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Manifesting is one of the biggest New Age fads of 2020. As the coronavirus pandemic forced people into isolation from the physical world, many chose to retreat to their inner world and reconnect with their spiritual side.
Advocates for manifesting claim that the practice can turn your aspirations into reality. How? By intensely thinking positive thoughts about it. Manifesting claims that if you focus your energy and intention on an outcome, it will ‘manifest’. There’s definitely a strong appeal to manifesting: it sounds like an easy way to wish free healthcare for all or a million dollars into the world.
Whether you’re a believer looking for suggestions on how to manifest good things into your life or a skeptic wondering if there’s a kernel of truth to this New Age practice, you might find that manifesting can be used in different ways to suit your lifestyle and principles.
What Is Manifesting?
Manifesting is New Age but it certainly isn’t new. Though it only started to trend in the 2020s, the practice made its first mainstream appearance with Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. Published in 2006, the book claims to have gathered evidence of a ‘Great Secret’ in the religious traditions and community knowledge of several cultures since antiquity. In it, she reveals manifesting as a practice of channeling your thoughts and aspirations into the world to make them real.
Is it as groundbreaking as Bryne presents it to be? Not really. The law of attraction, another principle that claims that your positive and negative thoughts shape your reality, has been around since the 19th century when the New Age movement began to take root. Both of these New Age concepts promise practitioners the ability to shape reality through thought.
As much as I’d like to provide a more specific definition of manifestation, the practice is admittedly a pseudoscience hence the loose definition that lets you interpret just about anything as manifestation. Depending on who you ask, the question of how to manifest can involve meditation, prayer, or just good-old science-based cognitive reframing.
When you look at it from a different angle, manifesting really just comes down to setting your goals, affirming yourself, and using positive thoughts to sustain your momentum.
How to Manifest in 4 Steps
Step #1: Set Your Intentions
The first step to learning how to manifest begins with knowing what you want in the first place. Manifestation requires intense focus on a goal and not having that set goal in mind makes it impossible to manifest anything. Put in non-New Age terms, your manifestations should have a specific and actionable goal that you’re sure you can accomplish within a set timeframe.
Goals like these are called SMART goals. It’s often used in Industrial and Organizational psychology to help professionals and organizations streamline their processes to be as efficient and effective as possible. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For example, let’s say that you want a change of career next year. We can see that the goal is time-bound as it’s supposed to happen by 2022. Now, let’s make it specific by picking a career. Maybe you’re an office administrator who wants to become a digital artist. Your measure of success for this goal would likely be to make a decent living as an illustrator. Since you’re the one who benefits if you make money off of your art, then the goal is now relevant, too.
That said, it takes hours of work and practice to develop the skills to be a full-time artist. This is where ‘attainable’ comes in; your goal should be feasible in the context of your current abilities and how quickly you can leverage the position you’re in. With a bit of luck, you’ll be able to manifest your SMART goals.
Step #2: Do The Work
Manifesting is the act of being a creative force in your own life. This is something a lot of people miss when learning how to manifest: under all the flowery language about vibrations and angel numbers, manifestation still requires that you take an active hand in achieving your goals.
Despite the way it’s presented, manifestation isn’t an instant magic trick to get what you want without working hard for it. Thinking positively about your goals can only go so far. While thoughts shape our internal world, thoughts alone can’t alter the physical reality around us. Manifestation is you exerting your will on the world around you and to do this, you need to be proactive in your life.
Step #3: Keep An Eye Out for ‘Signs’
Or in less superstitious terms: learn to recognize an opportunity when you see one. When you start to gain momentum in your journey to manifesting your goal, you’ll have to start noticing the ways you can take advantage of opportunities when they show up. An amicable relationship with an acquaintance could mean a better-paying job. I know you’re thinking of nepotism, but it really isn’t about that. Just knowing a lot of people in a lot of places can help you stay up to date on who’s hiring and when, giving you the chance to get your foot in the door before other applications start streaming in.
Another thing to keep an eye out for when you start learning how to manifest is the concept of functional fixedness. Functional fixedness falls under the category of cognitive biases in psychology. This form of cognitive bias narrows your ability to see possibilities in the world around you because you’ve gotten so used to an object or a skill being used in a certain way that you can’t think of anything else it could be good for. When people say they don’t have the skills to do something, they may find themselves surprised that others think they have the beginnings of that skill, a sort of adjacent skill that can be refined for a different purpose that can help you pivot into the next major shift in your life.
Step #4: Be Radically Grateful
There’s another cognitive bias that can affect your understanding of how to manifest: confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when your mind picks out information and events in the external world that fit what you already believe or think about it. While it’s true that a lot of New Age beliefs work off confirmation bias (and really what belief doesn’t?), manifestation’s ability to get you to focus on the positive aspects of your intentions can keep you from falling into a trap of self-pity.
When you confirmation bias your way into the positive side of things, you’re giving yourself the tools to stay emotionally receptive and responsive towards your goals and yourself. This also keeps you from being too hard on yourself. While hard work is the key to any success story, working yourself into the ground is a fantastic way to make sure you’ll be out of commission for a long time. When manifesting, practice gratefulness to everyone who helped you along the way, especially yourself.
Is Manifesting Real?
If you’re still reading at this point, you may have noticed that the process of how to manifest bears striking similarities to mindfulness and meditation, both of which are shared by both New Age beliefs and established practices in cognitive-behavioral psychology.
The positive attitude that manifesting fosters in its practitioners is also similar to the use of positive affirmations in the therapy room. Positive affirmations are used in cognitive behavioral therapy as a way for clients to ‘overwrite’ negative thoughts that trigger depressive moods. If you want to put it in New Age terms, it keeps you on a high-frequency vibration, the kind of energy associated with positive, self-healing emotions.
Despite the connection manifesting has with cognitive behavioral therapy, that doesn’t mean we can treat manifestation as a cure-all solution to the ills of daily life. It may help keep your mood up and give you a way to stay emotionally centered, the fact remains that manifesting doesn’t do anything in the face of factors far out of your personal influence.
Several sources on manifestation and the law of attraction advocate for a ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps‘ mentality by speaking out against self-victimization. It’s a real phenomenon, sure, but it helps to remember that sometimes ‘playing the victim’ isn’t just play because you actually are a victim of, say, intergenerational poverty. When outcomes are heavily influenced by factors out of any one person’s control, it can be harmful and demotivating to encourage biting into, for example, the myth of the college drop-out billionaire.
This is without even touching on how the ‘you can do whatever you put your mind to’ mindset in manifestation circles can be medically and psychologically irresponsible. Manifestation doesn’t cure serious illnesses like colon colitis. Medical science does that and a faulty understanding of cause and effect is what leads to assumptions that positive thinking cures cancer or schizophrenia.
As with anything, learning how to manifest is good in moderation. It’s a great way to help you organize your emotions and aspects of your personal life. But leave it at that.