Do Thoughts Become Things? My Exclusive Interview With Canada’s Iconic Thought Leader, Bob Proctor

My cell phone buzzed. I was in Los Angeles and had just attended the Paradigm Shift seminar with Bob Proctor and Sandy Gallagher, and was scheduled to do an exclusive interview with Bob Proctor. Their event manager Gina Hayden had been trying to reach me. When I called her back, in a matter-of-fact tone she asked me, “Aida I was wondering if after the interview tomorrow you would like to fly back to Toronto with us on the private jet?” I screamed inside, but calmly responded with “Sure, that would be wonderful.”

Many people may know Bob Proctor from his work as a respected speaker in the personal development industry. Bob has been teaching about prosperity thinking, manifesting success and the universal laws for over four decades. Or you may have seen him featured in the movie “The Secret”, but what most people may not know, is that he is Canadian.

…as a Luminary, Bob is also one of few people alive on the planet who worked directly with Earl Nightingale…

Both Bob and Earl were purveyors early on, of the philosophy from which many consider the classic success book; Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”.

As I rode up the elevator to the 12th floor penthouse suite, my head was still spinning with ideas from the last three days of the seminar. A foundational philosophy that Bob Proctor is known for teaching is based on the Napoleon Hill quote “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Bob still teaches and resonates with the book’s philosophies today: “I have been reading it every day, going on 57 years.”

I have heard similar ideas from philosophers and thought leaders over the years: “You become what you think about.” Or “Thinking makes it so.” Although in my heart I have always believed that at some level our thoughts impact our reality, I have to admit, it has always left me with a slight sentiment of oversimplification. There was always this nagging voice inside that said, ‘Prove it’.

As I walked down the hall to the hotel suite, I checked the time; it was 9:58am. I stood in front of the door, and waited. At exactly 10 o’clock I knocked. Bob Proctor opened the door to a suite that was bigger than my condo ( really ) wearing a crisp blue shirt, with his thick white hair cleanly brushed back. The man has great hair. After a few minutes of chit chat, I set up my recorder and the interview began.

Following the phenomenal success of the movie ‘The Secret’, there was a backlash about the ideas surrounding the law of attraction; the layman’s term for some of the theories in quantum physics. Did people misunderstand the message?  “There is an enormous element that people misunderstand. Rhonda Byrne ( the creator of The Secret ) did a great job and she deserves all the credit. But it left people with the idea that if you just want it, you will get it, and that is definitely not true. A want is an idea in your educated, conscious mind. You have to turn your want into a desire. Desire is planted in the subjective side; the subconscious, which is the universal side of your mind, connected to intelligence and everything that is.”

Scientists theorize whether the universe contains an intelligence. From the quantum physics perspective ( how our world works at the smallest subatomic level), the universe is an interactive environment. There are a few very strange and unexplained things that all physicists agree upon. When researchers set up measuring devices to observe subatomic particles, the act of observing affects how they behave: as a wave or compact particle. Particles will also appear in two places at once, until they are observed. Somehow the particles know they are being observed and thus behave differently. Wait… what? So let’s recap all that – no one really knows what the heck is going on.

…as Bob puts it: “The truth is rarely in the appearance of things.”

He continues: “There is an energy that flows into our consciousness and we can turn it into what we want. Your brain is an electronic switching station. You activate brain cells, which then set up a vibration in your body, all wired through your central nervous system. Now on a conscious level we call vibration ‘feelings’. Your thoughts control your vibration. Your body is a mass of molecules at a very high speed of vibration. You can only attract to you what you are in harmonious vibration with. It’s action-reaction. The universe reacting is the law of attraction.”

Most quantum physicists would agree that at a subatomic level our world exists as vibrating fields, perhaps a universe of strings producing different particles. But scientific knowledge is often tentative and provisional, with the currently accepted theory being the best explanation with the information we have today. Quantum theory has demonstrated that truly anything is possible. So is it really that big of a stretch to hypothesize that somewhere in all of this unknown, is a field containing universal intelligence? And that perhaps as a vibrating human mass of molecules, we can interact with this field in a purposeful way?

And if purposeful thought with emotion can lead us to create a vibrational field, we may want to be more disciplined with what we are thinking about. Or as Bob put it: “You see in your mind what you want. If I have an idea, or a collection of thoughts towards a purpose, my thinking is purposeful and directed. Write out what it is you want. You are painting a picture with words. ‘I am so happy and grateful now that ________’ and you describe whatever it is in the present tense. Then you let yourself get emotionally involved, you become the actor. You act like you’ve already got it. Then you attempt to do it as often as you can throughout the day. It will turn into a habit. That puts you on the frequency. Just thinking it doesn’t put you on the frequency.”

Self-directed neuro-plasticity research proposes that the way in which a person purposefully directs his/her attention, will affect both the person’s experience and the biological structure of the brain. As we repeat a focused, directed thought process with clear intention and emotion, we can rewrite over an existing non serving neural program; pruning old synaptic connections and sprouting new ones.

And that is exactly what Bob Proctor did. He was once a 26 year old unhappy negative thinker, who did not finish high school, had a poverty mentality making $4000 a year with $6000 in debt; “I was the product of my conditioning. Whatever you get as a child you carry all your life that’s like a program that is planted in our subconscious mind. We are conditioned and that’s what a paradigm is: conditioning.”

He then learned and diligently followed the principles he teaches today. And with the help of a mentor, he made his first million by starting an office cleaning company, growing to locations around the world. As he studied the principles of the great thought leaders, it took Bob Proctor almost 10 years before he understood why he became successful and how the principles worked: “When I finally discovered what I was doing, all I wanted to do was teach it. I was so fascinated with it. I love teaching it.”

As we flew back to Toronto in the private jet ( did I mention that ? ) I had a chance to spend the next five hours in further conversation. There is a kindness and generosity of spirit in Bob Proctor that is evident. As a wealthy man of 83 years of age, he continues to grow and expand his business, yet it seemed clear that his mission resonated from legacy more than currency.

There was a time when the ideas that man could fly, surgery could be performed without pain or that the world was round, were maverick. Perhaps the notion that “thoughts become things” is not all that different; as we just don’t know what the future will prove. As Albert Eisenstein wrote in a letter to Canadian physicist John Mofatt a half century ago, “Nobody is sure of having taken the right road, me the least.”