When I share about the ways my life has transformed both personally and professionally, I am usually not telling the whole story.
I’m not sure why. I think it’s partly because I am passionate about hardcore strategy, finance and leadership. I love talking about these things and they are incredibly important. But to focus only on those things is leaving out a key piece of my success puzzle.
I was also afraid of being labeled as “woo woo.” As a female CEO, I focused on more stereotypically masculine skills like strategy, finance and hard data to prove I was just as capable as all the men who far outnumber me in this role. But doing that does myself and my audience a disservice.
The truth is, I have been a student of manifestation for over a decade. This started out as listening to The Secret audiobook every day on my commute, making vision boards, and compulsively journaling about what I wanted as if I already had it.
These initial attempts yielded mixed results. The reason, I would later learn, was because I was focused on the asking and the wanting, but not focused enough on my feelings. My emotional state was not in resonance with the things I wanted, so even when I imagined I already had them, I wasn’t able to get there. I also didn’t have a regular meditation practice, which limited me.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve continued to deepen my understanding and hone my ability to curate my inner world in order to attract what I want externally. Doing this, I have attracted circumstances that should not have been possible (like going from an employee to 50% owner of a 7 figure business in one year).
A year ago this month, we closed on our dream home. We got an amazing deal on a house in our ideal neighborhood that was much bigger and nicer than anything that we should have been able to afford in our price range. All this went down during an insane covid housing market that should have made these things totally impossible (especially for a first time buyer).
The market was so crazy that as soon as the house was listed, they were fully booked for showings (within MINUTES there were no more times available). Our agent was able to pull some strings to get us just ten minutes in the house.
As soon as I saw it, I was worried by how much I loved it. It was the highest priced house we had looked at and by far the nicest in our price range (by A LOT). I couldn’t believe it was in our price range at all. They were only showing it that one weekend because they knew they’d be flooded with offers. I kept telling my wife not to get her hopes up.
They received MANY offers, the top three within only a thousand dollars of each other.
Our offer was the one accepted.
When we did the final walk through before closing exactly a year ago, the selling agent congratulated us on our “instant equity.” A house on our new street that was smaller and in worse condition had just closed for 100k over what we paid. Had our house been priced for what it was actually worth, we wouldn’t have even gone to see it.
I could write multiple articles on what I did to attract this house, but here are the basics:
1. I spent years dreaming about my perfect house, talking about it, and obsessively watching HGTV to learn exactly what I wanted. I focused on it all the time and had fun with it. I wasn’t upset at the absence, I was excited by the possibility. I focused on all the things I saw in other houses that I LOVED and made note of them.
2. Before we started looking, I wrote a list of all the things my dream house would have (space for an office with lots of white boards, a yard for the dogs, an extra room I could turn into a giant closet, an open kitchen, space for a gym).
3. I did not compromise on houses that weren’t in the area we wanted or didn’t have the features we wanted (even when the market made us feel at times we were stupid not to just “take what we could get” in our price range).
4. I trusted my gut. When we put together our offer, I sent my realtor the number for the highest I could possibly go. Then, I got an impulse that I needed to up it. I scraped together an extra few thousand dollars which ended up being a deal breaker for our offer being able to compete.
5. During the offer process, I focused on the highest and best good (thank you to my friend Stacy Bahrenfuss for this insight!) Instead of focusing on winning and beating the other offers on the house, I focused on the joy the sellers would feel from our offer, the joy we would feel, and even the joy of the people whose offers weren’t accepted when they found another house that was more perfect for them. This shift was huge.
6. I spent years getting my emotions in alignment with positive outcomes. This took a consistent commitment to caring about how I felt and being mindful about what gave me boosts and what gave me dips in my good feeling. At the beginning of 2020, I started meditating every morning. After being a lifelong true crime fanatic, I quit true crime shows and podcasts cold turkey. I only consumed things that were positive and made me feel good. Then covid hit, and the world went into lockdown. This gave me an opportunity to focus more deeply on my inner state. Every day, no matter what was happening around me, I focused on feeling good.
After over a year of doing the things above, I hit a tipping point, and suddenly the work I was doing internally became visible to the external world. Someone in a coaching group I was in said to me, “You are on fire! What are you doing?” What was manifesting “overnight” and the results she was seeing had actually been years in the making.
Today, I continue to focus on feeling good and trusting my instincts. I avoid entertainment that is low vibration, and actively focus on things that make me feel strong positive emotions. It’s not a perfect science, but doing this has given me something more valuable than any house or external thing could. The payoff of focusing on feeling good is that feeling good eventually becomes your natural setpoint; the external circumstances you attract as a result are just the icing on the cake. 🙂