Manifesting: How to Actually Bend Reality
It’s action, intuition, and a little time travel. Einstein agrees.
Manifesting isn’t about vision boards or burning notes under a full moon (though yes, I’ve done that too). It’s about learning how to bend reality toward your vision through atomic patterning and actions.
I know because I’ve done it. Over and over again.
The Impossible Dream
When I was very young, I started an ice cream company that would one day spark a global trend in an impossibly noisy, nearly impenetrable industry. No one thought it was possible. Except me. (Or rather, I didn’t assume it was impossible.)
The dream fell apart many times. But it was all I had. So I kept going.
You can’t manifest something if you’re not willing to lose everything. That’s the toll. The rules change when survival is on the line. The tension of creativity grows sharper in that mode. You have to know your gifts and feel like the luckiest person alive (no matter the reality of your situation).
Manifestor, if you only know one thing about yourself, let it be this: you will figure it out.
Curious about my journey? Here’s a great recent podcast:
Becoming Your Future Self
When I was little, I imagined the person I’d become. She lived boldly, with wind in her hair and her name on the door. I dreamed of her often. And over time, she became my compass. My imagination was so vivid that the future began to overlap with the present. I could feel her.
You are who you’re becoming. Your body follows where your mind’s eye is looking. The person you will become already lives inside of you—born from what you think about and what you choose to act on.
There was a quiet voice guiding me. She whispered what became a mantra:
“Keep going. It’s going to be okay.”
I believed she was my great-great-grandmother, the guardian angel my beloved grandma said watched over me. After a near-death experience at seven, I clung to that story. I never doubted it.
That message echoed through my entire life. It gave me courage and the conviction to keep going, even when everything felt impossible. It also gave me permission to have fun with the adventure. I sincerely believed everything would be okay. And because I believed it, I moved through the world that way—braver, lighter, more open to possibility.
How to Manifest, For Real
This isn’t a checklist. It’s a way of life.
Go Your Own Way
Willing something into life isn’t linear. You’re not walking a path, you’re carving one. The normal way won’t work. And that’s fine, because you don’t have the resources, the know-how, or the network to walk that path anyway.
What you do have is something better: the ability to form an unshakable—sometimes irrational—belief in your vision and your gifts: creativity, audacity, instinct, hard work, and love.
Fall in Love with an Idea
Wander. Daydream. Create. Follow every curiosity until you find the intersection where something that lights you up creates value for someone else.
For every viable idea, there are 99 that fail. Be the person who comes back for the 100th. (Most won’t.)
Project that idea into the future until it turns into a vision. It becomes your biggest crush. Let it take over. That’s what makes it fun.
Help Others with Their Visions
Whatever you need, give it freely to the world. It will come back to you, tenfold. If you need help, be helpful. If you need love, give love.
Step Through Every Door
When I needed better dairy for our ice creams, I had to break into a system built to keep people like me out. I spent years listening, asking questions, and learning the language of the industry—pasteurization, homogenization, dairy farming.
One by one, doors opened. And I walked through every single one.
Eventually, the right door opened, and it changed everything.
Don’t Be a Positivist. Be an Optimist.
Don’t confuse optimism with positivity. They are not the same.
Much of our modern world is shaped by a kind of practical positivism, a belief that only what can be measured, proven, or modeled is real. It creates cultures of spreadsheets and systems. And beneath those? Fear and silence. People are afraid to be wrong. Afraid to speak up. Afraid to suggest change.
For optimists, the glass is not half-full or half-empty. Optimists live in the space above the water—the realm of the unseen, the not-yet, the infinite. The place to expand into. They rely on emotion, intuition, even a little metaphysics. It’s not naive hope. It’s a discipline. Atomic patterning.
It’s the ability to see over the horizon and take us there.
Dream in the Future. Act Now.
Start before you’re ready. Make something. Try something. Sell something. Act. If you’re doing something truly new, your early prototypes will be terrible. They won’t be polished. That’s the point. You’ll learn fast.
Make People Feel Loved
Your ability to make someone feel something is a superpower. It’s not branding. It’s not a strategy. It’s the root of resonance in an era of emotional disconnection. Emotion is the one thing machines can’t replicate, and the one thing humans can’t live without.
At Jeni’s, we didn’t begin with pitch decks or exit strategies. We began by making people feel seen, special, cared for. We gave love relentlessly. That’s why they came back.
To love people is to fight for them. The most effective leaders know this.
Most Americans can only name four emotions. Imagine the power of someone who knows how to move others right now.
Let Go of Ego
It takes an extraordinary amount of humility to create something new and stand for it.
You will look like a fool. You will fail publicly. You will upset people and get knocked down—more often than you’ll win. And you will get back in the arena. Bruised and battered, yes, but still standing.
Because you are strong enough to let go of your ego.
Most people will never have the guts to do that.
Know When to Fold ’Em
You don’t have to hold on to every relationship, every plan, every partner, every idea. You don’t owe anyone your silence, your explanation, or your softness. Work hard to make things work. Give as much as you can. But when it’s time to go—go.
That’s not coldness. That’s clarity.
More
Of course, building a company takes more than this. It takes a uniquely talented, trusted, and aligned team. A solid plan. Resources. Resilience.
But the hardest part, by far, is starting from nothing.
A Time Bending Moment
Driving home from the forest the other day, I was talking to the little girl I used to be, as I often do.
“Keep going,” I told her. “It’s going to be okay. Your life’s going to be pretty rad.”
And then I paused. I’d heard those words before. Soft. Familiar. Intuitive.
It stopped me in my tracks.
It had been me all along. I was the one sending those messages through time —from the woman I am now to the girl I once was.
And she had received them.
Maybe that’s what time really is—not a straight line, but a loop. A long, strange, beautiful conversation between who we were, who we are, and who we’re becoming.
Einstein believed “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
And physicists like Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking agree—time may be a landscape, not a line.
If that’s true, then maybe the voice we hear when we need it most doesn’t come from above or beyond.
Maybe it comes from us.
Looping back.
If we listen closely enough, we can hear ourselves whispering through the fold. Calling ourselves forward.
Keep going.
It’s going to be okay.
With love + lightness,
Jeni
This is the first time I've read something on "manifesting" that actually resonated/made sense. It's encouraging because it reflects in many ways what I've tapped into - especially the "time" layering in on itself. What you said about the vision being how you wanted to feel reminded me of the Thoreau quote where he said achieving your dreams is not about what you attain but the type of person you become.
Needed this <3