It’s truth time, ladies: How much time have you spent wishing something in your life was different?
Personally, I have spent a lot of time and energy on fruitless wishes in my life. I called these wishes by many names: prayers, visualizations, intentions, and magick spells, to name a few. I made them on paper, under the moon at midnight, and on the street when no one was listening. I employed every tool at my disposal both deliberately and desperately, trying to create more money, better relationships, greater opportunities, and different outcomes with the power of my mind.
I wanted to control my life and create what I’d always been told was possible for me, and these many forms of wishing were where I’d been instructed to start.
In particular, I wished that I could be a better writer. I wished for that “magic touch” that other writers seemed to have; that special something that makes words jump off the page and into readers’ hearts and minds. I prayed for inspirational lightning to strike me out of the blue, and transform the coarse sand of my mediocrity into the sculpted glass form of a divinely blessed creatrix.
Guess what? All that wishing … it didn’t work.
The more I wished for change, the more I found myself facing the same problems I’d always faced, and getting the same results I’d always gotten. The more I wished, the more frustrated I became, and the more I began to believe that creative visualization―and all the other tools of the metaphysical trade―simply wouldn’t work for me.
In fact, I almost gave up on writing because I couldn’t magically create the change I desired in my own creative process. “I guess I’m just not a good writer,” I told myself. “Maybe it’s time to give up and try something else.”
You see, wishing didn’t help me learn. It didn’t acknowledge the change that needed to happen within me in order for my dreams to come true. In fact, my belief that wishing, praying, and visualizing were all that was necessary to create a brand new reality kept me locked in an unhealthy cycle of victimhood. “If I only pray hard enough,” I told myself, “the benevolent Universe will hear me and take pity on me.”
It sounds silly, now. But for years, this struggle was real for me.
And then, one day, the Universe did take pity on me. Lightning finally did strike―and what it illuminated was not my wildest dreams made real, but rather the giant flaw in my thinking process.
Wishes―whether they take the form of creative visualization, prayers, magic spells, intentions, mantras, or something else―do not work without inspired action to back them up. Wishing without taking action is like sitting in your car with the engine off, or standing at the foot of a mountain trail waiting for an invisible ski lift to sweep you to the top: you can imagine where you’re going, but unless you actually do something, you’re never going to get there.
In real life, of course, things are never that simple. The actions we must take if we are to claim the things we visualize and pray for are rarely easy. They challenge us, stretch us, and scare us like nothing else can. Sometimes, they feel downright impossible. (Case in point: it’s hard to motor off into the sunset of your dreams if you have no idea how to drive the car!) However, it is through these inspired actions, these baby steps toward our dreams, that we test the mettle of our convictions, and show our benevolent Universe that we mean business.
Why Wishing Doesn’t Work
Most of the time, when we don’t get what we wish for, it’s because we aren’t ready to receive it.
Yup. I said it. We aren’t ready to receive it. (I know, your inner critic is busy blaming and shaming right now, but hear me out.)
Sometimes, our human minds play tricks on us. We instinctively deflect, repel, and dodge questions and situations that challenge our egos. Sometimes, we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. However it happens, though, the result is that we make excuses for why we’re not taking the steps to create the life we’ve asserted that we want, because taking those steps would require a complete reevaluation of who we think we are, what we believe, and what we’ve already created. Wishing is a “safe” way to try to create change, because all it requires of us is that we sit back and wait for the Law of Attraction to do its thing.
I wanted to be a better writer―but I wasn’t willing to acknowledge that a) there was a lot I didn’t know about writing, even though I’d been a moderately successful freelancer for years, and b) I had heretofore been behaving, believing, and reacting in a way that was not aligned with the results I wanted to create.
Subconsciously, I was more afraid of being wrong than of being a bad writer―so I prayed for improvement, while at the same time refusing to admit ignorance on any level. As you can imagine, this created an energetic gridlock more tangled than rush hour in New York City.
It wasn’t until I was ready to open myself up to the possibility of being wrong―or worse, uninformed―that I was actually able to absorb the information that would help me move forward, and apply it to my creative process in an objective, useful way.
“What?” My mind screamed. “Why do you need to read a book about grammar? You’re a writer! You should instinctively know the best way to format a sentence. What kind of operation are you running here, Bryna?”
And yet, the only way to go from “okay writer” to “great writer” was to ignore that inner critic and approach my process like a total newbie. In order to learn what I didn’t know, I had to admit that I might not know anything.
Oh, boy, was that hard. Until, one day, it wasn’t anymore.
Until I shifted my thinking and admitted that I needed to make some difficult changes within myself, I wasn’t ready to be a great writer, because I wasn’t ready to take the necessary actions to grow into that role. I couldn’t receive what I was asking for, because I wasn’t willing to make space for that new way of being. I was too caught up in who I was (and too guilty about who I wasn’t) to become who I could be.
I think many of us run into this from time to time, especially with our creative processes. As children, we’re fed a lot of crap about “natural talent” and “inborn skills,” and encouraged to pursue what comes easily to us―because, obviously, if it’s easy, we must be “meant” to do it. Growing up, I was always told that I could do and be anything I wanted―which, of course, was true, as it is true of nearly everyone. What I didn’t understand, however, was that natural talent, no matter how prodigious, is in no way a substitute for practice and experience.
In other words, just because I’m not automatically great at something doesn’t mean I’m somehow disqualified from doing it.
Unsubstantiated wishing plays into that all-or-nothing mentality. I have friends who say stuff like, “I wish I could play an instrument, but I just wasn’t musical growing up.” As though, if they haven’t tried something by the time they turn eighteen, they are barred from doing so for the rest of their natural lives. Of course, it’s harder to learn an instrument at forty than at four―but it’s only impossible if you refuse to pick up your guitar. (On the flip side, it’s easier to wish you could play than to actually force your fingers to stumble over the frets for those first few months.)
These days, I’m all about finding new challenges to surmount, both in my writing and in my business. It’s still hard for me to admit when I don’t know something, or when something doesn’t come easily to me, but I’m okay with the learning curve now. I’ve realized that not knowing something doesn’t make me wrong, or stupid, or untalented; in fact, the only wrong choice is to refuse to learn.
So, ladies, let’s stop sitting in our cars with the engines off, or staring up at the mountains we know are calling us. Let’s pull out those instruction manuals, put our pedals to the metal, and leave those unhelpful wishes in the dust. Let’s challenge our notions about who we are and what’s possible for us, and take inspired action to move beyond imagination into real, tangible experience.
It’s about time, don’t you think?
