Karin Wildheart

While taking a cross-country road trip, you might encounter some bad weather or traffic. Maybe even an outright roadblock at some point in your travels. That wouldn’t be unusual.

What would be weird is if one of those things made you turn around and go home saying, “It just didn’t work. I couldn’t get there.”

If you were driving to California from Ohio, you’d keep driving even if it rained or snowed or was very hot on the way. If there were traffic, you’d drive through it or pull off the highway and wait it out. If there were a roadblock, you’d use signage or GPS to find a detour.

What you would not do is end your trip and blame the traffic. You would not give up and sigh, “I guess I wasn’t meant to reach California in this lifetime” and never again try to go there, feeling shame around how the trip didn’t work and what kind of person it makes you to have hit traffic.

And if you did say that, people would be so confused. “What? So you just decided you’re never going there?” They might conclude you really didn’t want to go there that badly, or at least that your expectations were not very aligned with how road trips work and of course you wouldn’t be able to make it with that kind of attitude.

Yet when it comes to pursuing a dream life, soulmate, dream family, or dream business… somehow people end up believing it’s “just not possible.” Somehow, the path to pursuing your dream goals is seen as totally different than the path to a geographical destination.*

This will be a two-part article. In part one (this article), I’m going to explain the similarities between manifestation and geographical travel. In part two I will show you how this way of seeing things can supercharge your manifestation, shortening the time between now and you receiving your desires.

Belief and certainty are the two (very intertwined) factors that determine how quickly you manifest your goal and what it’s like to travel there (pleasant? unpleasant?).

First: belief. So many people assume their dreams are impossible. If you are willing to believe your dream is possible, even if you aren’t sure how it will unfold, then you’re at least a stage 2 in my 6 stages of living your dream life. So a willingness to believe your dream is possible means you’re already on your way–some don’t even have that.

People often think, “It would be foolish of me to believe I can have the exact dream life I want to create. I have no evidence for that! I’m stone-cold single, I hate my job, I am not even sure exactly what I want but it definitely isn’t this.”

This is understandable, but you don’t need the evidence you think you need. Here’s why:

You don’t require evidence for travel

You believe in a near-infinite number of places you’ve never been, things you’ve never seen, and people you’ve never met. How many countries are there in the world? (AKA How many countries do you believe there are in the world?)

How many of those have you been to? What makes you believe in the countries you haven’t been to? How do you know about the city you’re planning to visit even though you’ve never been there?

You’ve heard people talk about it. Maybe you’ve seen maps or photos or social media posts.

But that’s almost certainly true of your manifestation as well. You have heard of at least one person, perhaps many people, who is living a life you would LOVE to live. Someone who has a lucrative, fun business while getting to spend tons of time with her husband and kids. Someone who lives in a mossy cottage in the woods and grows all her own herbs and always has enough of everything through the magic of community. Someone who travels all over the place and has photo albums full of incredible views and memories.

Social media can be an amazing expander. Most likely you’re following at least one person who is living out your dreams, or a life similar enough to inspire you. Their photos and words are like postcards from the other side, from places you’ve never been but would love to see.

They weren’t born into their dream. No one is. Hopefully we were born into our parents’ dream lives, but either way, we have to build our own as adults.

If those other people created a dream life–which you know they have because their lives are proof–you can too. Your dream is possible. It’s not vague and amorphous out there in the ether. It literally just requires putting one step in front of the other and persisting. Just because it’s not currently present to your senses doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You don’t treat any other destinations like that is the case.

Imagine traveling to another city, state, or country. For virtually the entire trip, your physical destination is not even visible. You see changes happening in the terrain, but they don’t always have an obvious connection to the end destination. You can interpret (or ignore) the terrain changes however you wish to. If you were using your sense of sight to determine how close you were to somewhere you’ve never been… you’d have no idea how close or far it really is. And this is just for the most basic, believable travels. How much more so for the invisible and intangible.

A word about “But how?”

Requiring visual evidence goes hand-in-hand with wondering “But how?” or constantly asking “Am I there yet?” like a little kid.

If you decided to drive across the country for business or pleasure, you would not spend a single moment with your head in your hands agonizing about “how” you’d do it. You would not say “But I’ve never BEEN to all those states! How will I figure out what to do? What if I can’t do it? Oh, there are infinite decisions to make! Maybe this journey simply isn’t meant for little old me.” This is not how road trips work!

You’d have full confidence you would figure out whatever you need to, as countless people have before you. That you definitely don’t need to know every single turn in advance and of course you’d be overwhelmed if you thought that foreknowledge was necessary. Anyone would be if they thought they needed a prior mental conception of each and every step of the drive to a place they’ve never been.

Pause and think about that a moment. Knowing the entire journey in advance in detail is simply not how journeys work. It does not make sense to apply more stringent expectations to our big, soul-fueled dreams than we do to driving to St. Louis. How does it feel to know that you are sure to simply figure out things as needed, just like you always have with every trip you’ve ever taken?

Nowadays we have GPS. And before that we had paper maps and clear highway signage that gave good enough direction that road trips have been popular for a very long time.

Imagine me standing on a roof and shouting this (I want everyone to hear): YOU CONTAIN A “GPS” THAT IS PROGRAMMED TO YOUR DREAMS. (Here’s some help connecting to it.)

You don’t need to know the “how” in advance. Or even DURING. On a road trip, your job is simply to take the next turn prompted by the GPS, improvising and redirecting as needed. On your journey to your dream life, your job is simply to take the next step prompted by your inner knowing, improvising and redirecting as needed.

“How” is an excuse, a story. The internet has so much how-to information it hurts. And even so, the best guidance still comes from seeking within and exploring what you are quietly tugged to. As I said, each of us contains a personalized GPS that is always trying to direct us back to the journey in which we live most authentically, make the greatest contribution to the collective, and receive the greatest amount of satisfaction. All you have to do is listen, take the next action you feel prompted/pulled toward, and remove whatever in your life is not aligned with your goal.

Read more here about why you don’t need to know how.

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I said before that belief and certainty are responsible for whether and how fast you manifest a desire. You are responsible for creating belief and creating certainty.

As this article illustrates, belief makes it so you can walk the path at all, keeps you from giving up and going home. A differing level of belief is why you have probably reached every road trip destination in your life yet perhaps not every manifestation goal. Belief determines whether it will be possible for you to reach your dream life. (If you don’t believe Montreal exists, you will never even try to go there. You will never go. Knowing every step in advance? Not required. Not possible.

Belief gets you started and certainty brings you home. They are two stops on the same spectrum.

What determines the speed of actualizing your dreams? Certainty. Conviction. Commitment. Decision. These are all closely related and I can’t wait to share more about this in part two.

Looking for further guidance and support around manifesting your dream life? I’d love to chat with you about whether my 1:1 coaching and hypnosis would be a fit for both of us. Feel free to reach out via comment or email (or DM me on Instagram) for a no-pressure conversation about your dreams and/or the possibility of working together.

* A few more thoughts I wanted to share that don’t fit into the flow of this article:

Because road trips are seen as commonplace, we openly accept that giving up is a decision, never forced, because most of us would persist until we reached our destination, even if circumstances were extreme and we had to face unusual weather or spend an extra night in a hotel. 

But if you stop pursuing your dream, few people would point out to you that that was your choice. Maybe they don’t want to kick you when you’re down, but I think it’s more so this super common belief that dreams aren’t realistic, while road trips are. And telling someone they have agency is not kicking them while they’re down (although try telling that to the person who’s not ready to accept their agency… and warn me before you do because I don’t want to be there!)

It’s all in the story. When it comes to your dream life, obstacles like weather, traffic, roadblocks—say, lack of outward recognition or social media engagement, lots of competition, and an unfavorable economy/lack of funding—are seen as the reason you gave up.

But no matter “why” you gave up, YOU are the reason you gave up. Your decision to stop being tenacious is fully and 100% the cause. Your decision to make any given obstacle a journey-ending problem belongs to YOU and you alone. Nothing is a problem unless you decide it is, because it’s your decision that makes it a problem. Your decision to take the circumstance personally enough that you let it alter your ultimate plans and path.

There is no shame in this, of course! It’s your decision to make, and there’s no morality associated with it. Maybe you don’t feel like doing what it takes to get what you most desire. That’s seriously fine! But make no mistake: it’s your choice. No one and nothing outside of you can force you to give up. This is easy to see with travel and harder to see with pursuing your dreams.

Remember: you can put yourself in situations where it is hard to give up. You can structure your life and relationships around this. Hire a coach, join groups, make commitments, set up accountability meetings or partnerships, and much more.

Photo by Fran on Unsplash