If there’s one activity I can really get behind, it’s manifesting. I believe that if I want to be a rocket scientist, I can be. If I want to beat Elon Musk at a game of Sudoku, I can. If I want to create the world’s largest rice mosaic, I can.

And before you say “I want some of what she’s smoking”, I’ll quickly let you know that I’ve just finished drinking a tall glass of the Tony Robbins Kool-Aid. And I’m very, very into it. The dude is a steel-bending, mind-shaping, reality-shifting powerhouse.

One thing the big man says is that “whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life”. Reading between the pearly white veneers, I think what he is talking about is manifestation — the buzzword of our new paradigm.

It may seem that every second person you meet these days is currently “manifesting” something. But what the “F” is manifestation, and how can you use it to your business advantage?

In short: we can create our own reality. And on a daily basis, we do.

Manifestation is often nestled deep in the drawers of new-age hippie BS between tarot cards and a dusty copy of The Secret that smells mildly of patchouli and nag champa incense. Whatever you wanna call it, manifestation is, in essence:

• The law of attraction
• Creating your own luck
• Vision boarding — only far more effective and rooted in neuroscience as opposed to Pinterest

Before you slowly back out of the room, stick with me (and please BYO radical optimism, hopeful curiosity and a stick of sage  to cleanse the air after I leave you).

Thankfully, we don’t need to consult the crystal ball, worship the gods of chai, spend hundreds on a fortune teller or give up gluten to benefit from manifestation. We all participate in manifesting on a day-to-day basis, whether we’re aware of it or not. Our thoughts are constantly creating an energy flow and that energy attracts its likeness. That’s why when you have a shitty morning (why does your toast always land butter-side down?) the rest of your day is likely to transpire into even greater heights of shittiness. Alternatively, if you focus on the positive (this morning’s sunrise was orgasmic), you’re more likely to go about your day with a sense of gratitude and attract more positive outcomes for the entirety of your day.

I would consider myself experienced in the art of manifesting. I strongly believe in the power of creating your own luck and do my best to actively cultivate this good fortune daily. In fact, I credit a lot of the success of my creative agency, Smack Bang Designs, to manifestation. Over the last eight years, I’ve noticed how my thoughts and feelings directly impact my reality and, surprisingly, our bottom line. And it seems I’m not alone.

All of the great entrepreneurs I admire credit the practice of manifestation as a key ingredient to their secret sauce of success. This superpower takes the practice of visualisation to a higher state of consciousness by imploring our emotions and feelings. Manifesting is essentially asking the mind to believe we’ve already achieved our goals and desires — as if we are living and breathing our dreamed reality. In doing so, our energy attracts its likeness — we are able to attract this goal or desire into our reality.

It’s simple really; positive thoughts attract positive outcomes, while negativity begets negative outcomes. Interested? Of course you are. So how do you do it? You simply close your eyes (look serene, don’t hold your jaw too tight … be Zen, god dammit!), sit on a rock and cross your legs (I don’t care that you’re getting haemorrhoids and your knees are so stiff they’re holding up your chin), visualise yourself in your dream life (yes, of course your teeth are whiter in your dream life) and feel it in your soul (the same way you feel coffee pulse through your veins at 7am on a Monday morning).

Just kidding, you don’t have to do it like they do on Instagram.

Manifesting on the fly

I find that manifesting things on the fly works best for me. Anywhere, anytime. The key to it is practice, conviction, imagination and courage.

For a long time I kept my manifesting to myself — a dirty little secret not unlike the fact that I like putting my undies in the dryer before wearing them (so damn warm!), but now here we are. It’s 2020, and I’m writing a blog about manifesting. The future is weird.

Before we get started though, I would like to say that I recognise manifestation is completely a matter of opportunity. And that opportunity is intrinsically linked to privilege. We live in a world where we are told we can have whatever we want, however I am fully aware that I personally have been born into a set of circumstances and privilege that provide security and opportunity that are unfortunately not available to everyone. With this opportunity we are able to leap into the great power of manifesting — we truly are lucky.

Here’s what I know for sure. Open your palms and get ready to create your own damn future.

Get clear on what you truly want

The first step in manifesting is knowing what it is you want to manifest (duh). Knowing what you want begins the creation process, but sometimes it makes for an uncomfortable conversation with ourselves. What do I truly want? What do I deeply value? What will make me fulfilled? You need to get really specific about what you want so you can start to bring it into your life. Do you want to find your next great client? Do you want a brand-spanking shiny new office? Do you want Ryan Gosling as your PA?

Having extremely clear intentions is imperative — the universe finds it hard to read between the lines. I find that writing down my goals is more powerful than just thinking them — probably because I have a memory like a goldfish and forget my thoughts approximately two seconds after having them — but also because writing them down seems to give them more weight.

Energy flows where attention goes

The next step is envisioning your goals with laser-sharp intention. How do you cause something to change? You direct your power towards it. Remember the Robbins Kool-Aid — “Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life.”

Manifestation and meditation go together like IKEA furniture and Allen keys (or should I say IKEA furniture and marital arguments?). Meditation, by definition, is a practice where an individual uses a technique to train attention and awareness to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.

Meditation is a very powerful tool for bringing more of what you want into your life. It brings about clarity and gives you the time, space and opportunity to really connect with the “feeling” of attaining your goals. Meditation is where you can fire and wire new neural pathways to convince your subconscious that you’ve already achieved and are therefore worthy of attaining your deepest desires. There are many different kinds and ways of learning meditation, but if you’re interested, I would highly recommend checking out The Broad Place.

Your self-worth dictates your reality

Here’s a cold, hard fact for you. Your manifestation results are intrinsically linked to your self-worth. The thing is, you can tell the universe what you want all day, but if you don’t believe you’re deserving of success, you will stay stuck where you are forever.

Conversely, if you boost your self-worth, that which no longer matches your lower state of worth simply falls away. Just as the legendary Michael Jordan once put it, “You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.” You need to step into your worth to be open to receiving it.

You gotta feel it to create it

What’s imperative to understand is that the power of manifestation lies in the “feeling” of our dreamed reality as much as the visualising. Let’s face it, manifestation is pretty much a glamorised version of adult make believe. You simply fake it ‘til you make it. You think of your goal and begin acting like it’s already happened. In doing so, you’re accessing your subconscious and waking it up to take action.

By “feeling it” you change your reality at a cellular level; your body-mind connection quite literally convinces your being that you have achieved your goal and so, on a physics level, your energy attracts that goal into your reality. Joe Dispenza is my ultimate homeboy and a total guru on this topic.

You gotta werk, werk, werk, werk, werk

A big misconception is that manifestation is simply thinking positive thoughts and, at the click of your fingers, all of your deepest desires will be fulfilled. This is an extremely narrow and flawed view of the concept. Let me assure you, if you sit around waiting for your black Porsche to materialise in your driveway, you’re bound to be disappointed.

You don’t simply close your eyes, wish for what you want, and then leave things up to chance. It’s quite the opposite really. It’s in the doing that the real magic of manifestation exists. It’s not surprising, with my Taurean drive and ceaseless need to achieve, that I find manifesting works best when I do. I’m a big believer in the heady combination of manifestation and hard-freaking-yakka. You must commit to action and do the work, otherwise you’re doing little more than fantasising or daydreaming — which is a beautiful pastime, but probably not the quickest route to achieving your wildest desires.

Check yo’self before your wreck yo’self

When it comes to getting what we want, we often get in our own way. Just like those inspirational quotes on Pinterest tell us, “You are your only limit.” Self-limiting beliefs, bad habits or negative patterns hold us back from playing bigger and experiencing amazing things. By ridding yourself of these bullshit lies you tell yourself, or freeing yourself from past failures, you can create space for the good vibes. This will inevitably attract more good vibes. As you do so, you will also fine-tune your intuition, which you’ll quickly realise is a close BFF of manifestation and another very powerful tool in boosting your business’ bottom line.

Rally your troops

As a business leader, you have to envision yourself in the place you want to be before you can get there. The best way to do this is to surround yourself with people who are already “there”.

Lacy Phillips, the queen of manifestation, talks about these people as “expanders”. Surrounding yourself with people who are living the life of their dreams shows our subconscious what’s possible. By hanging out with “expanders” we raise our energy because, after all, seeing is believing.

Be patient

Now Mum, I know you’re reading this and thinking “Patience and Tess — that’s the best oxymoron there is.” And I will agree, impatience is more my forte. But when it comes to manifestation, it’s important to understand that good things take time. Manifesting is a salsa dance between push and pull — we need to work at it and take action every day to bring us closer to our goals, but we also need to sit back and let fate take the steering wheel occasionally. Having patience is to trust that the universe will deliver in perfect timing.