“Please tell me you aren’t going to talk about manifestation,” my (former! I am now fully freelance! More on that below) boss said to me last week. Sorry, Bethan, I’m going to talk about manifestation.
Well, sort of. I have read a whole bunch of books that have manifestation at their core. But I’m not going to recommend you read any of those books, as I had at least one bone to pick with every single one that I read. I actually do believe that some of the ideas central to manifestation can be powerful, but have a whole heap of qualifiers to add to that statement.
The universe is not vibrating around your unique & special thoughts
I fully believe that there is a lot that science doesn’t know about. But I really, really, really don’t think science is ever going to discover that there is some life force swooping around all of us, listening out to our thoughts, waiting for us to vibrate our energy toward making more money than we could possibly think of, and then sending us a winning lottery ticket. I’m pretty sure the universe doesn’t care what you do. If there is a life force, like God, or Allah, or whoever, I’m pretty sure getting you rich is not on their list or priorities. Sorry.
Bad thoughts don’t necessarily lead to bad things
I mean, there is some truth to this. If I have a crappy day, come home in a bad mood, then I’m more likely to be impatient with my kids, more likely to start an argument with someone, and maybe that could lead to bad things. A bad mood at work could lead to you not doing your job well, which could lead to you getting sacked, etc.
But I think there’s a very dangerous undercurrent to this kind of thinking, because it often suggests that by having negative thoughts, you are preventing good things from happening. I call bullshit.
Bad thoughts lead to bad things happening when you let them result in bad behaviour. And focusing on the negative can stop you from doing good things, that much is true. But it’s impossible to police your thoughts all the time. You can do work to encourage positivity, but anyone who says they only think good thoughts is either lying or high (or psychotic!)
This line of thinking can also lead into some slippery, and dangerous, areas around health.
However, I do believe in the power of positive thinking
I had to put down a book recently, because it suggested that people with chronic, difficult to diagnose illnesses, could be cured if they cleared their mental blocks. Again, that is some unscientific bullshit.
But when it comes to things you can control, mindset makes a huge difference. For example, let’s talk about launching my freelance business. To launch this successfully, I have had to do a lot of work around my mindset when it comes to money.
‘I can’t charge that much’ ‘Why would someone pay me to do that for them?’ ‘There is no way I will ever make enough to pay for our mortgage, bills and general life’ ‘I can’t do this on my own, I need to get a proper job.’
Do any of those sound familiar? Well, they’re all very familiar to me, as these are the thoughts that plagued me for months when I started to launch my side projects. They still follow me around now, from time to time.
The fact of the matter is that people are willing to pay for services they aren’t able to do themselves for whatever reason. They are willing to pay for people to teach them how to do things. People will pay for all sorts of things.
I offer something I am good at to other people who are less good at it. What I charge is in line with the market, and also makes sense for me in terms of what my financial needs are. Why am I so stressed out about charging my worth?
It’s taken a huge amount of work on my mindset to be able to do this! I took part in a group coaching programme, I have a co-mentor who I talk to about this stuff a couple of times a month, I read a lot of personal development books and I have a list of affirmations that I look at multiple times a day.
It does make a difference.
(PS: I feel like affirmations are often used as a film trope to suggest that someone is crazy or deluded. Guys, using affirmations is scientifically proven to change your internal dialogue. If you want to change the story your brain tells itself about any aspect of yourself, you should be doing affirmations.)
You have to put in the work
And this, out of all of the above, is the biggest one out there. It’s no use thinking positively, writing down what you want to happen, working on your mindset, etc, if you don’t actually do the things to get you to where you want to be.
Manifestation books are filled with examples of people who wrote down what they wanted, and then got given it miraculously the next day. And that kind of seredipity does happen occasionally to me, too. Like the fully operational Dyson vacuum I found on the street near my house, a week after I’d written down that I just wanted to find a new one because I couldn’t afford to replace the old one.
BUT would I rely on it happening? Never. Just writing stuff down isn’t enough to make it happen. I remember the Dyson incident so clearly because it’s one of a handful of times that kind of stuff has happened. That is not enough to base a life on.
Write out your goals, but also figure out what steps you need to take to get there. Can those steps be broken down into tiny actions? When are you going to do those things by?
Is it manifestation? Or is it white privilege?
I saw a meme of this the other day, and it made me laugh. In one of the books I am not going to recommend to you, the woman gives an example of manifestation in action. She wants some insane amount of money ($80k, if memory serves) to work with a business coach over the course of a year. She writes it down and then vibrates on that amount of money. She focuses all of her energy on it. She talks to everyone she meets about it. Then, lo and behold, an aunt calls her (“out of the blue”) and tells her she’d like to give her that exact amount of money.
First of all: How do I get a coaching gig where someone pays me EIGHTY THOUSAND dollars to work with me (and I worry about my rates!?). But second of all – that money was not manifested. That money came from having rich relatives! Would someone without a rich aunt have come to the same result by following the same process? Maybe, but don’t blame me for being incredibly dubious.
I mean, this woman has literally written a book about manifestation, and that’s one of the best examples she can come up with!? Come on.
Sometimes things feel like manifestation, but they are just your privilege working for you. The only reason that Dyson was waiting for me was because the people living in that house nearby had enough money to replace it with something better (and likely more expensive). That is my privilege (of where I live) in action.
I believe in abundance. I believe that there is enough work out there for me and my peers, that there is money all around me.
But then, I’ve always had enough. I know that if things go completely tits up and I burn through my savings, my parents would help support me. The possibility of not having enough and ending up living on the street is extremely unlikely. Believing in abundance is easy for me. That is a huge privilege, and I fully recognise it.
In summary…
Yes, you can write things down and vibrate your energy toward them and hope the universe delivers them to your door. When you focus your energy on something, you tend to see it more often. For example, when I was pregnant, and was looking to buy a buggy, I have never seen so many buggies in my life – they stood out for me because my attention was on them.
The best way to manifest success is to write things down, focus on what you want out of life, and then actually go out and do the shit that needs to be done to make it happen!
Thoughts? Really disagree with me on any of this? Are you a true believer? I would love to know where people stand. As I said in the intro, I do actually believe in manifestation, it’s just my definition of what that means seems to be wildly different from the authors of most of the books about it!
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This is interesting. I’ve read several of the Rhonda Byrne books about the law of Attraction. There is no scientific evidence behind any of it. But there is an undefinable something? You know that thing where you haven’t seen anybody for absolutely ages, you think about them and then the next day you get a call Or you see them on the street? How many times does that happen! Is it just a coincidence?
I think the mind is a very powerful tool that we don’t fully understand. I think we could probably use it in ways we can’t even imagine – if we knew how.
But I think everything that we do, we think, we feel, we say, we need – it all has to be done in harmony not just with ourselves but with everybody and everything else.
I agree that there is something more than we fully understand, but I also feel like the way that most of the books I’ve read have gone about it feel very dubious. And I also think about all the times I’ve thought of a friend and they HAVEN’T called. Our minds are designed to look to patterns in the world around us, so while I think there’s definitely more that we will uncover about the power of our minds, I also do think that some things probably are just coincidence.