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The Art of
Manifesting Your Dreams
by Laurence G. Boldt |
We’ve all heard a lot about “The American Dream”—but
is there only one model of success? I think it’s safe
to say that there are as many American Dreams as there
are Americans. Sure, many of us share common values and
aspirations for the kind of world we’d like to live
in. But when it comes to the visions we have for our
lives as individuals, we are as unique as our
fingerprints. Your dreams are not mine—or those of
your next door neighbor. Each individual has his or her
own idea of what constitutes a happy and successful
life. Each must chart their own path to living their
dreams. Creativity, then, is the real secret to a happy
and successful life. After all, the life you want to
live isn’t going to just show up someday. You are
going to have to create it. Fortunately, creating is
what you were born to do.
Creativity Is Your Birthright
Every child is
born a genius
~Albert Einstein
Birds fly, fish swim, and humans create. Our
species is not defined by the size of our brains, our
ability to walk upright, or even our ability to make
tools. Anatomically modern humans go back at least
100,000 years. Were we to see these people dressed in
modern clothing, walking down a street, they would be,
to all outer appearances, indistinguishable from the
rest of us. Yet anthropologists identify truly modern
humans with the period beginning about 40,000 years ago.
It is in this period that we see the first flowering of
the creative imagination, the first signs that a vivid
inner life was shaping and enriching the human
experience. Our primogenitor, the first truly modern
human, was born when some unknown spark ignited a
creative fire in the human imagination.
And human beings have gone on
creating ever since. We can only marvel at the human
capacity to survive and thrive in the most extreme
climates and geographical settings—from the Inuits, or
Eskimos, of the Arctic North to the Bedouins of the
Arabian Desert. Human beings not only survived in these
extremes but produced a rich cultural life and made
beautiful artifacts. For example, the Paiute Indians
lived in the Great Basin of the American West, a barren
environment where little more than wild grasses grow.
Yet they took these grasses and created truly
spectacular basketry. It is not only highly functional—woven
so tightly, it holds water without mortar—but also
widely recognized as some of the most beautiful the
world has ever seen. This is the essence of what it is
to be human: to respond creatively to the environments
in which we find ourselves and to shape these into a
life of beauty and meaning.
Creativity: What It Is and Isn’t
Creativity is one of those
words we use all of the time without ever stopping to
consider what it means. But what is it? Creativity is
simply the ability to make things or to make things
happen. It has nothing to do with image—you don’t
have to dress like a bohemian or act like an eccentric
to be creative. Being creative has nothing to do with
your occupation. You don’t have to be a writer,
dancer, painter, or musician to express your creativity.
You can be what you naturally are. In fact, the more you
embrace your own natural talents and gifts, the truer
you are to your own values and sense of purpose, the
more creative you are likely to be. The expression of
creativity is not limited to your career or work life.
You can be creative in the way you approach your
relationships, your lifestyle, your personal growth,
your finances, or any other aspect of your life.
Creativity is more than just coming
up with great ideas. It’s the ability to take an idea
and give it life, to bring into being something that
either did not exist before at all—or that did not
exist before for you. If we think about it in this way,
we can see that this is something we have all done at
different times in our lives. So we all have not only
the innate capacity to be creative but real experience
in being so.
What Keeps Us from Creating the
Results We Want?
Yet, for all too many, that
experience remains limited and/or unconscious. By “unconscious,”
I mean that we often don’t recognize that our
successes (and, interestingly, even our failures)
reflect the application of basic laws of manifestation,
or principles of the creative process. We may attribute
our success to luck, hard work, or a variety of other
factors, and miss the role that universal principles of
manifestation play in our achievements. I wrote my new
book How to Be, Do, or Have Anything to help
people recognize these principles of creative
manifestation and apply them in very practical ways to
consistently achieve the results they desire. Over the
course of many years working in the career development
field, I have been reminded again and again that many
people don’t know how to create the results they want
in life. And it’s just not people in the middle or at
the bottom end of the economic scale. By mid-life, many
who are financially well-off have discovered that
knowing how to move up the corporate ladder, or even how
to make shrewd and lucrative investments, is not the
same as knowing how to create what they truly want in
life. People from all walks of life and across the
socio-economic spectrum fail to recognize and
consistently express their innate creative abilities.
But if we are all naturally creative,
if creativity is, in fact, built into the very fiber of
our beings, why do we so often believe, feel, and act as
though it isn’t? It takes years of conscious
development for our innate creative capacities to reach
their fullest expression. Even the most basic level of
development can be stunted by a variety of unfavorable
factors. Chief among these is the belief that we
are not creative. Studies designed to find variables
that correlate with creativity have examined a range of
factors including: IQ, socio-economic status, education,
ethnicity, and gender. It turns out that none of these
variables correlate with creativity. In fact, the only
reliable predictor of how creative a person actually is,
is the individual’s belief in his or her creativity.
The more creative you believe you are, the more creative
you are likely to be. Though it surprised the
researchers conducting these studies, this outcome is
really a matter of common sense. If you don’t believe
that you have the ability to create what you want, you’re
not going to try, to experiment, to risk following your
dreams, or, if you do try, you’re likely to give up at
the first sign of trouble. In either case, you’re not
going to gain the knowledge and practical experience
that comes with applying the creative process over and
over again. What we believe shapes what we do, and what
we do determines the outcomes in our lives.
Unfortunately, most people weren’t
brought up to believe that they could create what they
want in life. Most didn’t see their parents modeling a
creative way of life. Even if their parents paid lip
service to creative development, their actions often
indicated that following one’s dreams was not a high
priority in life. If people didn’t get encouragement
to believe in and express their creativity at home, they
most certainly didn’t get it at school. In seminars I’ve
conducted over the years, I’ve often asked people if
they felt as though they had been encouraged to develop
their creativity in school. In these admittedly
unscientific surveys, I found that fewer than 5 percent
believed their creativity had been nurtured at school.
On the contrary, the sit-in-rows-, learn-by-rote-, and
find-THE-right-answer approach to education discourages
original thinking, experimentation, and risk-taking—all
of which are necessary for creative development.
When they leave school and enter the
work world, most people do not find their creativity
encouraged there either. Indeed, powerful structural
impediments to the development of creativity have been
built into the way much of work is organized today.
While these impediments can be overcome, consistently
expressing our creativity at work requires greater
conscious effort today than it did in times past. Prior
to the Industrial Revolution, most people had daily
experience with the creative process. They made their
own homes, clothing, tools, furniture, bedding, soap,
candles, and a host of other items. They worked on
things from start to finish, infusing their love,
intelligence, and care at every step along the way, as
they moved from idea to result. Yet with increasing
mechanization and specialization, the experience of
working on things from start to finish became confined
to fewer and fewer people. Today, few own their work.
They have little control over its ultimate purpose or
the process by which it is produced. The effect of this
on individual creativity was something that the
economist Adam Smith foresaw centuries ago. While Smith
thought that specialization would be good for the “wealth
of nations,” what we would today call the “GDP,”
he warned that from the standpoint of the individual, it
would have a stifling effect on creativity and a dulling
effect on the human imagination. As Smith predicted,
many have lost “the habit exertion” that comes with
being creatively challenged at work.
In our entertainments as well, we
have grown increasingly passive. Instead of making up
our own stories, songs, and dances, as our ancestors did
for untold centuries, we watch television. Even reading
a book requires a more active use of the imagination
than watching a movie or a television program—but
reading too is on the decline. So today, whether at work
or at home, many aren’t using their creative
imaginations—and just as muscles grow flabby from lack
of exercise, so our imaginations grow flabby from lack
of use.
We can see then that there are a
variety of reasons why people fail to recognize and
develop their innate creative capacities. Some of these
are social and cultural, some strictly individual. For
many people, skepticism about their creative abilities
can be linked to more pervasive self-esteem issues,
reflecting fundamental doubts about their worth and
deservingness. For others, it may be related to specific
experiences in the past. For example, after being
criticized by a teacher in an art or writing class, a
young person may have decided not just that he isn’t
cut out for art or writing—but that he isn’t the “creative
type.” We have seen, then, how our natural creative
abilities can be denied, inhibited, and blocked. Yet we
should never forget that—regardless of a person’s
age or past experience—these abilities can be
reclaimed, cultivated, and expressed.
Cultivating Creativity: A Great
Leap Forward
All right, so how do we
develop our creative abilities? The short answer is: the
same way we develop any skill—with knowledge and
practical application. When we are thinking about
developing creativity, it’s important to keep in mind
three principles discussed earlier:
1. Creativity is the ability to make
things or to make things happen, to shape our outer
environments in the image of our inner life.
2. Creativity is natural to human
beings; under favorable conditions, it spontaneously
manifests itself.
3. Creativity can be cultivated,
which is to say that with conscious intention and
direction, we can enhance our creative capacities above
and beyond naturally occurring levels.
We discussed some of the unfavorable
elements that can interfere with the natural development
and expression of our innate creative potentials. In the
end, what they have in common is the sense of breaking
the individual’s spirit, of destroying the confidence
we had in ourselves and the trust we had in life when we
were the “genius” children to which Einstein
referred. A confident, cheerful, and loving attitude
toward life is the sunlight that the soil of imagination
needs to germinate and grow creative ideas into viable
living entities. Anything that makes us doubt ourselves
or our possibilities in life blocks that sunlight. By
the same token, anything that gives us confidence in
ourselves, and the power we have to shape our lives in
the image of our dreams, dispels the clouds and allows
the light to come streaming in. Nothing gives us
confidence like a thorough understanding of the creative
process, the means by which ideas become living
realities.
Agriculture, the cultivation of
living plants, provides an excellent analogy for how a
naturally occurring phenomenon (like human creativity)
can be taken to new and higher levels. Humanity made a
great leap forward when it discovered agriculture. Our
entire civilization owes its existence to those ancient
pioneers who took a naturally occurring phenomenon—the
interaction of sun, soil, and seed that gives birth to
food-producing plants—and began to cultivate this
process to make it yield far greater results. Today, we
can take another, even greater, leap forward by
cultivating that seemingly random process through which
the interaction of consciousness and environment—of
idea, emotion, and action—gives birth to a new thing,
event, or experience of reality. By understanding and
cultivating that process by which seeds of thought
germinate within the fertile soil of the human
imagination and begin growing into living realities, we
can empower ourselves as individuals and revolutionize
our collective experience.
Cultivation means moving from
haphazard and limited results to predictable and
bountiful ones. If you were to toss some seeds out your
back door, a few might take root; perhaps one or two
might even mature and bear fruit. Yet if you are
counting on a rich harvest, you will want to prepare,
plant, and care for a garden. In the same way, you can
from time to time haphazardly create the results you
want in life without understanding the creative process.
Yet if you want to get consistent results, year in and
year out, in a wide variety of areas, you will want to
understand and apply all the steps in the creative
process.
And it is a process. When you plant a
garden, you don’t go out the next day and dig up the
seeds to see if it is working—to see if things are
really growing. You recognize that growth is an evolving
process—and you trust it. You also understand that at
different stages of this process, different things need
to be done. There is a time to prepare the soil, to
plant the seeds, to water, fertilize, weed, harvest, and
so on. In the same way, there is a process in the act of
creating. Impatience can spoil your manifestations.
There is as well a sequence to these events, and it is
important that they be done in order. Understanding and
exerting conscious control over the creative process
allows us to get better and more consistent results, in
the same way that planting a garden helps us to grow
more food.
While the act of creation always
retains an unconscious component, there are things we
can do to trigger this unconscious element as well.
Again the analogy holds: we can’t make things
grow—nature does this in a mysterious way—but we can
create conditions which are conducive to growth. When it
comes to creating results, some people recognize this
process—these conditions of growth—intuitively. Yet
many do not. It has long struck me as a great failing of
our education system that we do not teach people the
practical mechanics of creating the results they want in
their lives. It was the desire to address this issue
that led me to write my latest book.
How to Be, Do, or Have Anything reveals
the eight essential steps of “the manifestation
formula,” the key to understanding the creative
process. The manifestation formula articulates the
creative process in a simple, step-by-step way that
helps you understand all of its components, how they all
fit together, and in what order. This makes it easier to
replicate success, by understanding how and why you are
getting good results when you do. It gives you
confidence to apply this universal process to other
areas of your life that perhaps aren’t working as
well. It also helps you examine your “failures” and
understand exactly why success eluded you. Armed with
this knowledge, you will be much less likely to give up
on yourself or your dreams. You’ll have a blueprint
that lets you know exactly where you are in the creative
process at any given time and how to best marshal your
energy and resources to advance your goals at each and
every stage along the way.
How to Be, Do, or Have Anything
invites you to begin taking immediate action to fulfill
the deepest desires of your heart. As you move through
the interactive worksheets and exercises, your dreams
begin to crystallize, to take on form and substance. The
book can even help you tap into new visions for your
life, visions which have been with you all the while but
have remained hidden from your awareness. The key to it
all is application of the “manifestation formula.” I
like to think of the eight steps of the manifestation
formula as the essential amino acids of the creative
process. Just as our bodies can spontaneously produce
the rest of the amino acids from the essential ones, so,
by mastering and applying the eight essentials of the
manifestation formula, we can spontaneously generate the
particulars that we require to flesh out our unique
manifestations. I have seen firsthand how applying this
formula has helped people to regain confidence in their
creative capacities and transform their lives. I invite
you to embrace the creative process that is your life on
earth and begin shaping it in the image of your dreams.
Read
the Introduction to How to Be, Do, or Have Anything
Copyright © Laurence G. Boldt, 2001
All rights reserved.
Laurence G. Boldt is a writer, career consultant, and personal coach with
nearly two decades of experience helping people shape their dreams into
practical realities. He has been credited with helping to revolutionize the
career field with a new a vision of work and a new technology of vocational
guidance. Laurence is the author of five books including the bestselling Zen
and the Art of Making a Living and How to Find the Work You Love.
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