Bread, Oil and Life Coaching - the Expansion of Abundance

The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim 180) instructs:

Do not remove the tablecloth and bread from the table until you have said Grace After Meals. Those who leave no bread on the table will never see a sign of blessing.

The Mishnah Berurah here notes that blessing cannot rest upon something that is empty, and that we learn this from the story of Elisha and the jar of oil. This is found in Kings II:4:

1. And there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets to Elisha, saying, Your servant my husband is dead; and you know that your servant feared the Lord; and the creditor has come to take to him my two sons to be slaves.

2. And Elisha said to her, What shall I do for you? tell me, what have you in the house? And she said, Your maidservant had not any thing in the house, save a jar of oil.

Elisha tells her to gather many empty utensils, and pour out from her jug into these. She does so, and a miracle occurs, and the jugs keep filling up in abundance, until all the utensils are finished.

Elisha did not create something out of nothing, but rather expanded what was already there. This is a fantastic lesson for us and is consonant with the principles of life coaching. One major difference between life coaching and therapy is that instead of delving deeply into what's wrong and trying to fix it, life coaching looks to what is already there, the strengths and the positive that exist, and begins immediately to increase it incrementally, through action, through positive thinking and affirmations.

Though a prophet - whose job it generally is to aid people to do inner processes of repentance - Elisha here did not to go into why the woman was starving or the spiritual reasons behind it. He stepped in, said "What do you have in the house?" and proceeded from there. Similarly, we don't always have to go into deep therapy to fix what's broken in us; we can make positive change and that in and of itself can heal us and make us whole and full...

As Rebbe Nachman of Breslov says in his well-known Torah "Azamra" (Likutei Moharan 282), we look to gather the good points, from amongst all the negative. And when we gather those good points, true good is created and expanded, and together all the points make up a melody.

P.s. In parshat Toldot, when Isaac wishes to bless Esau, he asks him to bring him tasty food first, so that he can bless him from within the experience of savouring delicious food. I think this fits with the idea developed above, that in order to create expansive blessing, Isaac wished to get himself into a state where he was already fully inside the positive experience, of what there already was, and proceed from there to expand outwards to what hadn't yet manifested.
This principle is something some New Age philosophies emphasize (e.g. Abraham-Hicks) and I think there is great wisdom to it, to start with what there is, from where our souls can bless and thank G-d naturally.