I Didn’t Know I Was Manifesting Until I Looked Back

Manifestation had a moment. A big one. It surged after The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s book that turned the idea into a household word, and for a while it felt like everyone had a vision board.

I had one too, if you can call it that. A Pinterest board, a while back, full of things I wanted. I put my wishes out to the universe the way the book said to. I manifested car parking spaces, among other things, with what I’d honestly call varying degrees of success. I never dug into it much deeper than that. It was superficial, a bit of fun, and I moved on.

But it did do one thing I didn’t expect. It cracked open a side of me I didn’t know was there. I’m an atheist, so a spiritual dimension wasn’t really on my radar until then. That small, superficial dabble somehow led me to Alan Watts, and from him to Buddhism, and from there to a few other places I still find myself circling back to. I’m not a practising Buddhist, but a lot of the teachings have stuck with me. The middle way, at its simplest, is the idea that wisdom tends to sit between two extremes rather than at either end of them, moderation over indulgence, balance over denial. My own take on it is a bit blunter: you never find an extremist standing in the centre. There’s a lot to say about that, and how relevant it feels today, but that’s a post for another day.

The real turn came later, and it came from somewhere much harder.

After Jay died, I was looking for ways to make life mean something again. I wasn’t trying to manifest anything. I was just trying to find a way through. It was only looking back, much later, that I realised what I’d actually been doing the whole time was manifesting, just not the way I’d understood it on that old Pinterest board. Not wishing for things and leaving it to the universe to sort out. Using my journalling and my morning rituals to set a course. Building an environment, day by day, that made it easier for the things I wanted to actually happen.

Once I noticed that, I leaned into it properly. I started building real vision boards into my journal, not a scattered Pinterest board but something aligned to what I actually wanted to move toward. I set a focus. I built an environment around it. And I started noticing, with a kind of quiet confidence, that the things I was pointing myself toward were genuinely showing up.

Some of it still feels a bit unbelievable, even to me.

I had a good coffee machine, but I wasn’t getting the best out of it. I wanted to actually be good at it, latte art and all, not just make a decent cup at home. A few months later, a friend with contacts at a coffee company arranged for me to meet their world champion barista, and she gave me a bit of hands-on training directly.

Another time, I put an incredible holiday on my vision board. In my head it was somewhere exotic, the Seychelles, an image of an island with a boat moored off it. Not long after, a friend won a trip on a luxury 30ft yacht, with staff, and invited us along. Not the Seychelles. But better.

Then there’s the one I still can’t quite explain. Work had gone quiet for a while, and one morning I was out walking Jay’s dog, turning over in my head how I might drum up some more of it. I came up to a junction, and a van went past, my client behind the wheel. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while, so later that day I messaged him, told him honestly that seeing the van had made me think of him. He replied straight away, said he’d actually been thinking about me too, he had a piece of work he thought I’d be a good fit for.

I’ve turned that one over a lot. Sometimes it’s about being ready for the opportunity when it shows up. Sometimes it’s about creating the opportunity without quite realising you’re doing it, maybe I’d mentioned wanting better latte art to a friend in passing, and something someone said to him later is what actually set that in motion. I don’t think it matters which it was. What I do think matters is building the environment, saying the thing out loud, making it feel real, and then noticing when it comes to pass, even when it turns up looking nothing like you pictured. Not the Seychelles. A yacht instead.

I don’t think any of that happened because I asked the universe nicely. I think it happened because I’d built a life, an attitude, and a set of habits that made me the kind of person those opportunities could actually find. I set the environment, stayed open to the opportunity, and believed it would come. I said what I wanted, out loud and on paper, and I kept showing up in ways that made it easier for it to land.

Wishing hands the work to something outside you. Manifestation, done properly, is you doing the work, quietly and consistently, and staying open enough to notice when it’s working.

What Manifestation Actually Means To Me

So now manifestation isn’t a separate thing I do. It’s built into gratitude and intention setting as one daily practice. I set goals and build a vision board around them. I create a focus, an environment, and a personal attitude that’s genuinely open to what I want and need, rather than gripping onto exactly how it has to arrive. I don’t force the specifics. More often than not, what actually turns up isn’t quite what I pictured at the start, and more often than not, it works out better than what I’d have planned myself.

That’s the difference, to me. Wishing hands the work to something outside you. Manifestation, done properly, is you doing the work, quietly and consistently, and staying open enough to notice when it’s working.

If you want to try a small version of this yourself, you don’t need a system for it. Write down one thing you actually want, plainly, the way you’d say it out loud to a friend. Then ask yourself one honest question underneath it: what’s one thing I could do today that makes this even slightly more likely? Not force it into being. Just make room for it. What manifestation actually means is up to you to decide. This is only what it’s come to mean for me.

That’s the same blank page you’ll find in the Jay’s Dad Journal, an open space alongside the daily rituals where you can build your own version of this, in your own way, over time.

This is the same blank page I use to build my own version of it. You’re welcome to build yours.