Why Your Intentions Aren’t Manifesting (and What To Do Instead)

Certain times of the year - January, back-to-school time, Mondays (if you’re like many of us) - are when we begin to think about how things are going and what we’d like to see change. 

This year, 2021, is no exception.

The vision boards get made, the resolutions shared and the new journals filled with our personal and professional goals. 

So why don’t they usually happen?

Why Your Intentions Aren’t Manifesting

In my own life, and with my clients and colleagues, I’ve seen a number of things get in the way of intentions manifesting.

Folks report: 

• My resolutions have been too audacious and not realistic. 

• I don’t spend much time thinking about why I want these things to happen. Maybe that has something to do with it.

• It’s scary to say something aloud.

• Being extreme - like quitting alcohol, sugar, carbs and exercising all in the same day - always knocks me off my game.

• I don’t want ANYBODY (not even my subconscious!) telling me what to do! 

• Even though I know creating accountability and getting support is helpful, I hate feeling like I’m disappointing myself and others if I don’t do it perfectly.

• When my To-Do list is too big, I get overwhelmed. Less is definitely more. 

That’s in addition to the very real question of access and proximity to resources. 

Let’s be real: it’s a lot more realistic to fulfill your intention of writing a book this year when you have time, a reasonable amount of financial support, a great writing coach and accountability partners than when you don’t have any of those things. That’s not to say it’s not possible - just that proximity and access to resources can make manifesting many kinds of intentions more easeful.

How to Create Intentions That Do Manifest

There are a number of elements that make it more likely that your intentions will manifest. 

Here are just a few:

• Focus on the feeling you want. Rather than create an intention of losing 15 pounds to feel more confident (and let’s face it - that almost never works), focus on the feeling of being confident now at your current size, shape and weight. By focusing on feeling confident right now, you’ll begin to take the actions that a confident person would take.  

• Create intentions not from your ego, but from your Highest Self. Whenever I’ve created intentions from my ego (“I want to look great in a bathing suit and make that bastard, my ex, suffer!”) even when I’ve gotten what I wanted, it didn’t satisfy me. In fact, it’s like a food addict reaching her hand into a bag of chips saying, “This’ll be the last one!” and not stopping til the whole bag of salt and vinegar Kettle chips is annihilated (not that I’ve EVER done that, ahem). Take the time to connect with your spirit, Source, God, the Universe, your Highest Self, inner leader or whatever you call that part of you that is more than your small ego. Let it guide you. 

• Don’t spend too much time wondering how your intentions are going to manifest - just do what you can to get clear on what they are. At this stage, let your creativity - and your heart’s desires - become clear to you. Let go of the ego’s desire to control and know how it is all going to happen. This is where the mystery and power of the Universe is here to support you. When your vision is aligned with your Highest Self (see above), it’s easier to go with and trust the flow of life to bring you the people, places and things you need to thrive. Your job? Surrender, Dorothy. 

• Look at your life holistically. If you’re reading this blog post, I already know two things about you: you care about mastering resilience to stress, anxiety and trauma AND you want to have a more meaningful impact in the world. Rather than focus on the one thing you’re certain will make you happy - like finding a partner you can truly be your authentic self with in all circumstances - look at your whole life. 

A great tool that I share with my private and group coaching clients that can help with this is this Wheel of Life. 

Wheel of Life Snapshot Assessment 

Draw a big circle - the messier the better. (Who needs more perfectionism?!) Now drop one line from the top to the bottom, another from left to right, and then two diagonals. You should have a Wheel with eight sections. 

Now make a snapshot assessment of some of the key domains in your life in these eight sections: health, friends & family, work/vocation/activism, significant other/romance, physical environment (your home, car, where you live, etc) money, spiritual/personal/creative growth, and fun & recreation. You might need to play around with categories that resonate better for you so feel free to split these up or create categories that are more aligned for you(like you might have a nine in satisfaction with your friends but your family is more like a three).

Now rate each of these sections of your pie in terms of your levels of satisfaction, zero being you are totally miserable in this area of your life, ten being you are completely fulfilled. 

The key to the exercise is not focusing on what it looks like to others - but how satisfying this area of your life is to you. 

For example, you might be an attorney working in private practice. You have a prestigious job and make a decent living. But you hate what you do and would rather be spending your time writing that noir novel you’ve always wanted to. So you give your career a low score of say, 3, even though to your friends and family it appears it might look like you have the best job ever. 

Where You Might Get Stuck

But what if you can’t get clear on what you want to manifest? 

What if you have no idea what your intentions are, you just know you can’t stand the way your life is now?

Don’t worry - it’s much more common than you think.

In my own journey, I found that healing trauma was the key to getting greater clarity about my heart’s desires. When I was at my lowest point after witnessing a car bombing while working as a diplomat in the Balkans, I had no clarity whatsoever about my intentions. All I knew was that there was a still, small voice inside of me that demanded a life of greater authenticity. The pain of trying to be the character my ego had brilliantly created was too much to bear. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted (and could never in a million lifetimes have imagined the life I have today) but I was clear that I didn’t want to be who I had been til that point in my life anymore. 

As world-renowned psychiatrist and trauma-expert, Bessel A. van der Kolk the author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma notes, trauma is a loss of imagination - and it’s incredibly important: 

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”

Even if you start by getting clear on what you don’t want anymore, that can be enough to get you to make the changes that will bring more satisfaction to your life. Spend time outside in nature, explore art, join a group of like-minded folks with similar values, read children’s books, or whatever you can to spark your imagination to start including elements that might make your Wheel of Life rounder, fuller and more fulfilling. 

The Bottom Line: There’s Good News

The bottom line is that, with the right kinds of intentions, accountability and support, you are far more likely to manifest the life you’ve always wanted. It might mean letting go of some old ideas and habits (like the way-overrated rugged individualism narrative that has harmed so many of us) but it is possible. Grab a pen and your journal and get started. 

Ready to create your most resilient and intentional year yet in 2021? Get the motivation, accountability and support you need. Check out the Mastering Resilience Small Group Coaching Program with social justice pricing.

How to Get Motivated When You're Stuck - COVID19 Edition

If you’re a regular reader of the blog, then I know at least 2 things about you:

1. You’ve likely experienced stress, anxiety or trauma.

2. You care deeply about making a meaningful impact in the world.

Between the two of those things, and what trauma-informed yoga therapist De Jur calls, “The Global Retreat” caused by the pandemics of COVID19, racism and economic recession, my guess is that finding your mojo these days can be tough.

Recently there was a discussion in my on-going Group coaching program about how to get and stay motivated when you’re stuck in these incredibly challenging and poignant times.

Between the heat of the dog days of summer, the stress on parents with school-aged kids, and the upcoming election, it’s no surprise you might want to bury your head in the sand and take a 10 year nap.

Let me be clear: there are days when cultivating somatic awareness, listening to your body and staying in bed is definitely the wisest thing to do. 

And, for many of us, particularly folks who have been carrying too much of a burden for far too long, that’s often the most compassionate and loving thing to do.

But if that’s not you, how can you get up and go, when your giddy-up has up and gone?

Here are three questions I shared with my Group that might help you get motivated when you’re stuck around your personal, professional and spiritual goals, too:

1. What’s the smallest action you can take without your resistance kicking in?

Let’s say you’re a marathon runner. You love to go on long runs, with the wind in your hair and open country ahead of you. But when it’s 100 plus degrees out, even with a treadmill in your guest room, you can’t get motivated to move. 

Instead of trying to do the kind of run that you usually do, what’s the tiniest action you can take without your resistance kicking? 

Could you do one mile? 

Nope.

Still too much? What about half a mile?

Hmmmmm …

How about 100 yards?

The trick here is to reduce your expectations of yourself in the short-term by so much and make them so low that you cannot possibly fail. 

By focusing on the smallest action you can, you set yourself up for a win which boosts your self-esteem, gets you off of the endless Tiger King binge you’ve been on and breaks deadly inertia.

2. Can you use bookending to support you?

I absolutely love what I do for a living.

Helping folks master resilience to stress, anxiety and trauma in order to have a more meaningful impact in the world is my jam. It’s pretty much my favorite thing in the world (besides swimming in the Aegean, but that’s for another blog post).

But the one thing I still don’t love doing is accounting and bookkeeping and taxes.

(Can I hear an amen, my intuitive-feeler readers?)

Left to my own devices, I’ll put it off way too long.

What helps me, instead, is to use a practice called bookending, which creates some inner motivation and helps me engage with others. 

With bookending you have a goal in mind.

Say you want to spend 1 hour working on your taxes (or going for a run, or meditating for 20 minutes, or getting onto your yoga mat after weeks of eating too much Halo Top on the sofa). 

Next you commit to someone what you’re going to do and when. It’s usually a good idea for this to be a person who isn’t deeply impacted by your decision but wants to support you. It could be a friend, a co-worker or an Accountability Partner, like the ones in my Group Coaching program. 

Finally, when you’ve completed the task, you “bookend” the action, to once again reach out to your Accountability Partner and let them know you’ve done so. 

This ending ritual in particular is super important and is magic for self-esteem.

By doing so, not only do you get stuff done and keep moving forward with your goals, but you might even inspire someone else to take action, too. A win-win for sure! 

3. How can I create some regular accountability for myself in this area?

Our culture is obsessed with the toxic-fantasy of the self-made man (or woman). 

This is not news to you, I’m sure. 

The compulsion to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is one that many of us have learned is the only way of living that has value. Our egos get so wrapped up in doing things alone, that we don’t achieve what we could if we had just a little support. 

Full disclosure: I’m an unmarried only child and a double Leo. 

 Let’s just say that, like the sun, my ego can get so big because part of me still falls into the trap of believing the oppressive lie that, for something to count, I need to do it all by myself.

Thankfully, I’m supported by a number of spiritual, professional and activist communities that remind me that I can only show up for the work I’m meant to do in the world if I allow myself to be supported. Just the simple act of checking in with my authentic communities - where I can show up as my wholehearted, fabulous, and sometimes completely insane self - helps me stay accountable for my bigger purpose. 

Folks in my Group coaching program see that, too. 

They regularly create accountability for personal (“I’m gonna finally build that bookcase I’ve been staring at for months!”), professional (“Finally, I’m going to commit to launching that Healing Circle I’ve been talking about for ages!”) and spiritual goals (“I’m going to stay accountable for keeping my word this week to myself as well as to others”).

What matters is that you let someone (or some community where you can show up authentically) witness your goals, speak them and then take action around staying accountable. 

The bottom line, my dear one, is that right now, things are tough. 

Years from now, we’ll look back on this time inshallah and see how we used this seminal moment in our history. 

Not just what we felt, but what we did as Kamala so brilliantly reminded us.

My hope for all of us is that we use it wisely.

With these three questions you can check in to help yourself get motivated when you’re stuck.

For your benefit. And for the benefit of all those whose lives you touch. 

Interested in getting some support to stay on track with your personal, professional, and spiritual goals? Check out my justice pricing-based Mastering Resilience On-Going Group Coaching program here.