As written for Adventures in Manifesting. Read the article here:

It’s true there’s literally hundreds of people out there telling you that if you imagine your future regularly enough, in enough detail that you’ll bring it into reality. It’s the plague of the book and show “The Secret” that has turned into a bandwagon on which so many wannabes have jumped.

But if so many ‘guarantee’ it works then why haven’t we all got what we want? Even if we imagine our futures daily, in microscopic detail to the backing track of Mariah Carey’s ‘Hero’ or R.Kelly’s ‘I Believe’, why do things not change the way we need them to? And if all that’s not the answer to life, the universe and everything….then what is?

To unravel this conundrum, I’d like to share with you the story of a woman who back in 2004 was boxed into a career she didn’t want, earning wages she wished were higher, who dreamed of a nicer house and a European car, and who was also imprisoned in a body she hated – one that weighed more than 143kgs.

In 2005, at the suggestion of a mentor, she nervously wrote out two plans – one detailing how she wanted her life to be, and one detailing how she wanted her health to be. Her Life Plan also contained a radical change of residence and her top 12 travel destinations. Her Health Plan not only contained weight and body fat goals, but all the required support systems. And whilst these plans captured every detail in S-M-A-R-T format, they also contained her most heartfelt and deepest desires. Little did she know that by writing these plans she had started a chain of events that would change her life forever. And once the plans were finished they were shoved in a drawer, forgotten, never again to see the light of day again.

Fast forward 3 years and the woman had a new life – she had left her dead end job to take on a Managerial career in a global corporation, her salary almost doubling. She had rented out her suburban house and bought a large inner city apartment with city and garden views. She had sold her aging Ford which was replaced with a Renault that she loved driving, and she had visited over half of the travel destinations on her list. But the biggest change of all was her body – she had shed over 70kg – half her body weight – naturally, without surgery and without ‘dieting’.

So how did all this come to be real?

Fortunately I’m in a unique position to tell you how … because … well … that woman is me. Over the years I’ve thought and analysed how I managed to change, or rather, redesign my life. And the truth is, for the most part, it was completely unconscious. Since then I’ve learned that there’s a part of the brain that not only drives us toward, but also decides on what we want, often without consideration for what we may consciously desire. This explains why some people repeatedly attract and select the sort of partner they are trying to avoid.

Funny thing about the brain is that this programming cannot be consciously over-ridden; rather it has to be changed. So in writing my plans I followed a process that allowed me to link the deepest desires of my subconscious to my conscious choices, and by focussing on them I infused them with a relentless passion, cementing it all together in a document to make it real. And by doing this my daily choices became unconscious and automatic, making it easy to achieve everything I wanted.

Did I know it was going to work? No way.

If back in 2005 you’d said to me all this was going to happen I’d have said you were lying.

But I’m so glad it did.