The Law of Correspondence

Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world; it corresponds with your dominant patterns of thinking.
This is an extraordinary principle. It explains most happiness and unhappiness, most success and failure, most greatness and meaninglessness in life. After years of study in this area, I still stand in awe before this powerful law, like standing and looking out over the vastness of the Grand Canyon.
Just think! Your outer world reflects your inner world in every way. Nothing can happen to or for you in the long term until and unless it corresponds to something inside of you. If you want to change or improve anything in your life, you must begin by changing the inner aspects of your mind.
Sometimes this is called the "mental equivalent." Your greatest responsibility in life is to create within yourself the mental equivalent of what you want to experience on the outside. The fact is that you cannot achieve it on the outside until you have first created it on the inside.
It is as though your life is a 360-degree mirror. Wherever you look, there you are. Your relationships for example, always reflect back to you the kind of person you are on the inside. Your attitude, your health and your material conditions are a reflection of the way you think most of the time.
This is hard for most people to accept. Most people think that the problems in their lives are caused by other people and circumstances. They are shocked and angered to be told that they are the primary architects of everything that happens to them. They want others to change. They want the world to change. But they do not want to change themselves.
The Law of Correspondence is a foundation principle of virtually all religions and schools of thought. It is really great news. It is the key to personal freedom and happiness. It is the high road to great success and fulfillment.
There is only one thing in the world that you can control, and that is the way you think. However, when you take complete control over your thinking, you take control over all the other aspects of your life. By thinking and talking only about what you want, and by refusing to think or talk about what you don't want, you become the architect of your own destiny.

by Brian Tracy