Manifesting for Beginners: Step-by-Step Guide to Manifesting the Life You Want

3 Steps to Create The Results You Want Without Wishful Thinking or Endless Spiritual Study

If you’re curious about manifestation, you may have wondered:

• “Is manifesting just a dressed-up version of wishful thinking?”
• “Is this a pagan ritual that I need to buy crystals and move to Sedona to do?”
• “If I try it, do I have to pretend bad things aren’t happening, or that everything is my fault?”

The answer to all three of these questions is an emphatic NO!

Manifestation is not fantasizing, some kind of dark art, or an exercise in denying difficult circumstances.

It’s actually a keen awareness of the way that our thoughts, feelings, and actions co-create the results we have in life.

Whether you attend spiritual retreats or pride yourself on strictly rational, cause-and-effect thinking, you are still manifesting results in every area of your life, every single day. 

The challenge –– and the opportunity –– is to actively direct the manifestation process. So that you can trade the results your limiting beliefs haphazardly create for the results that you would truly love.

And while this is a deep topic with many layers, it’s actually quite simple to begin sharpening your ability to manifest!

Step 1: Shift your awareness from what you don’t want, to what you would love

At first, you might think: “What do you mean? Isn’t what I would love just the opposite of what I hate?” 

NO! It isn’t –– and a true awareness of the difference is the starting point for manifesting your dreams, instead of just living on autopilot.

As strange as it may sound, when your attention is fixed solely on getting rid of what you don’t want, you actually attract more of those exact things into your life. 

Why? Because our minds, at the deepest level, cannot easily grasp the context of the things we think about. 

So for instance, if we repetitively think something like “I hate having to sit in boring meetings all day at work”, it may seem obvious that your goal is to stop spending your time that way…

But in the depths of your subconscious, all your mind hears is “boring meetings.” And from that starting point, your mind then creates more thoughts and feelings that perpetuate you being in boring meetings!

This is one of the rarely-discussed ways that the Law of Attraction works to create our results. The thoughts and feelings that are most prevalent in our minds send out signals to attract what those thoughts and feelings are a vibrational match for.

When spiritual teachers say “our thoughts shape our reality”, that is the direct meaning of this cryptic phrase.

Now, I’m not saying you can just flip a switch and instantly stop thinking the thoughts you do now. Or that manifestation is about replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts.

What I am saying is: If you want amazing results that you love, those amazing results need to become the primary thing you think about. Because that’s the only way to ever attract them.

And luckily, this isn’t something you need to force into being, or lace up the boxing gloves and fight with your mind to make happen.

Once your awareness shifts from “what I don’t want” to “what I would love”, your power to manifest grows naturally.

So, sticking with our example––dig deeper than your disdain for meetings. If somehow, magically, those disappeared from your calendar, what would you love to spend your time at work doing? 

Once you ask yourself this question (or whatever the equivalent version is for you) I’ll tell you what you’re in for at first: a confusing, maddening silence! 

It will most likely take some time and exploration for you to detect what you would feel alive and happy doing.

Why? Because, up until now, your attention has been exclusively focused on what you don’t want!

You may experience some irritation, or notice thoughts such as: “I don’t know! I just don’t want to go to another pointless meeting where everyone says the same old stuff!”

If thoughts like these come up, it’s okay! Notice them. Be aware that right now, these are, in fact, the dominant thought loops that you go through every day. 

Then, to the best of your ability, set these thoughts aside and sincerely ask yourself: “What would I love?”

This is Manifestation 101. Let your visual imagination take over, and picture a scene where you feel engaged, purposeful, happy, content…whatever your word is. 

In whatever area of life feels most important to you right now, concentrate on an achievement, a project, a lifestyle change, or a feeling that would make you light up inside. 

Then, it’s time to take this fuzzy image and flesh it out into its full glory.

Step 2: Sharpen “the what” while ignoring “the how”

Once you shift your awareness in the direction of what you would love, the next move is sharpening your mental picture of it. 

The mind responds to pictures far more than to words, and so, the more vividly you can imagine what you want to manifest, the more quickly and fully it will come. 

However, if you are not careful, there is one obstacle that can interfere with your visualizations: your mind’s incessant questions about “how” you’ll do whatever it is you picture. 

So for instance, you might start picturing a project you would love to take on at work. Something you truly believe could attract a ton of new clients, elevate the way the company is perceived, and put it on the map in a much bigger way…

Only for your vision to get short-circuited by thoughts like: 

• “How would I ever pull that off?”
• “This is totally different than anything the company is doing.”
• “I don’t see any way it gets approved.”
• “So-and-so would never get on board.”
• And on and on and on

When these thoughts come up, it can feel immobilizing––like it’s useless to continue imagining what you would love until you have point-by-point answers for all of these interrogations about how you’ll do it.

When this happens, remind yourself of something that can be very easy to forget: you didn’t use a “how” to create the life situation you have now.

You didn’t follow a detailed 50 page plan to wind up where you are today. And you don’t need one to manifest money, or love, or success, or whatever you want to create next.

The Universe doesn’t respond to “how.” It responds to the dominant thoughts, feelings, and images in our minds, and the actions those things naturally prompt us to take.

What you need right now is not a “how”, but trust. Not a trust borne of blind belief, but a trust in the fact that there are forces at play that are beyond words, explanation, or linear “this leads to that” thinking. 

Open a Google Doc or a blank notebook page and write this down: “If success was an absolute certainty, what would I love to experience?” 

Then describe that end result in as much color, detail, and cinematic specificity as possible. Make it a visualizable scene. If you want to make vision boards or a gratitude journal, now is the time.

Don’t just write down “I would be happy” or “I would have money.” Describe, as fully and richly as you can, EXACTLY what your new state of existence would look like and consist of. 

Most importantly, let yourself feel it. Let the scene you’ve created stir something in you. Allow it to move beyond words and into sensation. 

The thrill of possibility. The quiet certainty of knowing. The electricity of an idea so real, so alive, that it almost feels inevitable. As if merely contemplating it is raising your vibrations.

Because that’s when true manifestation begins—not when you figure out “how”, but when you become so aligned with the vision that the “how” starts revealing itself in ways you never could have planned.

What’s important is not how many positive affirmations you say, or which inspirational quotes you read on your social media. 

It’s whether you can create a vision that is so powerful, it sends a shockwave through your entire life.

That’s what the art of manifesting is all about!

Step 3: Take one step today, from where you are, with what you have

Lastly, once you have a crisp and compelling image of what you want to manifest, take the first step.

You don’t need a perfectly-worked-out “how” for the entire journey, but you do need to set the journey into motion with some kind of concrete action.

This is the difference between someone who practices manifesting and actually sees a shift in their results, versus someone who just reads about it and gets nowhere. (Which is a lot of people!)

As you consider which step to take, you may notice your mind throw up yet another trap: the thought that whatever small step you can take today isn’t enough to actually matter. 

This is especially common in situations where the thing you want to manifest is massive––the kind of dream that would often be thought of as “a ten year plan.”

Yet even if you have huge, soaring, “put a dent in the Universe” ambitions, there is still a step you can take today to start moving energy in that direction. 

If you aren’t sure what that step should be, ask yourself this: what step can I take today, from where I am, with what I have?”

This doesn’t have to be a huge action. It could be as simple as making a phone call, sending an email, or purchasing a piece of software. 

Whatever the specific step you take is, it will set off a chain reaction that leads to an actual shift in your lived results––which makes the next action (and the next, and the next, and the next) inevitable. 

By the time you finish manifesting the life you want, you will most likely look back on the journey and realize that it went NOTHING LIKE any plan you could have formed in advance.

That’s exactly the point. When you place your trust in the unseen forces of the Universe, and control what you can control (by creating and living from a vision) what feels impossible becomes inevitable. 

Want to go beyond manifestation for beginners and discover the complete process to create your vision? Watch my free, 1-hour masterclass The 3 Keys To Creating An Extraordinary Life.