In the write space to succeed
Manifestation is the new craze, it seems. Celebrities do it, influencers love it, but Chris Schulz wonders if it’s all it’s cracked up to be?
Pretty boy pop star Shawn Mendes grabs his notepad, opens it up and shoves it in front of his girlfriend’s face. The Canadian singer points proudly to pages of phrases he’s repeated over and over again, like he’s been writing lines in school detention.
‘‘I control my brain and my voice,’’ is written in big, loopy lettering. ‘‘I sing with no tension. My chest voice is strong and healthy.’’
In his recent Netflix documentary In Wonder,
Mendes bounces around like an excitable puppy over another of his lines that reads: ‘‘I will sell out Rogers Centre.’’
He tells his partner Camila Cabello, with whom he shared the erotic duet Senorita, that writing those lines down was the reason he filled the Toronto arena last year.
‘‘That’s why this s... works,’’ he proudly mansplains. ‘‘Because I wrote it in my manifestation journal.’’
If you hadn’t already heard, manifesting – or, the art of making your dreams become a reality – is everywhere these days.
Oprah Winfrey does it. Lady
Gaga loves it. And Mendes, the 22-year-old crooner, is a big believer.
Manifesting has manifested itself into 2020’s hottest lifestyle trend.
On Instagram, the hashtag #manifestation has been used nearly four million times, with influencers spouting geysers of affirmations, wellness and positivity.
It’s a hit on TikTok, where videos about the wholesome practice have been watched more than six billion times.
Among YouTube’s thousands of manifesting videos you’ll find some showing off their ‘‘vision boards’’ and others explaining the ‘‘law of attraction’’.
Many have millions of views. Start listening to them, and they can be persuasive. ‘‘Manifesting is making everything you want to feel, and experience, a reality,’’ says life coach Angelina Lombardo, who wrote the Amazon bestseller The Spiritual Entrepreneur.
‘‘[Use your] thoughts, actions, beliefs, and emotions.’’
Kathrin Zenkina, a podcaster, influencer and bestselling author who goes by the nickname ‘‘Manifestation Babe’’, teaches people to use manifesting to make money.
Her book is assertively titled Unleash Your Inner Money Babe: Uplevel Your Money Mindset and Manifest.
On Instagram, where she has 200,000 followers and posts several times a day, she likes to say things like: ‘‘The universe is my ATM machine.’’
On her website, she writes: ‘‘What first began as a journey of self exploration has since boomed into a $5 million+ company.’’
Clearly, manifesting has worked out OK for Zenkina. But does it work out for others?
Despite seeming like a hot new trend, manifesting is not new. Many claim its origins come from The Secret, the 2006 book and film that briefly became a cult-like movement spouting similar positive affirmations.
But its origins can be dated well before that, thanks to the power of a long-lasting celebrity quote.
Oprah says she got her role in the 1985 film The Color Purple because she wrote it down on a piece of paper.
Jim Carrey believes his entire career happened because he once wrote himself a $10 million cheque and post-dated it by five years. In 1994, for Dumb & Dumber, he was paid exactly that.
And in 2011, Lady Gaga told 60 Minutes she’d been manifesting for years. ‘‘You’re saying a lie over and over and over again, and then, one day the lie is true,’’ she told Anderson Cooper.
What is also true is that lifestyle trends come and go as fast as a cool white cloud.
A few years ago, decluttering was huge, thanks to Marie Kondo and her Netflix series, Tidying Up. Meditation also became a hit, led by celebrities like Jared Leto promoting calming apps like Headspace. But Natalie Tolhopf says there’s much more to manifesting, and it isn’t just a fad, if it’s used correctly.
The Orewa-based business coach says manifesting shouldn’t be used for directly acquiring things, like more money, a better car or a bigger house. It should be part of a bigger strategy.
‘‘Manifesting is acquiring the experience of what it is that you want to feel, and then ... living and believing in that experience,’’ she says. ‘‘[It’s] just one part of something greater.’’
From her Orewa office, Tolhopf teaches manifestation to her clients, many of whom are starting out in business for the first time.
She coaches them to act from a ‘‘success mindset’’, starting each week with a goal, writing it down, then working to achieve it.
‘‘Visualise what you want, what actions you need to take, and then go and do it,’’ she says. ‘‘It can’t just be: ‘I would love to have a million dollars’ ... you don’t get it.’’
Where there’s a trend, there’s a backlash, and the outcry over manifesting has begun in earnest.
Type ‘‘Why manifesting sucks’’ into Google and you’ll be met with more than a million results.
One of those is a blog post from Canadian psychotherapist Cheryl Bradshaw headlined: ‘‘Why I can’t get behind the manifesting movement
– and you shouldn’t either’’. Written in the aftermath of the death of a 10-year-old girl who was hit by a car in Ontario, Bradshaw’s scepticism is obvious.
‘‘People can work their whole lives with passion and integrity and still never ‘make it big’,’’ she writes.
‘‘Life has times where it’s just plain hard and awful and it just doesn’t make any sense at all.’’
Bradshaw takes her scathing critique for the trend further, comparing manifesting to ‘‘victim blaming’’.
She points out that bad things happen to good people all the time.
‘‘Sometimes the world is just senseless. And sometimes things don’t happen for a reason,’’ she says.
‘‘We can’t run away from discomfort by creating a false reality that soothes us in times of uncertainty.’’
It’s true that writing things down to ‘‘manifest’’ them could play a part in making good things happen. But it’s also true that it won’t stop bad things coming our way.
Here’s something else that’s true: Oprah Winfrey’s overwhelming charisma meant she was always going to become a megastar.
Jim Carrey was gifted with the kind of rubbery facial expressions that would turn him into one of the world’s most bankable movie stars.
And Shawn Mendes was always going to sell out arenas, even if he did piggyback off the success of his more talented girlfriend.
And another thing: In 2021, there’s another entirely new lifestyle trend coming our way. We don’t know what it is yet, but it is inevitable. No matter how many times you write it in your notebook, you can’t manifest your way out of that.