If you are going for luminosity, you may have to lower the bar. That's right, I said lower the bar, not raise it. We've learned to raise the bar on our hopes and dreams to a sometimes impossible level. This keeps us either driven and revved up, on the one hand, or lethargic and resigned on the other.

Instead, you're going to look at what sings to your heart. You will create something we'll call a game worth playing, and you'll choose the goals worth playing for. You'll learn how to gather and focus your energy - your time, money, physical vitality, creativity, enjoyment, and relationships - so that you get what you really want. You'll also learn how to go past that point where you've given up on yourself. You will go from busyholism to accomplishing what is dear to you. But the price you may have to pay for all of this is lowering the bar - going for less, not more.

Let me tell you a success story about someone we'll call Sally. She was twenty-eight when she first came to a seminar I led on how to become financially successful. Tall, with a big smile, she had just gotten off welfare and had a job cleaning homes.

Sally wanted to be financially successful. The definition of financial success is doing what you said you would do with money - with clarity, focus, ease, and grace. The amount of money is not important. I know millionaires who are not financially successful by this criterion; instead, they are worried about money, afraid that they'll lose what they have, convinced that people like them only because they are rich.

Being financially successful was a big challenge for Sally. As she put it, No one in my family has ever even talked about being financially successful. I want to know that I'm doing something with my money instead of just having a one-night stand with it.

Sally set a goal: an investment portfolio with $600 in it by the end of one year. This would demonstrate her intention to be financially successful.

Every month Sally would work extra hours to put $50 in an investment portfolio savings account. That may not be a huge amount of money, and for Sally it was a bit of a stretch but by no means impossible. By our definition of success, each time she regularly deposited a $50 check, she was demonstrating financial success.

At the end of one year she had $600. She put it in that investment portfolio. I'm going to put $100 a month away now! she said.

And so she did. I happened to see her a few months after she put that $1200 into her investment portfolio. She looked like a different woman. Her clothes were more professional, and she was putting herself through school, but what I remember most is what she said about the process: I thought you had to have confidence and feel better about yourself before you could be financially successful. I waited a long time for that to happen. Now I see that I had it backwards. When I got that first $600 and did what I said I'd do, I automatically felt better about myself - like I could take on the world!

How much - quantity - is not what's most important here. Conventional wisdom tells us that you have to save up larger amounts of money in order for your investments to count. But is that really true? In a spiritual or metaphysical sense, amounts are simply inconsequential. It's the quality of the action - in this case action taken with clarity, focus, ease, and grace - that determines your experience of luminosity. And luminous experiences encourage us to persevere, to keep going. It's the consistency that pays off in the long run.

The above article is an excerpt from Mastering Life's Energies, copyright 2007 by Maria Nemeth, Ph.D. It is printed here with the permission of the publisher, New World Library, Novato, CA, 1-800-972-6657 ext. 52.

Maria Nemeth, Ph.D., is an international inspirational speaker, author, seminar leader and personal coach. She is the Founder of the Academy for Coaching Excellence. For more than 20 years, Dr. Nemeth has trained professional coaches, ministers, clinicians, executives, teachers and private individuals using the coaching methods and skills she has designed. Her courses and workshops have been taken by thousands of people from around the world who report significant (and even miraculous) changes in their lives as a result of her teachings. To explore her work further, visit her website, www.marianemeth.com.