Manifest a Change in Your Career

Welcome to Navigating Your Career, the only podcast that blends personal development, professional skills, and psychology to help you get happy at work and live the life you want. If you want to stop feeling stuck and start feeling better, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Melissa Lawrence. Let’s get started.

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast where we are going to get a little bit woo. So manifestation is everywhere these days. Manifest your dream car, manifest your perfect partner, manifest a million dollars. Manifestation does have some science behind it, and it’s what we’re going to talk about today. But the way it’s being used in commercials, on television, on social media is more like Affirmations 2.0 will yourself to want and you will receive.

I think there was a book like The Secret that was like this years ago. But no, that isn’t how it really works. So if you listen to my podcast regularly, you know that I talk quite a bit about the psychology of human behavior and your brain. And I’m going to break down for you how to align your central nervous system with the woo of manifestation and the strategy of your career goals to get what you want more quickly. So let’s just dive right into this.

So your brain, your body, the universe all are working for you. And you can tap into the science of manifesting when you’re looking at making a change in your career, whether that’s going to another level. Getting your dream job promotion, working at your dream company, having a dream boss. You can use the science behind manifestation, which, spoiler alert, is really the science behind intentional thoughts to create a different result than you have right now. And so I am going to break it down for you in four steps.

But know this. You can’t just put it on a vision board. You can’t just write down ten things you say to yourself every day or live in the future state of having already achieved what you want. It’s more than that, because if you’re always living in the future and pining away at what you really want that you don’t have right now, you’re going to feel pretty crappy when you’re focused on what you don’t have. You’re constantly feeling like you don’t have enough.

You aren’t far enough along, you don’t measure up. And that kind of thinking isn’t going to help you with your goals. When what you want is far away, your brain can start to go into protection mode and start telling you that it’s never going to get there. This isn’t going to happen to you because your brain can’t comprehend something that it hasn’t seen, that it doesn’t have evidence of. That’s just the way our brains work.

And so if you’re constantly living in that future state of something so far away that your brain can’t comprehend, you’re always going to feel unhappy in where you are right now, and it’s going to sabotage you even more. Your brain is going to want you to stay the same even more because it’s protecting you. Because your brain is thinking, no, that is too far off. And we’re not even going to entertain that because you might fall on your face and we do not want that. So it’s going to give you all of the reasons you can’t have what you want, which is just going to make you more unhappy.

So your brain means well, but sometimes it’s just not that helpful. You won’t stop wanting what you want, but you won’t get there either, because it’s too far. So you’ll stay in this cycle of comparing yourself to other people, always wanting more, and then not getting it. Convincing yourself it is impossible, but you deep down still want it. So then you’re just going around and around with really wanting something, but convincing yourself you can’t have it over and over again, and you’re just going to feel like crap.

You’re just not going to feel fulfilled and happy in the life that you have right now. You’re not going to feel like your goals are possible and you’re going to stay stuck. So instead, what do you do? How can you manifest a change in your career without your brain freaking out? How can you have big goals and do more than just put them on a vision board and hope they happen?

So here are the four steps to leveraging your brain and the universe with some strategy to help you manifest the change that you want to see in your career. Number one, give yourself the space to want what you want. Dream. Come up with the things you don’t think you can really have, but secretly want. I’ve actually started incorporating this more into my daily journaling, letting myself connect to a future that I want to create for myself.

So for you, whether it’s to be a CEO to own a beach house in California or earn enough money to buy a beach house if it’s to love your work, if it’s to find a cure for a disease, let yourself indulge. I have a newsletter on LinkedIn called Career Tips Weekly, and last month I shared why you should stop using smart goals. I know it’s a corporate standard, but it can actually hold you back and prevent you from achieving the big things you want. So I have a different approach. And one of the steps is this one here to let yourself go outside of the confines of what you think is reasonable because your brain is always going to provide you with resistance reasons.

You can’t have what you want. So know that nothing has gone wrong when this happens. So if you want to dig deeper into that article on LinkedIn, I’ll put a link in the show notes. You can even subscribe so that you’ll be notified whenever I post new articles under that career Tips Weekly Newsletter so number one again is to give yourself the space to want what you want to let yourself dream. And I know if you haven’t come from a lot, if you maybe don’t have an example of anyone who has achieved what you want, it’s going to seem even farther away.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have it. So that is going to go into number two, the second step. And this is really important. So most manifestation advice out there is just stopping at number one. It’s just saying, okay, you’ve decided what you want to manifest, put it on a vision board, think about it a lot and let the universe deliver it.

No. Instead, let’s incorporate some practical strategy with neuroscience. Think of the big things you want, the dreams that you created for yourself in the first step. Then acknowledge where you are now versus where you want to be. Visualize the steps that you’ll take to get there now.

You have to visualize and focus on the things that you’re going to have to do, not just the outcome that you want. Because this is going to normalize obstacles for you. It will build resiliency and help you take action that is going to get you the result that you want. It’s going to normalize the things that you’re not going to want to do to get there, like speaking up more, being uncomfortable, working more, getting up earlier, networking, building relationships, failing, presenting to groups, all of the things. If you don’t know what the steps are, imagine someone you think does know.

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s a friend or a mentor that you have. Imagine that they’re doing it with you or that the other person is doing it. What are the steps that they would take if you can’t figure out or think about if you’re getting a brain block on, what are those steps you’re going to have to take to get from where you are now to where you want to be that dream you want to achieve? Think of someone that you think knows the answer, and then let your brain brainstorm what they would do. Because this is totally solvable.

The key is to essentially think through, visualize, and imagine yourself completing this goal, getting to the end, earning that promotion, being CEO, and all of the steps you need to take on the way there. Number three. Next is to visualize the obstacles you’ll go through on the way from where you are now to where you want to be and feel it in your body ahead of time. I know this might seem strange, but hear me out. Sit with these feelings for a moment and then visualize how you’ll feel when you overcome it.

Feel all the steps along the way. It can feel hard, it can feel amazing. But let all the feelings in your brain actually, this is like a really interesting fact. Your brain actually has a hard time knowing what happened to you literally and what you think happened to you, which is why we could have so many miscommunications and conflict and so many different sides to a story. Our brain is always deleting and distorting information to align with our beliefs that we really have.

So when you do this part and you go to that place of okay, I have the steps I’m going to have to take now I’m going to feel what it’s like to take those steps. It’s kind of like training your brain. It’s like taking your brain to the gym. When you visualize what you want, every step of the way, the obstacles, the celebrations, the feelings you’ll have, it will normalize it for you. And then when it happens, really literally, your brain can’t fool you that it’s too hard, that if it was meant to be, it would have happened already, that other people have it easier that you don’t deserve this.

When you practice and prepare for the obstacles and get in your body, that feeling you’re going to have, you get your brain on board. Then when these obstacles happen because they will, you will be less likely to sabotage yourself. Now finally, step four, you have to take action. Manifestation will make it easier to remove the resistance because you let yourself feel what it would be like. You thought through the steps and the obstacles.

But where people do this wrong is they just dream and stop there. Like I said, you have to align your thoughts with your body. This creates your gut instincts, knowing what to do, what choices to make. You can’t just forget to take action. So it’s not just thinking about what you want, thinking about the steps it’s going to take to get there, feeling the feelings in the body.

Now you have to take the action and your thoughts and your feelings are connected and your feelings are connected to your action. So when you have these in alignment, you can manifest the change you want to see. So when you don’t align your thoughts and your feelings to this dream that you have, the action that you take is going to be very different. But when you’re thinking this is something I can have, these are the steps it’s going to take to get me there. These are the obstacles I’m going to have to overcome.

You let yourself feel all those feelings along the way. Then when the opportunities come up, you’re automatically going to take the action that is going to get you to that goal where if you just want something and you don’t think of the steps, you don’t think of the obstacles, then the first time you get an opportunity, you’re going to go back into your default thinking of telling yourself you can’t have it. It’s too hard, you don’t deserve it. So when you align what you want with your thoughts and feelings and your action is going to be so much different it’s going to be so much easier for you to get that promotion for you to get to that next level for you to have better relationships with your boss. All of the things you want to have in your career and really your life but especially in your career they will happen and you will start taking the action to making them happen when you follow these four steps So there you have it four steps you can take to use manifestation aligning your central nervous system to your goals so you can achieve bigger things.

Now you can do this once and leave it or you can revisit and connect to this visualization the steps, the feelings on a regular basis to continue to train your brain this can be something that you work into your routine that you work into a meditation into your journaling on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I would be so curious to hear how these steps work for you. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, tag me and let me know thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. I truly hope you enjoyed it.

If this episode resonated with you or helped you in any way please share it on your social media and tag me. I love seeing what you’re you’re up to. Also please make sure to subscribe and leave a review and until next time have fun navigating your career knowing the life you want is totally possible. Bye.