Manifesting? 👼🏻 No, Identity.

This brings up questions about 'manifesting' — new age ideas that we can change external reality through changing our thoughts in a kind of non-Newtonian physics kind of way. 

Mostly I see these kinds of strategies as magical thinking. There’s an alternative view that I think is profoundly useful. My opinion is that identity is decisive in determining the world we inhabit, and thought is not. This helps explain why sometimes manifesting seems to work, and sometimes it backfires. This helps explain why we often continue to do things we know are unhealthy: There’s an identity payoff to our current way of being, and a perceived cost to the thing we want. Most of the time these payoffs and costs are totally unconscious, like biases. They rest on false-but-foundational assumptions about "the way reality works", so we need other people like coaches to reflect them to us. The underlying identity assumptions become objects, and we can see them and choose something different. This often involves a small ego-death, which is part of why we resist big changes for a long time.

Now a plug: Training the capacity to see and name these assumptions, and then skillfully facilitate others into greater alignment is a big part of the LU Coaching Training (next cohort starts in five weeks!). It works. And it does so without falling into magical thinking or overly focusing on the external world!

With love, Jordan