This week is about what you let go of.

The single biggest shift in my life came when I identified a higher power, and it’s something I don’t talk about enough for how valuable it has been to me and my life and my trajectory.

Life before a…

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Sometimes there are quick wins. Most of the time, there aren’t. It’s the long haul.

And honestly, it’s easy to keep showing up when things are going right, when everything is going as planned or as you hoped. The harder thing, the thing that actually separates people, is continuing to show up when it’s not going right. When it feels like you’re making no progress at all.

Let’s say you’re three months in

You’re doing all the right things. You’re putting in the time, the effort, the energy. You’re sticking to your plan. And nothing has happened yet.

Three months, in the grand scheme of things, is not a long time.

I wrote “I live in California” for six years before it was true. Six years.

I don’t think there’s a correct timeline for any of this. As long as you stay committed to your vision for yourself, I don’t think anything can stand in the way except your own limitations. And if you want something badly enough, you’ll work your entire life to make it your reality.

Look for the breadcrumbs

That said, there’s a difference between waiting and moving.

Before California was my whole, full-blown reality, I was constantly coming out here. For work, for school, for pleasure. Every trip inched me a little closer to the life I was writing down every day, and I was very intentional about that.

I was leaving breadcrumbs for myself.

So if the big thing hasn’t happened yet, ask yourself what the small step is. What’s one thing you can do this week that moves you closer, even a little? Progress doesn’t always show up as the result. Sometimes it shows up as proximity.

Follow the plan, not your mood

Your mood is going to fluctuate. Your plan doesn’t have to.

Some days you’ll feel like you’re getting somewhere, and some days you’ll feel like you’re getting nowhere. If you let your mood make the decisions, you’ll quit on the exact days that matter most.

So stay true to the plan. Not the feeling.

But know the difference

Here’s the other side of it, because I don’t want to preach blind persistence.

Sometimes things just won’t work, and that’s allowed to be the result.

The smart thing to do is to recognize that. To ask yourself honestly: Is this not working because I haven’t put in enough time? Or have I actually exhausted my options, and it’s time to switch something up?

Maybe you tweak it. Maybe you flip it around and try something new. That’s not giving up, that’s being fluid enough to adapt without letting go of the vision.

There’s a big difference between this isn’t working and this isn’t working yet. Knowing which one you’re in is a major part of being successful.

Why consistency wins

I truly believe, in my bones, that if you do something over and over, day after day, week after week, year after year, you’re bound to get there.

Ask any entrepreneur or business owner. They’ll tell you their persistence is the reason they made it. Not a golden ticket. Not everything going exactly to plan. Not things coming easy. It’s that when it got hard, they kept showing up and kept putting in the work. At some point, there’s no other option than for it to work.

I wrote one line for six years. Now I live it.

It wasn’t not working. It just wasn’t working yet.

It can be a blessing and a curse. Although personally, I do think it’s more of a blessing, even though it means I have to encourage (or force) myself to leave my comfort zone. But that’s a post for another day.

Today is about something simpler, and way harder to actually control: your motivation, and the fact that it’s going to be fleeting. Everyone’s is.

Motivation changes. That’s the point.

It’s not consistent. It isn’t going to show up every day, and as a woman especially, I’d say it’s largely out of your control.

This one is for the girls, because our cycles and our hormones shift constantly, day to day and week to week. We feel great one week and then completely off the next. Maybe that shouldn’t be our normal, but it’s incredibly common, and most of us are dealing with it.

So one day you wake up with all the motivation in the world, ready to conquer everything. And the next day, that feeling is gone.

The only thing that carries you through the second day is discipline.

What discipline actually is

Discipline means you show up even when you don’t want to. Even when you don’t feel like it.

Mel Robbins has a line I really like: you will never, ever feel like it. And she’s right. Most of life, we don’t feel like it. We don’t feel like getting out of bed without grabbing our phone. We don’t feel like going to the gym. We don’t feel like doing laundry, or cooking, or cleaning, or working. Half of those things (well, most of them), most days, we’d rather skip. I wouldn’t say it’s human nature, but I would say we live in a society where it has become wildly common.

Common. Something you never want to be or strive for. Common is not how you build yourself, your dreams, or your passions. Showing up on the days you don’t want to is how you do all of that, and that, is uncommon.

Those are the days that count. Those are the days that compound.

Your dream life can’t be built on motivation, because most of the time you won’t have it. But we do have something else… a different muscle that we could all exercise, that we should exercise, but most of us choose not to. Well, because it’s the harder thing to do, the more difficult choice to make.

Why routine keeps me disciplined

My routines are what keep me grounded. I wake up, I walk, I work, I make my coffee, I use my ice roller, I do my daily manifestation and gratitude. Very similar things, every single day. It signals to my brain that we’re just doing what we’re supposed to do. Building good, solid, impactful habits that exist on autopilot is the ultimate goal.

So even when I don’t feel like replying to comments, answering emails, filming, posting, or editing, it’s part of the routine. I just show up. It’s another form of brainwashing yourself, the same way I talked about with manifestation, except this time you’re brainwashing yourself into showing up. Even when your mind would much rather scroll, dissociate, do nothing.

The harder answer is usually the right one

I’ve alluded to this earlier and in other posts: the correct answer is usually the harder one.

It would be so much easier to say, I don’t care, I’m giving up, I’m doing what I feel like.

The harder answer is: I don’t feel like doing this, but I know it serves me. I know it serves my highest self. I know it serves where I want to be a month from now, two months from now, five years from now. So I’m doing the hard thing now, because it pays off later.

A lot of people get stuck chasing instant gratification. This is what I want right now, so I’ll do it. But that’s not going to serve the person you want to become.

How to actually build it

Pick one thing. Do it every single day.

It’s just as easy to build a good habit as a bad one, so be mindful of which one you’re building. Pinpoint a good habit you want in your life, and set yourself up to win at it. Once you taste that success, you’re hooked. And the success that takes longer, the kind that requires a little more effort, time, and energy, always ends up being sweeter in the end.

The most basic example: drinking more water. Get a reusable water bottle you love. Set a reminder that sits on your phone all day as a notification, and you can’t check it off until you’ve done it. Small boundaries like that. It’s working smarter, not harder, through the systems you put in place to hold yourself accountable.

This is the smallest example there is. But when you build the habit in the daily mundane things, applying it to your work, your passions, and your dreams starts to feel natural. Encouraging yourself to succeed becomes your default. You’ve built systems in every part of your life, so nothing slips through the cracks.

And it doesn’t have to be this big analytical thing. Eventually it just becomes part of you.

You start showing up as the person you want to be every single day. And eventually, you become her.

This part isn’t internal. This part is about everything happening around you that you don’t fully control, but can absolutely choose.

The people you spend the most time with will change your life. For better or for worse. There’s no neutral option.

You become who you’re around

If you’re surrounded by entrepreneurs, you’re likely to become one yourself. If you’re surrounded by addicts, you’re likely to become one yourself.

I’m using two extremes on purpose, to show how impactful your environment can be, whether you realize it or not. Whatever you’re around starts to feel normal. Not because it’s who you are at your core. Because it’s what you’re around.

I've lived through different seasons with different people, and my life changed the moment I got specific about who I let in. I intentionally surrounded myself with people who were hardworking, building something, smart, and kind at their core. And because I'm a success-driven person, it mattered to me specifically to be around people who were already successful or actively chasing it.

Figure out where you’re trying to go first

You can’t pick your people until you know what you’re actually building toward.

Want to go pro in a sport? Be around athletes. Want to build a pottery business? Go to the class every week, actually make friends there, be around people doing the thing in their free time, not just people who talk about wanting to.

It’s not only about their influence or their energy, even though that’s real. It’s that when you’re around like-minded people, you think differently. You see your own life through a different lens. You start showing up as the person you’re trying to become — before you’ve even fully arrived there. It’s kind of a like manifestation by osmosis in a sense.

Be picky. On purpose.

This is the whole “work smarter, not harder” idea applied to your environment. You can do everything else right — the manifestation, the gratitude, the daily discipline — and still slow yourself down by staying around people who don’t match where you’re headed.

If you can be intentional about your environment, you should be. I know that’s easier said than done.

So ask yourself honestly: is keeping a friendship or relationship that no longer serves you more important than doing what you already know is right for you — even when that’s the harder call?

You know the answer. The work now is actually applying it. Trusting your gut. Being a little selfish about it. Setting the boundary.

Where this ranks

Manifestation, gratitude, your highest self — that’s all within you, fully in your control. But the second biggest factor shaping your life, right after what’s happening in your own head, is who you let stand next to you while it happens.

Choose on purpose.

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Because manifestation is only half of the practice. Gratitude is what seals it.

I’ve been doing this for almost a decade now. And somewhere along the way it stopped being a practice and just became how I think, how I speak, how I see the world. I’ve trained my brain to work for me instead of against me. Without the gratitude piece, I genuinely don’t think the manifestation is as strong.

What gratitude actually is

To me, gratitude is showing appreciation for everything and anything. Any moment, if you can find gratitude in it — or find gratitude within yourself — it makes everything exponentially better.

Living a life rooted in gratitude has taught me that even a less-than-ideal circumstance can become positive through appreciation. An easy example to follow - you’re heading out for a walk and it starts raining. The instinct is ugh, now I can’t go. But with gratitude, the lens shifts: how lucky am I that I even have the ability to get outside, to walk in a safe neighborhood, to move my legs at all. That’s a privilege.

That’s the whole shift. From what you lack, to what you actually have. That is gratitude. It creates a path for infinite abundance because you are content with where you are, who you are, and what you have. Living in abundance is an entirely separate rabbit hole we can go down, but we’ll save that for another post.

The practice

Every day, right after my manifestation, I do 10 points of gratitude.

I don’t repeat the same 10 points every day, like I do for my manifestation. I’m thankful for my health, my family, my happiness, my life, every single day — that never changes. But if I wrote that down verbatim every morning, it would mean less. Less effective. Less fulfilling.

So I make it specific to that day. I add a because. A why.

Not: “I’m grateful for a good night’s sleep.”

More like: “I’m grateful I slept so well last night, because I have a busy week ahead and I want to set the tone for a strong one.”

Similar to my manifestation practice — I don’t share my exact points. It’s personal, for the same reasons I laid out last week. But that’s the shape of it. Specific. Rooted in a real reason. Not generic. In one one, genuine.

And honestly, 10 is the floor. Once you start looking, there are 100s of things to be grateful for, appreciative of.

Before I fall asleep

There’s a second version of this I do at night, at least most nights. Before I put my head on the pillow, I think back through my day and land on the best thing that happened. I don’t just note it — I take a second to actually sit in the appreciation for it. I don’t write it down or track this…maybe I should? But it really just bookends my day with the same energy I started it with.

Why this seals the manifestation

Manifestation is deciding what you want and telling yourself it’s already true. Gratitude is what makes that belief stick — because you’re proving to yourself, every single day, that good things are already happening. That the life you’re building is already working in your favor.

You can’t manifest from a place of lack. Gratitude is what gets you out of it.

Once you actually live this way, even for a little while, you don’t go back. The lens changes and it just becomes normal. You stop wanting to see the world any other way.

Gratitude truly is the path to a fulfilling life and your manifestations becoming your reality.

2017. I was in high school, deep in podcasts and books, always looking for ways to be a better version of myself — show up better, feel better, impact better, and deeper, and in a more meaningful way. One theme kept pulling me in: the ability to create my own reality. That’s genuinely all I’ve ever wanted — figuring out how to make my dreams, my life. That’s where manifestation came in. What if just believing something, hard enough, for long enough, was enough to make it true?

I didn’t know. I just wanted to find out.

After enough podcasts and books, I landed on this: 10 points of manifestation, the same 10 points, every single day, without fail. I set a reminder on my iPhone for 10am, every day, that just said “manifestation.” That later evolved into “manifestation/gratitude” — but we’ll get to that part next week. I’d open my Notes app, log the date, and start with 1.

What that actually means

Before you can write anything down, you have to sit with yourself and actually figure out what you want. Not what you’re supposed to want. What your dream life actually looks like, in detail, in your head. That part is harder than it sounds. Most people skip it — and most people lose belief before they even let themselves consider their dreams. I think that’s where society gets in the way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 27 years, it’s to ignore society and stay on your own path, with your own clear vision, without anyone or any social pressure getting preventing that.

Okay. Back to the 10 points.

Once you have the picture, you write it down as 10 statements. “I am” statements. Written as if they’re already true — even when they’re nowhere close to true. This is where you might start to feel a little delusional.

Good. That’s the point. You’re doing it right.

And this might not take you a day. It might not even take a week. Give yourself up to a month to get clear on what you actually want these 10 statements to be — because if you’re committing to writing them down every single day, you better believe them yourself, and want them more than anything else.

So. My number one point, the one I wrote every single day from 2017 to 2023, was: I live in California.

Six years. Same line. I have the receipts.

Before it was true. Before there was a single shred of evidence it would ever be true. I just knew that’s where I was supposed to be. So I wrote it like it already existed — because eventually, it did. Over those six years I lived in Connecticut, I lived in Boston, I lived in Vegas. Visited California. But no signs of living there permanently.

Nothing about this is overnight

I want to make that really clear.

A lot of my statements haven’t changed in years — the California one stayed the same for six years straight. Once something actually happens, that’s when it gets replaced with whatever the next season of my life needs. In almost a decade of doing this, I’ve replaced maybe four or five points. That’s it. It’s a long game. It’s a belief system at your core.

The goal isn’t to write new manifestations all the time.

The goal is to accomplish the ones you have — the ones that represent your biggest, wildest dreams. Because me writing this going on year 3 living in California says everything about the power of this practice. There are 50 states and endless countries I could have ended up in, and I ended up in the exact place I manifested for myself.

And while I do think miracles exist, for me it’s been in the slow, granular work — and more so, figuring out what energy I actually need to be living in to get where I’m trying to go. And then telling myself, over and over, until it sticks. Until I’ve basically brainwashed myself into believing it. I genuinely feel like the life I currently live is a result of me brainwashing myself, through my beliefs, into attracting everything I want and more, everything I want or better.

That’s also why what you consume matters so much — the people around you, the content you take in, the environment you sit in every day. All of that is quietly shaping what you believe is possible for yourself, whether you’re paying attention to it or not. But the thing with the biggest impact on yourself, is yourself.

Why I don’t share my actual list

Let’s talk about it, because honestly this question kind of triggers me. Maybe that’s personal. Anyway.

People ask me what my manifestations are all the time. I don’t tell them. Not because it’s a secret for the sake of secrecy — because it’s mine.

Your manifestations are never going to look like anyone else’s, and honestly, that’s the point. This is a deeply personal practice, and you have to be careful who you let into it. The second you open your goals up to too many outside opinions, that’s usually where doubt sneaks in.

If you read my 10 points out loud, line by line, you’d probably think I was delusional.

That’s the point. My dreams are within reach because I’ve decided they are. I don’t need anyone else to confirm that for me — and neither do you.

Where to start

Figure out what your life actually looks like at its most ideal. What are the top 10 things you want. Write them down as if they’re already true. Then it’s just a matter of time.

I wrote “I live in California” every day for six years before I ever set foot here permanently. Now I live here. That’s the whole practice, in one line.

Next week: gratitude, and the book that got me started on it a few years after I started manifesting.