Welcome. Today, I want to talk about the sometimes-hidden path from inspiration to manifestation. There are seven stages we need to pass, before we can carry our inspirations over into our personal reality. In the process, we transform ourselves and add joy and meaning to the life of the people around us.
It took me a bit of time to continue my Success and Inner Growth series. I needed that time to think and rebalance my life. But here we go again.
I do not know, if you are familiar with Napoleon Hill’s sentence: “What you can conceive and believe, you can achieve.” The way from conceiving to achieving is part of that way, but by far not the whole story.
Today, I want to share my two cents.
Step by Step from Inspiration to Manifestation
Step by step sounds nice. But you will ask: What steps? Here is a list:
- Inspiration
- Imagination
- Expression
- Commitment
- Focus and Power
- Transformation
- Manifestation
If I may return to the sentence from Napoleon Hill: To conceive something starts in the border area between imagination and expression. Imagination and visions can be fluid and do not always include clarity. To conceive means creating concepts, thus adding clarity and structure. Transforming our vision into concepts entails looking at the details and then establishing relationships between the different and aspects parts of the picture.
After doing so, we can turn our vision into a project and develop a plan. But the best plan does not help, if we do not execute it. Therefore, we need to commit ourselves to that plan. We must merge with that plan, so that the plan becomes part of us, and we become part of the plan.
After commitment comes action. You move towards the goal you have set, until you reach a point of resistance. You use all your skills and do whatever it takes to understand and overcome the resistance. This allows you to enter the world of your desires. But the journey from inspiration to manifestation is not yet complete, because you feel here like a stranger. Your transformation continues, you grow into your new life. In the process, you become different person.
Now, you are at home, again. Your new life becomes the undisputed reality, and if you turn your eyes back to your earlier life, it looks strange and impossible, quite the same way as your new life looked, when you started to image it.
Allow Your Soul to Inspire Your Mind
Inspiration is a matter of energy. Therefore, receiving inspiration requires opening up to the energy around you. To do so, you need a calm, peaceful, safe place that is easy to reach.
And importantly: ban all sources of poisonous energy from your environment. Any environment with poisonous energy forces you to cut your energy flows off, and in the process, inspiration cannot access you, either.
Further, you must set time aside for communicating with your soul and other sources of energy. Block in your calendar at least 30 minutes per day as time for yourself and make yourself unavailable during this time. Withdraw to your safe, peaceful, and calm refugium, open up and allow things to happen. Have a notebook handy and jot down your ideas or thoughts for further review.
Imagine the World Outlined by Your Inspiration
This is the domain of your creativity. Listening to the impulses coming from your soul provides you with a wealth of ideas. But, while arriving as inspirations, those ideas belong still to the sphere of energy, and they are not completely connected to your world.
The task of imagination is connecting those inspirations to your daily life. You imagine following the inspiration and observe, what you experience in the process. According to the result, your imagination has shown you, you refine the idea, tweak it here a little bit, dismiss there a small aspect, ad here another ankle. This process goes back and forth between your body and your soul, until you have a 5-dimensional image, where every dimension represents one of your senses:
- seeing
- hearing
- touching
- smelling
- tasting
You keep tweaking the picture, until is is attractive to your soul and brings joy into your life as a human.
After creating that attractive image, you have a goal. Create now a vison board representing that goal with its most important aspects and place it on a point where you see it all the time. This goal will turn out to be the magnet, pulling you into the direction of your choice. Obviously, you will fine tune it on your journey, because the closer you get, the more you can see the details.
Express Your Vision in Words
The next milestone on the journey from inspiration to manifestation asks you to structure the image you created as your goal.
Why is that important? Structure allows you to act, while a lack of structure will result in a situation, where all kind of circumstances have the power to push you around, like an autumn leaf is blown around by the wind.
The ability to structure their own world is the one thing differentiating humans from animals. And the outstanding tool of humans for structuring experiences and impressions is the language. You must connect your goals and aspirations with the power provided to us humans by language. If you fail to put them in words, they will wither away turning a fairy tale.
Structuring your vision and expressing it in words means work. This is in fact good news, because a work process can be replicated, and everybody can learn it. So, no excuses, here!
Create a Mind Map Reflecting Your Vision
You start structuring your vision by creating a mind map. Create shapes representing the big ideas behind your vision and name them. Move them around and connect them to each other. Create additional shapes with more detailed aspects of each big idea and name them. Assemble them step by step in a meaningful way. Look also for relationships between the details. This makes more relationships and dependencies visible, refining the structure.
Write It Down
Now, that you have created your mind map, it is time to describe it with words. Write a text into your notebook, describing this beautiful image with all the concepts, sub-concepts, the web relationships, and the dependencies between them. Writing your ideas down in words carries three big benefits:
- Every word represents a concept. Although the meaning of words varies slightly between one person or another, there is certainly a shared understanding of a word’s meaning within a distinct cultural context. Therefore words, and especially written words, challenge you to think carefully and with great diligence.
- Writing your vision down into words protects you also from self-delusion. You have written it into your notebook. It will be there, whenever you open it again and look. at it. Writing should not prevent you from refining your vision and clarifying your mission, but your words are there. It is now impossible to maintain: “I never thought that” and it is difficult to protest: “I never meant it”: Therefore, writing it down also offers a handy tool for self-control.
- At the end of this process of verbal expression emerges something like an outline of the path you are going to take in pursuit of your effort to turn your vision into reality.
But most importantly: expressing your thoughts in words allows you to share your vision with other people and makes your mission visible to people around you.
Talk about Your Plan
Sharing your vision with people and making it visible will open some doors for you, although it will also hurt some old relationships with people, who do not like the way you have changed.
These changes of relationships, and the need to let some people go, leads you to the next step on your journey from inspiration to manifestation.
Transforming Your Vision into Your Mission
After coming out with your new vision, your goals and intentions, your life will start to change automatically. There will be some changes you anticipated, and others which take you by surprise. Anyway, old habits and beliefs, which do not resonate well with the new path you took, will ask you: “Are you serious, dropping an old friend and servant like me?” Commitment means answering those habits and beliefs: “You have to change, or I will drop you, indeed.”
Some steps you have to take on your path will lead you clearly out of your comfort zone. Your old persona might yell: “Are you serious? I will never do this, and I cannot?” Commitment means here to answer: “Yes, you will, and You can – even if I do not know yet exactly, how!”
A lot of doubt and internal resistance will pop up, and you must engage them. There is no benefit in saying: “I know that I will succeed,” while silently thinking that you will not succeed.
You must step out of your comfort zone, entering unknown terrain, get used to it and learn to feel secure and safe in that setting. Commitment means here learning, trying, failing, standing up again.
Remember the determination, despair, and pride you felt as a toddler, after deciding that crawling on the floor is not your way of life. You decided that you must walk on your legs, and you will! And it did not take too long, until your Mama was running behind you and stopped you before you could run on the street.
Merge Yourself with Your Mission
Going through all this doubt, disbelief and even ridicule, tackling each of them one by one creates in you the confidence, determination, and ruthlessness you need to follow through with your plan and progress on the path you have sketched out so diligently. You and you plan merge into the same thing, fulfilling your vision turns into your mission.
At this point, you are ready to encounter the next milestone on the journey from inspiration to manifestation.
Overcome any Resistance with the Help of clearly Targeted and Focused Action
In the last step you dealt with the hurdles inside your mind. You tackled and overcame your doubts and amended your beliefs. You are determined to succeed.
That means you have the mindset you need to overcome resistance coming from your environment.
But before taking that outside resistance straight on, you must first understand two things:
- From where does this outside resistance come?
- Which benefits does it bring into our lives?
Only after understanding the essence of outside resistance, we can move on to tackle and overcome it. Therefore, I want to share first a few thoughts about the sources and merits of outside resistance.
If we understand that we have been building those barriers by ourselves, we know that we will be able to overcome them in order to fulfil our mission.
The Sources of Outside Resistance
All outside resistance reflects our past life. Our actions, decisions and even feelings take on their own life. Moreover, when we repeat our behavior many times, it materializes in our living environment.
This sounds a bit theoretical. But think about it:
- Your social habits determine to a large degree with whom you can connect.
- Eating habits determine the shape and strength of your body.
- Sleeping habits have an enormous influence on your ability to take in information through your senses.
- Altogether, those ever-repeating behavior heavily influences our access to information, income, social status, and the resources we can mobilize to get things done.
Therefore, we can say our past decisions and habits materialize and act as barriers whenever we try to accomplish a fundamental change of our life. Whenever we try to change tack, they turn into barriers blocking our path from inspiration to manifestation, trying to hold us back in our current state of affairs.
Barriers Stabilize and Protect Our Lives
Although we perceive those walls around our current world as obstacles and barriers, they exist for a reason. Like the structure of a house, they provide stability to our life. Imagine, how life would be, if each and every one of our thoughts and wishes would materialize immediately. It would be a big mess.
Therefore, we must appreciate the existing structure in our life. We must examine that structure, test the barriers and probe them. That leads us to a deeper understanding of our current situation, the one we want to leave. We can now define with accuracy, what exactly we must, want and will change in our life.
Understanding the current structure of our life with its different components, and how they depend on each other, allows us to find the right place to pierce one of those barriers and open a window or door for us.
Appreciating, examining, and understanding the structures in our life helps us to move on to the next milestone on our journey from inspiration to manifestation. It opens a door to a new world, while helping to avoid those catastrophic events, where the sky seems to fall on our heads.
Settle into That New World
After defeating those barriers, that used to look so powerful and insurmountable, we arrive now at a strange place. It is impossible for us to return to that cage of our past, but we don’t quite fit yet into that new world.
We need to explore it, sometimes with fear, sometimes with awe. We observe, how people who are already there, behave and act. Learning, evolving, and growing is now the order of the day.
We left fear and self-depreciation behind us. Therefore, it will not take long, and we have adapted, morphing into a natural part of this life beyond the barriers and fences.
The Journey from Inspiration to Manifestation of Our Dreams Transformed Us
After some time, we learned a new way to make decisions, changed our behaviors and adapted our habits. We morphed into a new person, and nobody, not even we ourselves, imagined from the beginning how we would be.
Now, that we reached a new balance for our life, things will stabilize again. A new structure will emerge in our life, a structure that fits our new personality, supports our new habits of thinking and behavior. This structure provides new stability, and with that renewed space to dream, attracting fresh inspiration.
Upcoming Episodes
This is the manuscript of episode 26 of the podcast Success and Inner Growth. If I find it possible and useful, I continue to post here transcripts, but at times, there will be unscripted live episodes, without transcripts. In the meantime, subscribe here, so that you don’t miss out on further episodes.
