If you’ve ever wondered if authors of job hunting books ever take their own advice in their job hunts, wonder no more. This one does.

I’m going to share with you how I used the Law of Attraction to bring me not just a job, and not just a good job, but a fantastic, brand new job that was created for me a mere 18 hours after getting laid off right before the Christmas holidays and then an even more incredible position that was handed to me five months later.

Sound impossible? Nope. All it took was a simple shift in my thinking.

If you’ve never heard of the Law of Attraction or “The Secret” before, try to picture yourself as a living magnet. You literally attract people, things and situations to yourself through your thoughts, feelings and beliefs – both conscious and subconscious. This is the Law of Attraction at work.

The Law of Attraction – like the law of gravity, the law of soil, the law of electricity and the other Universal Laws – has these qualities:

• It’s universal: It works exactly the same way for everyone with no exceptions.
• It’s consistent: It does only one thing and it does it all the time.
• It’s impartial: It doesn’t play favorites, have feelings or care about who uses it or how it is used.
• It’s effortless: It does what it does without effort, so size doesn’t matter, and using it is effortless too.
• It’s infinite: No matter how much you use of it, there will always be more.
• It’s mysterious: We know what it does; we just don’t know how it does it.
• It’s predictable: Because it will always do what it does exactly the same way for every-one all the time under all conditions, it can be intentionally used.

December 17th
Like most layoffs, this one wasn’t a surprise. I was working at a very small company so it was easy to tell how we were doing by the noise level in the office. And it was quiet. Much too quiet.

Finally, the president called us into her office and told us that the company was in seri-ous financial trouble and even if we all pitched in and gave extra effort, she couldn’t promise it would help or that she’d even be able to make the next payroll.

I don’t mind helping out and doing more than my share, especially when you need an extra hand, but when you tell me you probably won’t be able to pay me for my work, I’m gone. And there it was. I was out of a job and right before the Christmas holidays too.

That nice, comfortable feeling of having something to do, a place to go, people to see, a steady paycheck and great benefits had suddenly been replaced by a sickening, sinking feeling in my stomach.

Since I’m only human, I allowed myself to panic for about five seconds and then I caught myself. With my next breath, I remembered the power of the Law of Attraction and replaced terror with calm, dread with joy, and uncertainty with faith.

As the author of the world’s first guidebook to using the Law of Attraction to attract and get a dream job, I knew all about the Law. I knew with absolute certainty that I could expect to see very powerful demonstrations of whatever I focused on with my thoughts, feelings and beliefs coming to me very rapidly.

I knew if I focused on the feelings and experiences typically associated with being laid off – like fear, uncertainty, loss of income, loss of pride, a long period of unemployment and having to start all over – that’s what would show up in my life.

Since I didn’t want any of those things showing up, there was only one thing for me to do: I had to think differently. So as I’m being laid off, this was going through my mind:

“Okay, Universe, I thought this job was my demonstration of prosperity, but obvi-ously it’s not. Clearly, this was just a step on a path to a greater good. I don’t know what that greater good is now, but whatever it is, I’m moving toward it.”

Now, when you’re on a path and want to move forward, the first thing you should do is assess what you have right where you are, so I looked within. “Janet, you’re a publicist and sales rep. That’s who you are and what you do best,” I thought.

The second thing you should do when you want to move forward on a path is to look at what’s right in front of you. So I thought about what was on my desk and the 35+ ven-dors I had brought with me when I folded my business into the company.

And then it occurred to me that I could do for these small vendors what I had done years ago as an independent commercial real estate writer and publicist – help them build their businesses through publicity and writing.

But now that I was an established sales rep, I would add in the extra benefit of helping them build their sales, resulting in extra income to me through commissions. I knew the vast majority of these companies were small, short-handed and limited in terms of their marketing reach.

And since I was already dealing directly with either the CEO and/or the national sales managers, I’d get a yes or no right away. As a publicist, I knew there were numerous opportunities to promote both their products and companies, and increase their sales as a result. I was really getting excited about this!

The upshot was that by the time the president had finished telling us the bad news, I had already formulated the concept for my business and was eager to get started. I told the president that I couldn’t stay to pitch in and would be out by 5 PM.

It was now noon. It took the rest of the day for me to email all of my vendors explaining that I was gone, why I was leaving, what I was doing next and inviting them to join me.

In addition to the vendors I had brought with me when I joined the company and the handful more I had recruited during my four and a half month tenure, there was one vendor who had come in from left field.

This vendor was unusual because it was local, and was at the point of being ready to sell its products – a unique line of pain management devices that had just been ap-proved for sale by the FDA and was covered by Medicare and most insurers.

Since we were a local distributor of medical equipment and supplies selling to the Veterans Administration and other US governmental healthcare facilities and agencies, getting together seemed a natural fit.

Unfortunately, this vendor had no sales force, no organized way of getting their story told and their products sold, and not much money. They also had no way of knowing that we were about to fall apart as a company and couldn’t have done what they wanted us to do anyway.

Although they had never become a client, I sent this vendor one of my emails with the passing thought that given their circumstances, if anyone could use me to help them build their business, it would be them.

As I cleared out my desk, I gave thanks for having worked at that company and all the good it had brought me. Infinite abundance was already mine, and now I was ready to receive it in another form. I was about to find out very quickly what form it was to take.

December 18th
My phone rang the next morning. It was Tim, president of the pain management device company, saying, “I just got your email. What you are proposing is exactly what we are looking for. Can you give us more information?”

I spent the next two days flushing out my concept and emailed it to Tim and his national sales manager, Bill, who had sat in on the phone call. We agreed to speak again after the long holiday weekend and they had had a chance to read and reflect on what I sent.

December 27th
The conversation was short and sweet. It was a go with smiles all around.

January 3rd and Beyond: At 10 AM on the first business day back from the holidays, I'm sitting with Tim and Bill signing the papers formalizing our agreement that I would be their first outside sales rep. I knew it wouldn't be long before sales and commissions would be rolling in.

April 10th: By the spring, it was clear that marketing was the company's weak point and they were expecting me to perform sales miracles without money or their active participation. As a result, I was rapidly losing interest in them, but I needn't have fretted; something spectacular was already on its way to me.

April 18th: Four months after I got laid off, Terry, another ex-employee, suggested I meet her for lunch. I thought it was going to be a "gossip catch-up" kind of meeting, but Terry had other ideas.

Unbeknownst to me, Terry had spent the past year at our previous company laying the groundwork for her own medical equipment distributorship selling to the government. This was the exact same concept as our former employer, except Terry was going to do it right.

And she wanted me to do for her what I did best: durable medical equipment sales. Of course I said yes, and that made four of us: Terry and Famira, another former colleague of ours to do administration, and myself and Rodney, a friend of Terry's, to do sales. Then, after a mere three weeks together as a team, the dam burst.

Chip, one of Terry's respiratory clients from our previous company, had left his old firm six months earlier and was now head of sales for a manufacturer of a new portable oxygen concentrator. Even though we were in the earliest stages of setting up our company and he knew it, Chip asked us to be their national distributor to healthcare facilities.

This meant we could sell their products to all the healthcare facilities in the Veterans Administration, the military, and those operated by cities, counties, states and municipal hospital districts coast to coast, plus the thousands of private hospitals, nursing homes and clinics across the country. It also meant we could rent the concentrator to individuals who were referred to us by these facilities. Holy cow.

Within a week, Chip also asked us to serve as a manufacturer's rep in Texas, which means we would be out showing product and bring in purchase orders. All this, and we hadn't even signed a contract yet!

Around the same time, a vendor of mine that sold and rented bariatric patient care equipment and has a network of distribution centers around the country, asked if we could be their distributor to the government.

Meanwhile, all of my old vendors scrambled to jump on our bandwagon and get on our government contract which we would apply for in the fall. This thing was ballooning right before our eyes, and it was all we could do to catch our breath.

Since I had 12 years of experience selling durable medical equipment – as a dealer, a corporate manufacturer's rep, an independent manufacturer's rep and recently a distributor – I was considered the senior sales person on the team.

For several years, I've thought I'd be great at being a national sales director for a durable medical equipment company, but never had a clue how it would happen. Yet all it took was for Terry to say, "Janet, you're in charge of sales," and in a heartbeat, my title went from Account Manager to National Sales Director.

As of this writing, it is six months since Terry and I had lunch and we officially teamed up. Now it’s just a matter of a few months until we get our federal contract approved, and when that happens, the tidal wave will hit.

We already have several VA hospitals around the country ready, willing and eager to do business with us once we get our contract. After we get settled in with the federal sales, we’ll go after business from the state, city and county facilities and, of course, the private sector. The possibilities are endless.

And while that is manifesting, I decided to ramp up my public relations business and now have several small local clients, who provide exactly the kind of supplemental income I desire without the hassles of large accounts.

It’s all good. And so it is.

* * *

Janet White is National Sales Director for GTL Supply Solutions, LLC, a distributor of medical equipment to government and private healthcare facilities nationwide. www.gtlsolutions.com

She is the author of “Secrets of the Hidden Job Market: Change Your Thinking to Get the Job of Your Dreams,” available at www.jobmarketsecrets.com and Amazon. Email her at janet@jobmarketsecrets.com or call (972) 517-7503.