The 1 Common Misconception About Manifesting
And what the caveat to that is…
I recently read a really well-written article on how manifesting is BS because you can’t get anywhere without taking any action. It continued on giving some really illustrious personal examples of friends and acquaintances who were practicing changing their mindset but not putting any action into it and calling it manifesting.
Disclaimer: I am no expert. I am no manifestation coach and I’m no guru. I have had some success with manifestation, and everything going forward is just an explanation of how I view manifestation and how it’s helped me personally.
I totally understand the author’s point of view and perspective, but to me that is the biggest misconception of manifestation.
Misconception: Manifesting is all about changing your thoughts and thinking positive thoughts without putting any action behind it.
I’ve been following manifestation for about 2–3 years now and no I don’t lead the perfect life, nor am I remotely close to where I want to be. But I have manifested certain things into my life (a pregnancy, my ex-boyfriend to come back, etc.) that I feel are very strongly tied to what I practiced when I learned about manifestation.
In the manifestation community there seems to be a clear divide between those who practice law of attraction and those who practice other forms of manifestation.
Law of attraction is often associated with simply thinking positive thoughts. Full stop.
I’ve always been of the opinion that there is the word “action” in “attraction” so therefore it’s a necessary part of manifesting.
But before I delve further into that, let’s break manifesting down:
Manifestation starts off with determining what your desired goal or outcome is. In all essence it is goal setting. So far, I think we can all agree that that is reasonable.
Once you’ve decided on your desired goal or outcome, the next step is often to come up with different affirmations or thoughts that you can replace your current negative ones with. I think this seems to be a pretty reasonable thing as well. Negative thoughts don’t make your life fun, and it certainly doesn’t make it easier to work towards your goals.
A big part of manifesting is also to work on your self-concept. This means changing how you view yourself on your own and in relation to your goal. To me, I’ve always struggled with self doubt and limiting beliefs. And while I know I’ll never be completely free of them, it does make it incredibly challenging to work towards a goal when you feel unworthy of them or like they’re out of reach for you anyway. Working on how I view myself, and pouring into self-love and self-empowerment fundamentally changes how I then act.
Visualizing is another big thing in manifestation. And following-up with visualizing also comes determining how the person who has already achieved your desired outcome or goal would behave, feel, and ACT. This is where I feel strongly that actions comes into play.
If you’ve determined you want to be a money magnet, and you address your self-limiting beliefs around your worthiness of money, and you’ve identified how someone who feels worthy of money would act, feel, and think, and you then choose to act on that? It’s going to get you a lot further than acting when you haven’t done any mindset work.
An Example
The author of the blog post described an example of someone manifesting a raise or promotion at work not being an outcome of manifestation but working at a certain organization for a long time. It could absolutely be that. However, there are also many people who work for several years at a company and don’t receive a raise or promotion. That get overlooked.
So in that case, let’s say someone practices manifestation. They’ve determined that someone who has manifested a promotion would feel confident, they’d walk with purpose, they’d communicate differently with their boss, and they’d work differently with their co-workers. Suddenly, they feel energized at work and invigorated. They think of solutions to the company’s problems that they never had previously. They have an extra oomph that their boss notices. So therefore, their boss decides against promoting Steve and decides to promote for the newly-invigorated manifestor.
The Caveat
There is ONE place that I feel most manifestation coaches emphasize NOT acting on, and that is in the area of love.
From personal experience, I can affirm that yes, when you are trying to manifest a specific person back into your life or love overall, action in terms of contacting that person, driving past their place or “running” into them is not going to get you miraculously closer to your person.
Maybe it sounds crazy that just by changing your thoughts and beliefs about love or this individual will change whether or not they come back to you, but I ask you to think about the following…
How many of us have had this happen before where you were pining after your ex and then once you started moving on and started seriously dating someone, they came back? It felt like that taking your energy away from them somehow miraculously pulled them back in.
THAT’S why manifesting love or another person has nothing to do with action. At least not the kind of action that involves a second person.
I manifested my ex back simply by focusing on myself. I did not reach out to him. I never initiated contact with him. I never drove by his place (on purpose, he unfortunately lived close to my favorite grocery store so it was hard to avoid in some instances). And yet, he felt pulled to reach out to me when I was feeling absolutely whole and loved without him. When I was sure that he would come back, but that I also didn’t need to force it or that I was also 100% okay if it didn’t happen anytime soon.
When you are 100% sure of a certain outcome and you’re mentally and physically prepared for it, you’d be surprised how often it actually does occur.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I feel that manifestation is a different way to approach goal setting. It’s a way to build confidence.
As someone who struggles with worthiness and often puts others before her, I feel that manifestation is a blessing. Manifestation practices focuses on prioritizing yourself, because the thought is if you don’t prioritize you, why should someone else? It allows me to practice being my best version of myself without the intimidating jargon that I hear top CEOs talk about.
It’s approachable. It’s fun, and it’s rewarding and empowering. Who am I to say that it doesn’t work?
