, you actually have to disown those beliefs. You actually have to let them go by saying that I don’t want to believe in that anymore. And here are all the reasons why I no longer believe this. Because if you do not create a logical foundation for giving up a belief then it does not stick. And this is the reason why people do all sorts of affirmations and they listen to all sorts of hypnotherapy, meditation programs and their life does not change. It’s because they have not created a logical basis for letting go of their current belief systems.

So just listening, just popping something into your head and listening to it is not going to shift anything for you unless you actually give up all the things that are linked to it because just the word ‘money’ has so many beliefs like you just recounted. There are so many beliefs linked to money, unless you are finding a way to disprove to your logical mind why those beliefs are no longer applicable in your life then your logical mind is still going to hold up to them and your life will reflect it.

Jen: Wow, yeah, I agree. So, what logical set of beliefs have helped you with that personally?

Zehra: It’s a process. Because our past programming is really strong and cleaning it up just once does not work. But for example, you brought up hard work. You need to work hard in order to earn money. That is something that my parents used to tell us all the time. “Work hard and then you will get the rewards.” I gave up that belief by observing my parents. They were the most hardworking people I knew and yet my uncles, and aunts, and other people in the family who didn’t work as hard were financially way better off than my parents were.

Jen: Oh my gosh, that’s so true. I never realized that. My parents quit farming and did some other things and have way more wealth now and they work less hard. They would be embarrassed if I said, “You actually work less hard.” But they would agree it’s true but anyway it’s so funny, that’s true.

Zehra: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that’s for me collecting the evidence that said, no, this is not true. Look at that person, they’re not working that hard. Look at that person, they’re not working that hard. That colleague of mine, they’re not working that hard. So hard work has nothing to do with financial remuneration and the money that comes to you.

Jen: Yeah. And so, it would also make you want to go talk to and hear what people who do have wealth say about money.

Zehra: Yes. You see, here’s the thing, that’s a double edged sword because a lot of people don’t really understand what’s happening energetically and inside their minds. So, people who make a lot of money will tell you that they work really hard. What’s happening in the background at an energetic level is that their work doesn’t seem like work to them. They spend a lot of time doing it but it doesn’t feel like hard work. It seems like easy work, that’s why they’re spending so much time doing it.

Jen: Yes. They love it and it gives them…

Zehra: Yeah, just because you’re spending a lot of time on it doesn’t make it hard work. Just because you’re spending a lot of time on it could mean that you’re passionate about it and it’s easy work, not hard work.

Jen: For sure.

Zehra: I’ll tell you a little story about this. My daughter when she was 16, one of my friends put her up to it. My friend went and had a talk with my daughter and said, “Your mother’s working all the time, she’s working too hard. You have to tell her to stop working this hard, she needs to have fun. Why don’t you ask her to go hang out with you for a day at the mall.” Now, I hate going to the mall.

Jen: Me too.

Zehra: So, my daughter comes to me and she says, “You work too hard and let’s go and hang out at the mall.” And I said to her, “Listen, I’m going to go nuts if you want me to go and hang out at the mall for a whole day, you think that when I’m working that I am not having fun because it’s hard work. But sweetheart, I actually have less fun going to the mall because you know when you go shopping with me I’m always asking, ‘Can we go home now?'” So, you see, to the outside onlooker it seems that I work all the time and I’m so hardworking. What they don’t understand is it’s not hard work for me.

Jen: Right, that makes sense. So, I had a friend, I wonder what you think of this, there are different camps or opinions on law of attraction. He said, “We can put our work in one column and our income in another. That money flow, that income is coming separate from any work or time we’re putting towards a job or business.” What do you think?

Zehra: I completely agree with that because when you put a desire out there, there are so many ways that it can be fulfilled that you cannot even see because your vision is limited to the things that you can actually see. But the universe is not limited and there’s so many ways that it can come to you. I remember one of my very earliest books that I read before the term, law of attraction existed, by the way, the term, law of attraction only came into existence with the movie, The Secret.

Abraham Hicks actually coined the term ‘law of attraction'. But there were people talking about spirituality, and trust, and faith. Norman Vincent Peale, I’m not sure if you are familiar with that name, but he wrote many books on trust, and faith, and in one of the books he tells a story. So, this is before The Secret, before law of attraction. I used to read a lot of his books. I think I might have read all of them. He told a story of a girl who wanted a car. And she was poor. She had no money. It was paycheck to paycheck.

She really needed a car because she commuted for work but she could not save enough money or qualify in order to go and get a car. So, I believe the story was that she came to see him and he told her, “Just sit with that and let it go. Trust that God will find a way to bring you this thing that you want.” And so, I think he says in the book that it was only a couple of months later that she came to see him in a car, in a convertible car, beautiful car. I forget what make or model it was. And he was surprised to see that she had manifested this vehicle.

So, he asked her, “What happened? How did this come about? Is this yours?” And she said, “Yes, my great aunt who I had not seen in God knows how many years, passed away and left me the car.”

Jen: Wow, that’s neat.

Zehra: So that story always when I’m looking for, in my own life, and I’m looking for, I’ve got to make this much money so that I can get this thing that I want. I always put the brakes on and I remind myself, no, if money’s going to come to me it’s just going to come to me. And it doesn’t have to come to me through my work. And in fact, Jen, I’m going to say to you, when I coach people who have businesses I teach them not to make their business into the source of their income right at the beginning because then the business stops being a passion and becomes a chore.

And when something becomes a chore there is no joy in it. But it’s the feeling of joy that acts as the magnet that pulls the money in.

Jen: That’s great, that’s great advice. Well, this is powerful. And so, you have 12 books and you have a website. Where can people go to learn more about what you’re doing in the world?

Zehra: My website for sure, it’s zmahoon.com. There is a free downloadable book on it called Why Me, Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People, which was the question that I kept asking myself, why is this happening to me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why do all these bad things happen to me? And that book was the starting point of me being able to put the puzzle together to say, “Well, it is me. It’s not why me. It is me.”

Jen: Wow, yeah, powerful.

Zehra: Yeah, so there is a contact form on my website and if you – if anyone wants to reach out to me they can and they can download the book and join my mailing list.

Jen: Okay. And that’s at zmahoon.com?

Zehra: That’s correct.

Jen: Okay. Well, this has been powerful. I think I have some more thoughts to upgrade. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Zehra: Thank you for having me.

Alright, I want to challenge you to go practice thinking more about what is right and what you do want. And being in that joyful, happy high vibe place and especially taking 100% responsibility for your outcomes in your marriage, with your kids, with your finances, with your career, with all of it, it’s a big shift but once you step there you no longer can play the blame game. Those two cannot exist in the same place. So good luck with that, I can’t wait to hear how it goes and I will see you again next time. Until then, make it a vibrant and happy week. Take care.

If you enjoy this podcast, you have to check out the Vibrant Happy Women Club. It’s my monthly group coaching program where we take all this material to the next level and to get you the results that will blow your mind. Join me in the Vibrant Happy Women Club at jenriday.com/join.