Most people think manifestation means wishing hard enough and waiting. Sit still, picture the thing, and one day it lands in your lap. It doesn’t often work like that, although perhaps, in some ways, it still can.
My clue to manifesting was the shift I felt when I really understood the Law of Attraction. The moment it became clear I understood was when I arrived in Paihia in 2010. It was a place that had called me since I was 13 years old. I’d always put my own limitation on it: “one day, when I’m rich, I can live there.” And in 2010 I was a solo mother with less financial resource than ever before.
I was standing in what felt like the place I was meant to be. The side-by-side slides sat in the small playground overlooking the glistening bay. I could see my children enjoying it. I could see myself smiling, and I knew. Putting it out to the universe was a test: “if I wake up tomorrow morning and the sun is shining, I’ll move here.” It was New Zealand, winter, rain forecast all week. The odds were not in my favour. Yet I woke up to a beautiful day, and the deal was done. I trusted. I packed up my house in the weeks that followed and arrived to find a house the agents told me I would never find.
Because I trusted, because I felt this with all my soul, I stepped through the doorway of Paradise View and stood in a house that was a dream come true.
What People Often Get Wrong About Manifestation
The version of manifestation sold to most people is passive. Think positive, vibrate higher, wait for the universe to notice you. It treats the person as a bystander in their own life, watching to see if the wish comes true.
The truth is we’re all manifesting all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We manifest what we think and what we believe. When we’re laser focused on something, without a quiver of doubt, that plays into our hands. When the subconscious is running a record of limitation and lack, that’s what shows up in our reality instead.
Manifestation, as I understand it, is not waiting. It’s writing, deciding, and moving, with the paying-attention part done properly. It’s noticing the sign and actually calling the number on the noticeboard. It’s understanding the things you truly desire so you recognise them when they are calling out to you. Wishing doesn’t require any of that. Manifestation does.
The other thing people get wrong: they think it’s binary, either it worked or it didn’t. It’s not a vending machine. It’s closer to a conversation, one where you have to keep showing up and speaking clearly, and where the universe answers in its own time, not yours.
Try this: Next time you catch yourself “wishing” for something, rewrite the sentence as a decision. Not “I wish I had X” but “I am doing what it takes to have X.” It just feels different.
What Manifestation Actually Means
Here’s my definition, built from testing it against my own life since before I understood it myself: manifestation is the practice of naming your desires with total honesty, writing them down, and then acting like it’s already decided.
Three parts, and all three matter:
- Naming it. Not the version you think you should want. The one your soul actually wants, even if it’s inconvenient. I was a young girl in a tumultuous relationship, watching friends risk everything for ego games that shouldn’t matter, and I decided: “I want to move to Sydney.”
- Writing it down. I write my dreams and my desires without expectation. I know they’ll happen. Sometimes I don’t know if they’ll happen right now or if they’ll take longer than expected. In 2006 I wrote about a dream to move to the big city of Sydney. It was one of the clearest signals that manifesting on paper worked.
- Acting like it’s decided. This is the part people skip. Once it’s named and written, it’s easy to hold on, to push, to feel attached. Once you’ve taken the steps, letting go and letting it come to you, with knowing, that is the challenge. Weeks after writing my desire to move to Sydney, I looked at the internal job board and saw my job listed in the Sydney office. It was a calling card. Of course I jumped, and I landed the role. There was never a doubt in my mind. That job was already mine the moment I saw it.
This is why manifestation and luck get confused. From the outside they look the same. From the inside, one of them makes a decision and the other flips a coin.
What Manifestation Is Not
- It is not denial. Manifestation doesn’t mean pretending things are fine when they’re not. In moments of unhappiness or struggle, I believe we’re being guided. Sometimes it’s difficult to accept that dramatic change is needed. But if you’re deeply unhappy, or stuck in a series of events that don’t seem to improve, there’s no denying that perhaps the universe is asking you to make a hard choice, and the reward might be on the other side of it.
- It is not a replacement for doing the work. Writing “dream job” in a notebook and never sending a single application is not manifestation. It’s a wish with a notebook. Once you’ve declared your order, you still need to be ready to say yes to the opportunities that drop in.
- It is not always comfortable. Sometimes manifesting your greatest dreams requires you to leave the damp flat, end the relationship, or move your kids across the country with no home waiting. Other times it asks you to say yes before you know how it will happen.
- It is not proof you did something wrong if it takes time. I think all the time about writing down my dream to travel the world with my children. I wrote that in 2010. It didn’t become my reality until 2020. I needed to change my mindset. I had to move from “one day I’ll travel the world with my children” to “soon, I’ll travel the world with my children,” and really believe it.
Manifestation Examples From My Life
My favourite manifestation examples:
- Moving to Sydney the first time in 2006 was instant. I said it, I wrote it, and the opportunity arrived almost immediately. Within a month or so, I had moved.
- Moving to Paihia. All it took was the visit to reactivate the desire. I said it out loud, the universe guided me, and within weeks I’d moved.
- Moving to Sydney the second time took two years to fall into place. It was still the method, I declared and wrote it down, but in between I moved to Paihia and then fell in love despite thinking I wouldn’t.
- Writing my dream partner: “musical, creative, makes me laugh.” Then laughing when he was already there, in Sydney, someone I’d known a long time before.
- As a Kiwi from little NZ, there was always a dream to visit the big city of New York. Returning to New Zealand in 2023, then landing an all-expenses-paid week in New York City, was the ultimate dream brought to life.
- Then the wildest dream called. A message reached me while I was in New York: “want to come on a cruise from England to the Caribbean?” “Of course,” my heart said. And like that, it was done. A few months later we set off on our third trip around the world, the second for our children.
- My beach house. I first saw it visiting a friend who lived there in 2021. The house stole my heart, but I couldn’t afford it. I knew I’d live there one day. When we returned to Vietnam in 2023, I waited for the house, and it came up, and we took it. We moved out a couple of months later and quickly realised our mistake. When we returned again in 2025, we took it long term, and it’s still our home today.
Try this: Pick one thing from the last year that you desired and received. Trace it backwards. Did you name it? Write it? Act like it was decided? You’ve probably already manifested more than you’ve noticed.
Where Alchemy Comes Into It
Alchemy is the art of taking the hard or difficult things and turning them into a blessing or an opportunity. We can be brilliant at manifesting, and life will still keep challenging us, showing us the next step, the next direction. The challenge doesn’t have to be miserable. I feel this right now, sitting here contemplating change around work and life. I recognise our response to challenges are sometimes our clue if we’re on the right path. Embrace and find gratitude for the challenge, and you’ll probably be rewarded.
What This Means for You
If you take one thing from this: stop waiting and start naming. Write down what you actually want, in specific and honest terms, and then live like it’s already decided.
If you want the practice itself, How I Manifested My Dream Life on Paper walks through exactly how I write my dreams down. And if you’ve ever felt like wanting more was somehow wrong, Scarcity Mindset to the Abundance Frequency is the piece on what shifted that for me.
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