The term “manifesting” has been trending over the last couple of years and at first I was against it, but let me tell you why this is incredibly important for your success.
If you don’t know what you want, you won’t know when you actually have it. How many times have we said to ourselves how awesome life is going to be when we have all the cool things we want? Now how many times have we actually stopped to think “woah, I actually have a lot of the things I wished for as a teenager.” The answer is probably not that often. When I did that reflection on myself, I learned that I actually have more of the things I wished and worked for since I was much younger than I thought. Now the real question was, where do I go from here?
It took me a while to think about my dream life. I thought about how my ideal life looked like following year, then in 3 years, then in 7 years, and then when I’m all old and wrinkly. This process for me didn’t come naturally and I have to give credit to this amazing book I’ve read called Hustle Believe Receive: An 8-Step Plan to Changing Your Life and Living Your Dream by Sarah Centrella. This is not a promo but I highly encourage everyone to get a copy! Overall, I do know what I want my life to look at by the time I’m old and get to reflect on my life’s work. But I was pretty shocked to see that I had no idea what I wanted my life to look in the meantime, in just 1-3 years. Since I’m old fashioned, I got a piece of paper and a pen and just started writing down all of the things I wanted in detail. A new electric car, a bigger apartment with a patio, to travel to at least one new place, to start my own traditions like trying a new restaurant every month, and well I won’t bother you with the rest. After I had my list of the kinds of new things I wanted and all of the activities I wanted to do, I started planning out how I was going to achieve them.
The materialistic things would take me a little longer but for those I went into even more detail. Material things cost money, and to earn money you have to get a job, and for myself that meant booking more acting gigs, which meant updating my resume / reel with new material. Every end goal on my list had at least 5 little goals I could be doing on the daily that would subsequently lead me to crossing off my end goal without even thinking about it. Then I saw that the restaurant thing would be easy; I could sign up to several websites that publish the hottest new spots in the city and I would try some of them out. Once everything was laid out on paper for some reason it made things more attainable in my mind.
To my understanding and the way I’ve been hearing the word “manifest” makes it seem like all we have to do is envision the life we want and subconsciously we’ll be attracting those things into our lives. Skkkkkkrrrrt skrrrrrt - that’s not how it works. Everything must start with envisioning the life we want, somehow keeping track of that, and then working for it. It’s kind of like going to the grocery store: you know that you need groceries for the week and you can probably do a good job at getting most things, but if you go into the grocery store with a list of all the items you need then you’ll know for sure that you have everything you want. The new year is always everyone's favorite time to make those changes we've been saying we want to make, but get a head start and jot down your (near) future life now! #timetovivir