A little word on manifestation
The verb ‘to manifest’ literally means showing a quality or a feeling through an act. If you’re familiar with ‘manifestation’ in the spiritual sense then my apologies now for no doubt getting this wrong as all I have on which to base my knowledge is a few podcasts and a bit of light reading and I am sure there are many of you far better qualified than me to enlighten us on the topic, however, I am going to give it my best shot.
The 2006 bestselling book, The Secret, is a self-help guide that teaches the reader how to attract life goals and essentially turn dreams into realities. Again, I hold my hand up, I haven’t read it as I’ve always been a bit turned off by the whole concept and felt it was a bit too spiritual for me. However, I want to share with you some of my recent experiences with manifestation and my take on it. Who knows, I might even read it now too….
A Bit of Background
When I’m at my workbench I listen to a lot of podcasts, I like learning about the world while I’m also working, it’s a great way to multi task. Recently I’ve been really getting into Jake Humphrey’s High Performance Podcast and I’m planning to work my way through all of them over the next 6 months or so. Anyway, I recently listened to Roxie Nafousi’s episode on manifestation and it really struck a chord with me. If you haven’t heard it, it's very interesting, accessible and I can highly recommend it.
A Couple of Examples
Those of you who have read my ramblings before will know that I journal a fair bit and I like to look back on some of the things I’ve written in the past as it reminds me how far I have come. I have shared this with you before but I’ll share it again as it’s relevant to the topic. In April 2020, I had a dream to start a crafting business but I didn’t actually believe that I ever would. Because of this belief, around the same time, I forced myself to do some digging into my self-limiting behaviours, I.e. what was it that I believed in that was stopping me from pursuing this dream? I can see a sentence in my journal that reads, “it’s hard to make craft pay”. I can remember writing this and the reality of it is, yes it is hard, but that isn’t a reason in itself to not do it. However, for me the belief was that it would be too hard and I would therefore fail.
Here’s another example – I’m a runner, I’ve been running for years and I like the benefits it brings to my body and mind. I’m not a good runner though, and I’m not always a consistent runner. The first part of that sentence is a limiting belief and the second part is a fact, can you see the difference? Also, the interesting thing here is that to be a good runner, you have to be a consistent runner. It took me a long time to realise that because up until about 4 years ago, I just ran whenever I felt like it and I never consistently focussed on a goal with my running or implemented strategies to reach it. My running had plateaued and I wasn’t able to improve and get faster, hence I just believed I wasn’t a good runner, I never questioned that I just believed it. By the way, none of us think we are good runners, but we are, it’s all relative, it’s best to compare yourself to you rather than to anyone else, but that’s another topic.
It took a leap of faith and opened myself up to the idea of trying something new by working for a period of time with a professional running coach. He believed that with hard work and consistency I could improve my performance and after a few months of surrendering to his plan, I saw the improvements for myself. I learnt a lot about myself and my capabilities during that hugely valuable experience and although I no longer train with a running coach and I don’t always run well, the difference now is that I have it within me to be a better runner if I want to be it’s just not a huge priority in my life at the moment. The key thing is though, that limiting belief that I'm not a good runner has now gone forever.
So what’s the point of this? I just wonder whether you have limiting beliefs and whether they are holding you back at all? One of the biggest issues with them is that they can be so ingrained within you that you don’t even question them and you might not even be aware of them (I wasn’t) but what they are costing you in terms of holding you back from high performance could be sizeable.
Manifestation and positive mindset
Listening to the podcast made me realise that for me, the process of manifestation is not about praying to a spiritual guardian for good things to happen before sitting back and waiting, but rather it’s about my mindset and turning my negative beliefs into positive ones.
When you believe that good things can happen and that you have it within you to make it happen then this encourages hard work and it starts the journey towards a dream. There’s nothing to lose once you start the journey either because the things you learn along the way are equally as valuable as where you end up.
If you made any dreams at the start of January that you’ve already given up on then I would like to invite you to revisit them. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and be really honest with yourself, what is it that you really believe that is stopping you starting the journey towards making them happen? This isn’t always a nice thing to write down, I’ll be honest, but believe me when you look back on it in 3 years and see how far you’ve come since you felt that way it’s the best feeling ever! I would then urge you to questions those things you’ve written down, really question them, where do they come from? If your friend was saying those things to you right now, what would you say to them to challenge them and use that to challenge yourself. What actually have you got to lose and how is inactivity working out for you?
As a final thought, here are 3 things I wrote in April 2020 when I was really trying to challenge myself:
Fear of risk stops you doing things that could make you happier and stronger
There is more to lose by not trying
There is no ‘failure’ only opportunities to learn and improve
Good luck on your journey and do share in the comments anything that you have learnt yourself on this topic.
Thanks for reading, Helen x
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