These 14 Words Helped Me Manifest My Dream Life

... and how I created a writing business that helps health & wellness professionals live their dream life, too

On December 30th, 2015, my life changed forever.

Instead of taking my last remaining vacation day for the year, I decided to go to the office. I knew it would be quiet, and I wanted to clean up my desk and my inbox so I could start the New Year off fresh.

The office was empty. It was just me and the company president.

Around 3 o’clock that afternoon, the president called me into a conference room to “catch up” on a few things. I walked into the conference room, and he shut the door behind me.

He sat down. There was a closed manila folder on the table in front of him.

He looked down at the folder and opened it. He kept his eyes down and casually said, “I’m letting you go. This is your termination agreement.”

To say I was blind-sided is a ridiculous understatement. Just 10 months earlier, this same man had given me the biggest bonus I’d ever received in my 6 years with the company. (My entire 29-year career, in fact.)

The $30k I got was a piss in the ocean compared to what the company was gaining from the deal I brought them. It was for Angry Birds. They had already raked in $80 million from the deal and there was no end in sight.

It was the most lucrative entertainment alliance in the company’s history.

So being let go didn’t make any sense. And I now had a much bigger problem.

… Because 20 hours earlier, I had signed the papers for a monstrous cash-out refinance of my mortgage. Then I wrote my soon-to-be ex-husband a 6-figure check, buying him out of the house.

That gave me full ownership of the property and expenses, on top of paying for our son’s school tuition.

And just to be clear, getting divorced was NOT my idea. It was my husband’s. It’s not that he’d fallen in love with someone else. In fact, nothing really “happened” at all. He just decided he didn’t want to be married anymore.

I was heartbroken. Even though it was challenging to be married to him, I loved having a family. I loved MY family.

Our son was 12 when all of this went down. And the last thing I wanted was for him to go through his parents divorce AND lose the only home he’d ever known AND get shoved into a new school AND go through puberty all at the same time.

So my goal was to keep his life as unchanged as possible. I crunched the numbers and figured, if we cut back and lived a “no frills” life, I could buy my husband out of the house and cover the expenses on my own.

Of course, that was based on my 6-figure salary … the one I had just lost.

But it gets even worse…

I realized my husband was not in a good place on a number of levels. (I now recognize he had unresolved trauma that he was taking out on our marriage.) I knew I didn’t want more complications going forward. So I figured severing all financial ties would be the smartest.

So the day before, with the sweep of a pen, I signed a separation agreement that waived alimony and any child support I was entitled to.

I was 100% on my own.

As I sat across from the president trying to listen to him, I had one of those “Charlie Brown moments” … the one where Charlie’s sitting in a classroom and all he hears the teacher say is “WAH wah WAH wah WAH.”

My mind was racing with all the financial responsibilities I’d just taken on. And now I had no job and no financial help from my son’s father. I was expecting a full on panic attack to hit at any moment.

But something remarkable happened.

I suddenly felt a sense of complete calm and serenity wash over my body. I’d never felt anything like it before.

And then I received a message…

“God won’t let you fall off a cliff and not give you wings to fly.”

Whoa! It was so clear it was as if someone had walked into the room and said it.

I was so stunned I almost wanted to interrupt the president’s “wah wah wah” and ask, “Did you just hear that?!”

I was dumbstruck. All I can say is it felt like the Universe had stepped in and was taking over.

I remember just sitting back in the chair thinking, “I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but it’s gonna be good!”

It turns out that was the understatement of the century. Because the next 18 months were better than I could ever have imagined.

While I should have been dealing with the emotional fallout from my divorce, instead I was filled with excitement and anticipation. It seemed like I was being guided to follow a path, even though I couldn’t see where it was leading me.

It’s only with hindsight that I realized I had been manifesting it myself. And the Universe was delivering!

How I got the Universe to conspire in my favor

For the next 18 months, countless synchronicities and opportunities appeared out of nowhere. In fact, if everything that happened to me was put into a movie script, most of it would end up on the cutting room floor because it would seem too unbelievable.

I’m going to tell you about a few of them here. And I’ll give you the manifesting techniques I used to make them happen.

1. A course “found me” … and transformed my life

Before this incident, I had a career in the entertainment industry. For 29 years, I built massive consumer products programs around the world for brands like MTV, Nickelodeon, Pokémon, and The Sharper Image. I also negotiated deals with powerful companies like Disney, Fox, and Rovio (the creators of Angry Birds).

I loved the international travel, but corporate life was grueling … especially once I became a mom. I hated the long commutes (3 hours a day), company politics, and demands on my schedule.

Whenever things got really bad, I fantasized about writing a novel. I had vivid images of me sitting in a café in a provincial town in France, spending the days writing.

While I always loved to write, I was never one of those people who had a novel in them “just waiting to be brought to the page.” So I assumed if I ever lived out that fantasy, it would have to be when I retired and didn’t need my book royalties (if there were any) to pay the bills.

So it’s funny that the course that found me was about becoming a copywriter.

I didn’t know a thing about copywriting. I’d only heard about it a few months earlier, when I was working on a project for a grocery loyalty program. I needed meal plans and recipes. And a friend suggested I find a copywriter who specializes in recipe writing.

As I was searching for a recipe writer, I came across a magazine called Writer’s Digest. A headline on the cover caught my eye.

It said, “It’s Never Too Late!”

It was about making your dreams of becoming a writer come true. I was intrigued and bought it.

Then a couple of weeks later, an email about the copywriting course (from a different company) landed in my inbox.

At the time, changing careers certainly wasn’t on my radar. Even though I would have loved to get out of the rat race and do something I was really passionate about, I had no idea what that could be.

I would never have considered becoming a writer. To me, that screamed “starving artist.” And I couldn’t afford taking that kind of risk. I had to find another executive position to replace my 6-figure salary pronto.

So I bought the course thinking it could be my side-hustle. It said it was possible to make a 6-figure living as a copywriter, working from home in my pajamas, which sounded amazing! I figured if it worked, it could be my 2-5 year “exit strategy” from the corporate world.

Looking back on it, I now see that for years, I had been sending a signal to the Universe. Every time I fantasized about sitting in a café writing, I was letting the Universe know what I wanted.

2. Once I put a stake in the ground, the Universe started conspiring in my favor

The first few months after I got laid off, I spent a lot of time looking for a corporate gig. I polished up my resume, reached out to my network, and hit the pavement.

I hated looking for a job. Vehemently.

Yet every night when I went to bed, I was excited to wake up the next morning. Because my mornings were reserved for studying my copywriting program.

As my excitement about copywriting grew, those mornings got earlier and earlier. I’d often wake up at 3:30 am, ready to jump out of bed and get down to my desk. And when I learned there was a very strong need for health & wellness copywriters, there was no stopping me!

I had been passionate about anything related to natural health and wellness for years. And the thought of becoming a writer in a field I love was so exciting!

I felt like I was living a dual life. On the one hand, I was completely energized by copywriting. On the other hand, every time I went to a corporate interview, my energy tanked and I felt nauseous.

One day, the organization that sold me the course let me know they were offering a one-day workshop about launching your writer’s life. I took the workshop, and that’s when I decided to put a stake in the ground.

I decided I’d stop looking for a corporate job and put 100% of my focus on building a copywriting business. I’d give it 2 years to see if I could make it work.

And that’s when the synchronicities and opportunities started flying in.

The next 18 months felt magical! There were so many signs that I was heading in the right direction. Some of them came from places completely unrelated to copywriting.

One of the most surprising things happened in 2017.

Every holiday, my family always invited Gerard and his wife, Marianne, to come out from Manhattan to celebrate with us in Connecticut. Gerard and my father had been best friends since 1936, when they were just 10 years old. He was a fine arts dealer and the Vice President of the famed Wildenstein Gallery.

We were all at my brother’s house for Easter, and Gerard asked me what I was up to. I told him about an article I was writing for a copywriting blog. It was about a book called Breakthrough Advertising, by Eugene Schwartz.

Eugene Schwartz is considered copywriting royalty. To this day, Breakthrough Advertising is a must-read for anyone who’s even remotely serious about learning copywriting … even though it was written in the 1960s.

Well I was stunned by what Gerard said next.

“Oh, I know Gene. We used to work together.” 😳

Huh? How on earth could Gerard have worked with Eugene Schwartz?

Well it turns out that before he got into art, Gerard dabbled in a number of things, including catalogue sales. And that’s how he met Gene, who was writing copy for the products in the catalogues.

It was such an obscure and completely random connection! But it was just one of the many “coincidences” that made me feel I was on a path I was meant to follow.

(If you’re interested, I wrote about a few more events in this article: Without These 2 Things, Your Health Coaching Business Is Dead In The Water.)

3. The 14 words that turned me into a manifesting magnet!

The last 2 years of my marriage were one of the hardest times of my life. Even though it was my husband’s idea to get divorced, he didn’t do anything to make it happen. It all fell on me.

We still lived together. In fact, as far as everyone else was concerned, we were happily married.

Our lives centered around our son. And there was no yelling or arguing.

We both took part in our son’s activities… we ate dinner together every night in the dining room… and it was really “life as usual” (except my husband slept in the guest room).

I put up a good front, but inside I was a wreck.

I was heartbroken about my marriage ending…

I felt my career wasn’t aligned with what was important to me…

And I felt like I was betraying my son because I didn’t want to tell him what was happening until his father and I had things figured out.

Whenever I went through low times in my life, I would do a lot of soul searching. And this particular time I was really drawn to manifesting.

I desperately wanted to create a different life … one that I loved and would make me excited to wake up to every morning.

I gravitated towards content in “woo woo” territory. I consumed books by Joe Dispenza, Esther Hicks, Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, and more…

I did the work. Because manifestation does take work.

You have to spend time clarifying your vision and putting out the right signals. You have to get your energy to a high vibration. And you have to eliminate negative thinking.

None of that was easy to do while my life was disintegrating. I felt like a plate spinner in a circus, where each plate was part of my life. I tried to keep them all spinning so they wouldn’t fall. And that day in the conference room was when they all crashed to the ground and shattered into thousands of pieces.

But those 14 words I thought in that conference room became my mantra…

“I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but it’s gonna be good.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the perfect manifesting mantra because it’s a high-vibration message. It expresses absolute trust that everything will work out better than you can imagine, even though you can’t see the path ahead or how it will end up.

It adds rocket fuel to your manifesting!

For manifesting to work, you have to strike a balance between “doing” and “allowing.” You have to put the desire out there, then trust the Universe to deliver on it. You have to feel excited about what’s going to happen, even though you don’t know what it is… like the anticipation a child feels about Christmas morning.

If you try to figure out how it’s going to happen, or how you can make it happen, you just get in the way.

My life now…

So many people tell me I’m living their dream life. And the only thing I can say in reply is that I’m living my dream life, too!

I earn royalties for the sales letters and videos I write selling high-quality supplements…

I’ve already helped over 1,000 health and wellness professionals create a successful online business…

I spend 2-3 months a year living and traveling in France (where you can often find me sitting in a café writing)…

And I still wake up early every morning, excited to start my day!

The 3 Steps I Used To Create Manifesting Magic

To wrap things up, here’s how to apply the manifesting steps I used to create change in your life:

1. Fuel the outcome you want with emotion. I saw myself sitting in a café in France writing. But the emotion behind that was about freedom from the shackles of corporate life. It was about doing something I love in a place I love and waking up excited to start the day.

2. Let the Universe know you mean it. Every time I put a stake in the ground, it reminded me to say “no” to things that weren’t aligned with what I wanted. This made room for more of what I did want. And that’s what kept showing up.
   
   I told you about my putting a stake in the ground when I decided to pursue copywriting. And there were other times I did that along the way.
   
   For instance, when I first started writing, I’d take any gig I could get. I knew I needed experience working with clients. And of course I needed the money. But what I really wanted was to only work with health & wellness clients.
   
   I had one assignment that put me over the edge. It was with a young internet millionaire. He wanted to start a luxury travel app and hired me to write an email campaign. We agreed on a timeline and the materials he’d give me so I could do the writing. But he dragged his feet on getting me the resources I needed.
   
   I had blocked off time on my calendar for the project and had another client lined up afterwards. I was running out of time. He wasn’t respecting what we had agreed to or me as a professional.
   
   I decided to refund his money and to stop taking gigs that didn’t align with my end goal –– health & wellness. And lo and behold, an amazing opportunity showed up for me to join a health & wellness team as their copy coach!
   

3. Embody the 14-word mantra. As I mentioned earlier, this mantra … “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but it’s gonna be good” … gives you the right energy for manifesting. It communicates your trust in the process and creates excitement about what’s to come.
   
   I recommend you say it before you even get out of bed in the morning and really mean it. Feel that Christmas morning anticipation. And if you ever have a moment of doubt, replace it with the mantra.

Okay, the fact that you’ve read to the end tells me you’re serious about manifesting. And I hope my story has given you some new ideas.

If you got some value out of it, please give it a like and let me know what you liked about it in the comments.