Have you had enough of know-it-all financial advisers? What if the key to increasing your income and your wealth did not come from the answer they provided, but from asking questions instead?

“Questions empower, answers disempower,” says Gary Douglas, founder of Access Consciousness and best-selling author.

In Douglas’s view, almost anything that doesn’t end with a question mark is an answer. Answers can look like judgments, conclusions, decisions or beliefs-anything that does not have a question in it. Even sentences that look like questions may not be if you have a fixed point of view underneath them, Douglas adds.

If you believe that government bonds are the safest investment, for example, then asking a question about “What would make me the most money now and in the future?” cannot give you the information you’re asking for, because it can’t penetrate the judgment that there’s only one safe investment.

Douglas and his business partner, Dr. Dain Heer, co-authors of Right Riches for You and Money Isn’t the Problem, You Are, have all kinds of questions that can be used to create both income and wealth.

“What can I add to my life today that will generate lots of money now and in the future?” is one of them.

This question runs counter to conventional wisdom that we should cut back in tough times. How well has conventional wisdom been working lately? Douglas and Heer are all about doing things differently to create different results with money. Both Douglas and Heer have created wealth and income starting from very little. Douglas has started over from scratch three times in his adult life.

Their approach appears successful, as their seminar business is booming world-wide, while attendance at other seminars is down as much as 70% in the U.S. Instead of cutting back, they recommend asking the question about what you can add to your life. The reason for this is that when you cut back, you create a contraction in your life. This contraction in your life energy is reflected in your money flows. It becomes a vicious and unsatisfying circle.

By asking what else you can add to your life, you create an invitation for the universe to send you new ideas you may not have looked at before and new ways to generate money that you might not have thought of. This question also avoids a great danger to anyone with any creativity. Creative people do not like to be bored. If you are creative in any shape or form and do not have enough going on in your life, you can become what Douglas and Heer call OCCC: obsessive compulsive creators of crap. You will manufacture disasters in your life just to make sure you have enough to do. Why not add moneymaking possibilities to your life instead? Wouldn’t that be much more fun?

Douglas and Heer use some unusual questions to create wealth, and they recommend that you do the same. For everything they buy, they ask, “If I buy you, will you make me money?” If they get a yes, they will usually buy it; if they don’t, they won’t. This does however, require a willingness to hear or sense the answer.

The money doesn’t have to come in a linear fashion. One of Douglas’s investments is horses. He does not recommend “investments that eat”,
whether it’s an animal, a house with mortgage payments, or a child. However, he trusts his ability to ask questions and get the answers, and every horse he buys says it will make him money. He is in fact an importer of a new breed of horses, the Costarricenses de Paso. These horses certainly eat and have not been great sellers in this economy. Yet the more horses he buys (when they say they will make him money), the more his income increases.

Another unconventional approach that Douglas and Heer have about possessions is the recognition that possessions actually own us we don’t own them. “Think about your house, your pet, your children, your car,” Douglas says. “Do they go to work to pay for the mortgage, food and gas, or do you go to work to support them? Who owns who?” he observes.

Recognizing the reality of who owns who can have practical implications for investments and prosperity generally. Surround yourself only with things you love, say Douglas and Heer, even if half your house is empty and all your furniture ends up in the garbage. That will create a vacuum that the universe can fill with things that you would really like. A great first step is to ask everything in your house if it still wishes to own you. If it does not, you can ask it to bring you the person it does want to own.

One woman used this with an office building that was no longer bringing her joy. She had asked repeatedly for it to bring the people it wanted to own to her, without a single offer. Douglas recommended becoming a little more forceful. “Go tell it that if it doesn’t bring the people it wants to own, you’re going to burn it down!” he suggested. She did this and a few months later got a cash buyer and a sale that completed with ease.

While market circumstances slowed the results for the woman with the office building, economic circumstances do not have to dictate our results. Those who have used Douglas and Heer’s methods have seen their incomes increase for the most part. “Even during the great depression, many people made lots of money,” Douglas points out. This includes some of our “leading families” like the Kennedys.

Some questions to ask during adversity are, “How can I use this to my advantage to generate lots of money?” and “What’s right about this I’m not getting?”

If you ever lost a job or suffered some financial loss, only to see how it was actually a gift months or years later, you are familiar with how the latter question works. By asking the question, you fast-forward to the awareness you would otherwise have to wait months or years to get. That awareness can then be used to make you more money!

Another question that creates awareness which could initially be painful but result in eventually more money is this one: “What did I deny I knew or pretend not to know about x (the “bad” investment)? Somewhere in your universe, there was a knowing or a warning sign that you ignored. It’s not about judging or blaming yourself for making mistakes.

What if all those “mistakes” were exactly what you required to bring you to the place you are now, where you can make better and more successful choices? By looking at what you knew before making the “bad” investment, you can learn to identify the energy of it so that next time you have butterflies in your stomach or a lump in your throat, you’ll know to ask questions before signing the check.

Does asking questions about your financial choices promise instant 100% success? No, it’s a skill that takes some practice and patience to develop. But can any financial adviser truthfully offer you those results? And who has your own best interests at heart? Might now be the time to start trusting that person: YOU?