Manifest Your Best Life: 7 Life-Changing Lessons From My Best Year Yet
Holy f*ing moly was my 37th lap around the sun amazing.
I didn’t just luck into this incredible year, I created it for myself. There was a backbone of privilege that can’t be ignored, but it wouldn’t have manifested into something NEARLY as awesome if not for the birthday gift I gave myself last year when I turned 36.
The gift brought me close to family, which led to celebrating my birthday with them in Yosemite!
Last year, my birthday present was to prioritize doing what feels good.
This gift to myself was inspired by the human design experiment I participated in a few months prior. I had spent the month of June actively engaging in a human design experiment led by Irina Prokofieva. Each day that month I completed daily challenges designed to teach me to live by the blueprint of my human design, versus the one society had prescribed to me.
The results were outstanding, and by the end I understood that good things happen when we choose to live by our design and do what feels good to us. Life feels better, and it’s also good for our businesses, relationships, and everything else.
I also learned that living by your human design* (at least in my case, as a sacral authority manifesting generator) isn’t an intellectual exercise. There’s no way I could ever fully understand everything in my human design chart. Living by my design means being guided by the way I feel. If it feels good (truly good in my body, I’m not talking about temporary highs) there’s a good chance I’m living by my design. When I live my design, more opportunities continue to unfold.
Knowing this would be a challenge for me, I hired a coach.
I realized a while ago it’s silly to go about something new and important completely on your own, when there are experts out there who have already learned how to do it better, faster, and more efficiently.
So I hired Irina, the same person who had led the challenge the month before. If you’ve read my other blogs you know that this wasn’t just a feel-good decision. It was a great investment with financial returns, too.
Spent a great week with my cuz in Chicago!
Hiring Irina was crucial. Even with her help, I kept messing up. She redirected me more than I’d like to admit, gently asking me things like “Is business strategy what you want to work on right now? Because we can do that. But you had told me that you wanted to focus on life and see how things unfold.”
When she’d ask me this question, it always felt like a big eureka moment. I’d realize I had slipped out of the way I wanted to be, and back into what I used to know. I would thank her and choose to stick with my plan, asking her to help guide me back on course. I was always grateful that I did.
This strategy led me to some really cool places. I extended my four weeks in Boulder to six and loved them all. It also led me to spend true quality time (often around a week) with many friends, in many different cities and states. Eventually, it led me to a place that I love (Northern California) and to a partner I love. Not to mention clients I love working with and speaking gigs I truly enjoy!
I could go on and on, but I’m guessing you don’t want to be here until my 38th birthday. So let me summarize 7 of the greatest lessons I learned during my 37th lap around the sun.
1. If you’re in touch with your intuition, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to be guided by what feels good (see above).
If you’re not in touch with your intuition but want to be, that is one of the benefits my clients tend to get out of working together. Book a discovery call here and let’s talk about how I can help.
2. With relationships of all types, it’s a waste of energy to ruminate over what the other person wants and feels. Instead of obsessing over what they might be thinking, shift to asking yourself how they make you feel (when you’re physically together and when you’re not).
This was a rough lesson to learn. It involved someone I was into, whose actions didn’t match their words. I wasted too much time trying to intellectualize what they really wanted… until I came across Tinx’s audiobook “Shift” which shared the shift above.
It helped me realize that others’ feelings are irrelevant as far as your heart is concerned. Someone might want you or love you, but if your interactions with them (or lack thereof) leave you feeling confused, frustrated, or anxious… you deserve better. (Caveat: if these feelings are common across relationships for you, it might say more about the work you need to do than it does about them. The right therapist or life coach should be able to help you sort that out.)
3. WE ARE LIMITLESS!!!! (Inspired by Taylor Swift- my big aha at the Eras Tour)
The Eras Tour was INSANE, y’all. Absolutely phenomenal. And it was created by…. A human being (with the support of several others yes, but Taylor started it).
Taylor Swift is a human being, just like you and just like me. The fact that she can create something wild and incredible is proof that we’re all capable of creating things that are wild and incredible.
The Eras Tour defied previously conceived limitations for how many seats an artist could sell, how long they could perform, and how quickly they could change their outfits and positions on stage. You can defy perceived limitations too. But there’s only one way to know this for sure. You have to try.
4. Overthinking is suuuuuch a waste of time
Most of my stress this year was caused by trying to figure things out: what gym to go to, what I needed to post on social media (life got WAY better when I decided to stop using it as a means to my business in November), what to say, what was going to happen in particular relationships, etc.
I would think about this stuff over and over and over. Often I’d make a decision, and then I’d think about it more. Sometimes I’d change my mind, and sometimes I’d change my mind AGAIN and arrive back at the original decision.
Overthinking NEVER gave me good answers. But it did stress me out. And waste a whole. lot. of. time. Time I could have spent doing the thing I was thinking about. Or something else productive or fun.
Fortunately, I have some awesome tools (wow, have I actually gotten halfway through a blog without mentioning PQ®?!!) so I catch my overthinking and shut it down much faster than I used to. My effectiveness and speed at this have gotten better and better as I’ve grown my PQ muscles throughout the year.
Overthinking is one of the main things new clients have been coming to me for support with this year. I built a special program, the “Overcome Overthinking 8-Week Private Coaching Experience” to meet their needs. They’ve been loving it so I’ve decided to start offering it to the public. I haven’t publicly launched it as of the time of publishing this blog- but as a reader you get early access. Click to learn more and get dibs on a bonus session!
5. Imagination is powerful and fun… if you let it be
Supersquirrel to the rescue
It hit me when I was playing with a friend’s kid in their sandbox: I was just going through the motions for them. I wasn’t playing for me.
I was happy they were happy, but I wasn’t experiencing all that much joy myself.
After that, I decided that when I joined kids in playing pretend, I’d pretend too. Suddenly “ice cream shop” became a lot more fun. And now that I’m reflecting on it, I think my manifestations got more powerful, too 🤔 .
6. It’s super important to appreciate where you’re at in the process
I read about this in one of my favorite books I read this year (OK, half-read this year, but I am going to finish it)- The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler, but it didn’t truly hit me until one night in bed.
I felt a lot of resistance to going to bed that night. I was irritated that I didn’t have anyone to snuggle with after months of online dating, and hung up on what I didn’t have.
As I journaled about it, a profound realization leapt onto the page. “This is part of the process though!!! I should celebrate this. I won’t have my bed to myself for the rest of my life. But I do tonight!!! And that’s a beautiful thing!!”
So I decided to celebrate my experience. ‘Wow, I get this whole comfortable bed to myself. I can sleep however I want. Not everyone gets to do this!’
My mood quickly shifted to content and joyful, and I no longer felt resistant to going to sleep. I was out like a light by the end of a 10-minute guided meditation, slept amazingly, and woke up before my alarm, comfy, happy, and spread diagonally across the bed.
I met my current partner shortly after that. And I have no doubt that that shift I made- moving from longing to appreciation, helped cultivate the energy that eventually guided us to each other.
7. I saved one of the best for last: If a goal is important to you, you should probably WORK TOWARD THAT SPECIFIC GOAL.
This seems so obvious, right? But people forget to do this all the time. I see it in many early-stage clients, and last November I realized I was making this mistake myself.
I opened my eyes after a guided visualization of happy future me, and thought, “WTF are you doing you big goof?”
You see, there are only a few things defined for my happy future self. Future me looks freaking awesome, with silver strands highlighting their curly hair. They have a partner and a couple of kids they love. And they share their lessons and stories from stage.
I realized, as I opened my eyes, that while I was dreaming of these things I wasn’t doing anything to actually make them my reality. I’d been so focused on what I thought I was supposed to be doing - grinding away on Instagram to generate coaching clients - that I wasn’t taking action to make progress toward the things I wanted most. (Confession: had I been perfect at following my human design I would have given the IG grind up earlier. I wasn’t perfect, and I’m still not.)
That same day I signed up for a speed dating event. Within a week I had a suped-up dating profile and promised myself I’d actively date. And by the end of the month, I’d hired a speaking coach.
I began to feel better immediately because I knew I was prioritizing the things that mattered to me. And months later, I can say that it paid off. I have a partner I love who shares my vision for a family, and while I have yet to speak on a big stage I’ve had several awesome speaking opportunities. I know that the big stage isn’t far away!
Thanks for joining me as I unpacked my most recent year! This next one is shaping up to be pretty cool, and I’ve got some offers on deck to help you improve your experience, too. Join my list to stay in the loop!
*What’s human design? I think of it as “like astrology on healthy steroids, plus more”. You can look up your human design chart for free in several places on the internet including https://irinaprokofieva.com/chart/
