Practical Manifestation

Manifestation: Creating something in reality by thinking about it first. Everything, of course, is created this way.

—    DIY Magic

I just did something a little unhinged. I road my bicycle 100 miles, from Portland to the coast in a day. The Reach The Beach ride, a benefit for lung health, had 4,000 feet of elevation climbing; moments when slogging up a hill just felt endless. There was also the soul-lifting scenery of rushing rivers, peaceful forested valleys, and wooshing descents at breakneck speeds where my heart rose up through my throat and exploded my cerebral cortex into a blissed-out rush of pure adrenaline. It took all day, it was grueling, it was awesome, there were moments where I wondered what I was even thinking, but now that it’s done I’m proud of my accomplishment and already planning how to beat my time for next year.

I was a little intimidated to sign up for the ride at first, it’s a big challenge, not everybody who starts can finish. I saw a guy on the side of the road who was calling it quits after 30 miles, on what felt like an endless climb up a mountainside. He was staring despondently down at his bike. Obviously, he hadn’t done the necessary training to get the ride done. Which is what I want to talk about here: when I talk about manifestation, in this and future essays, I am not saying that you simply have to visualize yourself doing something and then you will achieve it. You still have to do the work!

So many books and “experts” on manifestation skip over this fact —the doing the hard work part—and act like it is all in the mind. That we simply have to think positive, be optimistic, and then let the law of attraction work for us and the universe will shower us with whatever we want. This of course is not true! The mental part—of visualizing what you want to achieve, of imagining yourself attaining what you want is only half of the picture. Because so many takes on manifestations skip over the do-the-work part it becomes easy for people to write of the actual power of manifestation by saying it’s just trite fluffy B.S. If somebody is telling you that all you have to do is dream, and it will all come true, well that’s horse-puckey my friends! (But I can see why it sells.)

The real secret is knowing how to combine manifestation with the actual doing of the work. The key is to start by picturing where you want to be, what you want to achieve, whatever your big goal is and then work backwards from there, month by month, week by week, visualize the work that you will need to do to get ‘er done. Physical challenges, like sports, work great for this because they are pretty straightforward. But you can also apply the same principles to anything: writing a book, preparing for a poetry reading, directing a film, finishing a doctorate dissertation etc.

The way I trained for the riding a century (after not doing much riding for a few years) was by saying—okay if I want to be able to comfortably ride 100 miles it would be good to get in a 60 or 70 mile ride a few weeks before the big one. I’ll start this week and go for a ten-mile ride on the weekend, go for 20 miles the next week, then thirty and so on. I figured out exactly how much sweat equity I needed to put in each week to be comfortable on the big ride and then I put in the time doing the training. By race day I had plenty of longer rides under my belt, and was confident I could enjoy the ride and make it to the finish line in a respectable time. The recipe is: visualization + planning (mapping out what you need to do on a calendar) x do the work = you can achieve what you want.

In his classic work on overcoming procrastination, The Now Habit, Neil Fiore describes this strategy as the “reverse calendar”.

“This view lets you mentally spread the work out over the days and weeks ahead, creating your own deadlines for the subdivisions of the project . . . now instead of facing a large, looming, impossible task your facing only small units that you can see yourself accomplishing. As you picture several smaller deadlines—all within your control—the paralysis caused by trying to complete a large project disappears.”

It’s kind of an open secret that new books about manifestation, and more business and career focused books about productivity are actually talking about the same thing but just approaching them from opposite directions. If you can combine the two approaches, they become very powerful and effective.

The actual visualization/imagination component of doing the 100 mile Reach the beach ride was very simple. I went for a walk around a big park, the day before the race and mentally imagined myself going on the race. I mentally saw myself, taking it easy on the first 10-20 miles, relaxing into the ride. I visualized myself conquering the two really big climbs that I knew where coming. (Staying relaxed and calm on the hills is key to not using up all your juice.) And then I visualized myself having plenty of energy in the last 25 miles and being able to really drop the hammer and fly to the finish line. Mentally rehearsing the whole race, the day before helped with doing the actual ride, pacing myself, and finding the confidence and grit I needed on race day. In the last 25 miles, just like I had visualized, I found myself flying by passing other cyclists who had spent all their energy earlier on in the day, while I was still feeling strong.

This essay is not about cycling. The point is that every big goal you can imagine needs to be broken down into smaller, manageable parts. I did the same thing when I bicycled 800 miles from Portland to San Francisco. I did it in manageable chunks. A big part of why we procrastinate is we think we have to do it all at once—you only ever have to handle the one task right before you. Roll over one hill at a time. It all adds up. With cycling that means doing the training. The effort that needs to be invested changes with every goal, but it all begins in the mind: with picturing yourself doing the work, and then actually doing it. With big goals visualizing achieving the end is so important because otherwise we can have a hard time (mentally and emotionally) connecting the daily work that needs to be done with the big picture. When we take the time to visualize, we connect everything holistically, the big picture and the small, the final objective and daily work. This is how real-world accomplishments are achieved. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. If you connect the vision of where you want to go with the doing of taking the necessary step in the now—you can go anywhere. Manifestation is the art of mentally connecting the big picture with the doing the work that you need to do today.