If you’re a humanoid—if you’re a creative and curious enough person to be reading this article—then the only reason you don’t have more money than you can spend is that you’ve been actively pushing it away with both hands, says Gary Douglas, founder of Access Consciousness™. In other words, you have not chosen to have it. You have not made the demand of yourself and followed through with doing whatever it takes.

Painful as it may be to hear this for the first time, there is no judgment in the above statements. Everything that shows up in our lives is what we have chosen to create. Once we recognize our potency in the disasters, financial and otherwise, that we have created, we can also recognize we have the potency to change them and create what we would really like to have.

So how do you recognize a story? A story is the reason and justification we give to ourselves and others for not doing what we say we’d like to do, for not having what we say we’d like to have. Every time you say “because,” a story follows. I can’t do that because…..I don’t have time, I can’t afford it, I didn’t get around to it, I couldn’t find good help…..all of these are stories. The most important story not to buy if you’d like to change your life, financial or otherwise, is your own. If you don’t buy it, you may find you no longer have to tell it either.

How many stories do you tell yourself about your finances? Your lack of, or limitation to, your business success? What if you were to look at what you have so often told yourself and recognize it for the story it is—your own grand and glorious creation and not an immutable truth of the universe? Might that make a new point of view and new financial reality possible for you?

The “do not listen to the story” component of this commandment is not suggesting total rudeness to those you are required to have in your life (relatives from whom you might inherit money, supervisors at work, important customers, for example). If you recognize their need to tell the story, you can listen without attachment. You can become like the china dogs in the back window of low-rider cars in Los Angeles ghettos. Let them talk while you just nod without saying anything. If you’re on a cell phone it’s a great opportunity to multi-task. All you have to say is interject “oh,” “I see,” “of course,” at the appropriate intervals.

If you’re dealing with someone with even a modicum of awareness, is it in their best interest for you to listen to their story? Are you not disempowering them by aligning and agreeing with them that they cannot afford what they say they’d like? Would asking them a question (phrased so they can hear it) not be more empowering because it could possibly make them aware of other choices they may have been hiding from themselves by telling their stories?

And you could, if you choose, treat yourself with equal empowerment as well. What if you asked yourself a question every time you told yourself a story about your finances? “What else is possible?” would be a great way to start. How could it get even better than that?