I want to ask you this: “How many wins have you had the past three months?”
1, 2, 5, 10…?
I bet you don’t even know!
I know (almost) all of mine. And you know why? Because I keep track of them. Not in an obsessive way, but in a gratifying one.
I journal my wins (and losses) every day. At least the most important ones. And I usually also journal the most insignificant ones. The ones that occur so frequently in our everyday life, that we don’t even feel grateful for them.
If you were to read my journal right now, you wouldn’t find that new car, a mortgage re-negotiation with smaller interest rates, or tickets bought for my family’s next vacation.
Nope.
Instead, you will most likely find that:
- I spent five minutes watching a nightingale on my window sill.
- I blew a dandelion for the first time this year.
- I made one mean omelet this morning and everyone loved it.
- I helped a client get unstuck.
- I was able to put $5 in my “whim” jar.
And many more examples like these.
You’ll say I’m crazy. Birds sing, flowers bloom and wither, and $5 is basically nothing.
And you could not be more wrong than that.
Because you see…
That car, that vacation, lower mortgage interest rates…those are in my accounting spreadsheet. Where they belong. Not in my journal. My journal is something private. And I’m not using it to ramble all about how things went wrong at work today or how I had a fight with my spouse (although sometimes those need to be mentioned too because they might just hold some valuable lessons I need to learn).
Instead, I’m using journaling as a manifestation tool. But not just any tool. I use it as my personal pantry of mini-wins.
And I learned this when I had to survive, for three years, with barely enough money to buy food and pay my bills.
So I did something, which got me through winter months when bills were higher. And it’s something I still do. But most important, it’s a behavior I adapted for every other aspect of my life.
And it’s quite simple: every time I would go shopping, with that small amount of money I could get my hands on, I would buy one little something that would go in my “survival” pantry (no, not the end of the world one, I couldn’t afford something like that).
It was the one rule I followed without fail. A can of beans, a pound of sugar, a small pack of instant flavoring. It did not matter if I only had a quarter to spare. I would find something that could help put together a meal and I would buy that.
And guess what happens when you do this every few days, for nine months?
You get to the point where your pantry is completely full. And you don’t have to worry about food for the next three months. You can only focus on rent and bills, even if they go higher because it’s freezing outside.
And that, my friend, is manifestation surviving. I found it to be the foundation for my manifestation journey. But, for me, it worked because I knew one simple thing: it is not a long-term solution.
At least not at its core.
Because while I used it successfully to feed my family, I also used it when my income grew and I just had no reason to worry about winter bills. However, I used it so that for three to four winter months, I would be able to use that food budget to invest in myself, my business, my family.
