Real manifesting

Intend - plan - do - improve

TLDR: Manifesting, properly conceived, is not all that different to timeboxing
Word count: 384
Read time: 2 mins

It’s easy — and I’m naturally inclined — to take a dim view of manifesting. It’s essentially just wishful thinking, designed to deceive the have-nots into thinking they can have whatever they want. This kind of concept is not new. It has a long history dating back to the New Thought movement of the 19th Century.

The idea smacks of tarot card reading, crystal ball gazing and certain religious claims that promise lots (eternal bliss, for example) in exchange for cash or devotion today. With all such ideas, the promise is more appealing to the poor / vulnerable / fanciful. You can be whatever you want is the populist platitude that conveniently ignores genetics, hard work and luck.

But if we take a pause to consider the best version of the concept (as we should with all ideas!), I think that it’s real and that it works. To manifest is to:

• Understand your goals

• Visualise them

• Believe they’re possible

• Align actions to those goals

• Make what you’re doing visible to the world (I talk about the concept of usefully shareable in my book - get the thing to a stage where it can be put out there to inform / influence / inspire / help others, and good things can come back)

• And retain a positive mindset about those goals

Seen this way, it sounds downright sensible. I would just add that in aligning actions to the goals, it would be helpful to be temporally specific, ie to determine when exactly these actions would take place.

And in that version of manifesting it is not very far away from timeboxing - which is really intending, planning and doing, retaining a pragmatically positive mindset throughout and continually reviewing and improving the process.

I’d go much further, actually:

Any effective system of self-determination / self-actualisation, positive productivity is, in the end, going to be equivalent to this. Because intending, planning, doing and improving are fundamental to our cognitively-blessed species.

Call it manifesting with a clock, timeboxing, or whatever you like, but it’s simply working out what you should do, when to do it, and doing it.

The promise here is not that you will get a yacht or a perfect physique or a promotion or a Rolex. It’s that you will use your time well. Nothing more. But nothing less. And that’s actually rather a lot.

Marc

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Links you may like

7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
Timeboxing, el libro (Español)
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