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In yesterday’s Daily Mail, therapist Paul McKenna explained how we can use the power of the mind to manifest the future we really want.
Today, he shows you how to transform your health, wealth and happiness – and how you really can improve your own luck…
Celebrating the shift from one year to the next, many of us will have raised our glasses and made a toast wishing ‘health, wealth and happiness’ for ourselves and the people we love.
But it takes more than just wishing for good things to come our way to manifest them into being. You need to consciously set your dreams as goals and create a strategy to achieve them.
Successful manifesting requires great focus – something the digital age makes difficult as it bombards our brains with endless mental distractions.
Our phones ping constantly with news alerts and messages. Our minds flit from replying to an email to catching up on social media to wondering which TV box set to watch tonight.
This makes it nigh on impossible to zone in on just one thing at a time.
But if you are looking to transform your life, it is a skill worth learning.
Focus plays an important role in ‘Power Manifesting’ – a specific set of strategies I have developed to place powerful positive suggestions in your unconscious mind that direct all your behaviours, thoughts, feelings and energy into achieving whatever it is you want.
I’m often asked: ‘What’s the one piece of advice you would give people?’ The answer is simple: You get more of what you focus on in life. What you think is what you become.
Self-made legendary investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett, whose fortune has been estimated at $140billion, was once asked: ‘What is the secret of your success?’ He reportedly said: ‘Focus.’
Professor Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has studied focus and its decline over the last 20 years. She found that, in 2004, the average attention span was two-and-a-half minutes. Now it’s about 47 seconds.
And yet just five daily minutes of focus is said to have made Andrew Carnegie, a 19th-century Scottish-born industrialist, one of the richest men in the world in his day.
He made his fortune in America, and when he was asked how he amassed such wealth – the equivalent of an estimated $310billion today – he is said to have replied it was all down to five minutes of pure focus on his goals every day.
My friend, the pop mogul Simon Cowell, is another man with extraordinary focus, vision, clarity and great instincts. He made his own luck by being decisive and taking action and, even though he wouldn’t call it this, I have learnt a lot from him about what I call ‘manifesting in action’.
In yesterday’s Daily Mail, I wrote about clearing the mental blocks that can hold us back from achieving our goals. Then I offered help to identify which heartfelt dreams we want to make our new reality. Today, I am looking at three key areas where manifesting can bring about incredible change: health, wealth and happiness.
Focusing your attention on those goals is the first step to realising them. So let’s work on that now.
Today, we show you how to transform your health, wealth and happiness – and how you really can improve your own luck…
Paul McKenna, above, says successful manifesting requires great focus – something the digital age makes difficult as it bombards our brains with endless mental distractions.
SET YOURSELF A GOAL: FIVE MINUTES OF FOCUS
We all have a list – be it stored in our heads or written down somewhere – of the dreams, the life goals, we want to achieve. Go to yours now and pick out one. Then focus on it and think about what you can do to make it real.
Set a timer, and focus! Stop the timer when your brain wanders… or when you get to 30 seconds. That gives you a start point. Repeat it tomorrow. Once you can comfortably get to 30 seconds, increase the timer to one minute.
Then push yourself to two minutes, then three minutes, followed by four minutes, until you get to five minutes of pure focus.
All it takes to master this ‘Five Minutes of Focus’ exercise is daily practice.
Just like an Olympian going for gold, this is done in increments – sometimes two steps forward, followed by one back – but overall you are always moving in the direction of success.
As you start to build your focus, you will get a feeling of subtle power as you find solutions to potential barriers to achieving your dream. I recommend keeping a written record that tracks your progress. That’s because scientific research shows us an important rule: What gets measured gets done.
LEARN HOW TO MAKE GOOD DECISIONS
When it comes to decision-making, the billionaire businessman Richard Branson uses a strategy called ‘Upside/Downside’.
The principle is that with any objective, you ask yourself two questions. First, ‘What’s the upside to this?’ Second, ‘What’s the downside?’
If the downside is too heavy and the upside too light, don’t do it. If something has a very substantive upside and a minimal downside, then go for it!
Never do anything on a 50/50. The potential pay-off has got to be worth taking the action.
Over the next five days, I want you to make one conscious decision a day. It can be as small or as large as you like, but factor in that ‘Upside/Downside’ principle.
When you make good decisions, they become a habit and you are training your brain for when you have larger decisions to make.
Write your decisions down so that you can keep track of how they work out.
CHANGE YOUR FORTUNES: USE THE LUCK GENERATOR
Luck isn’t something you were born with. It can be learned and there is the science to prove it.
You can improve your luck by harnessing the power of a specific part of the brain called the reticular activating system (RAS).
The brain constantly filters the world around us and our RAS is like a heat-seeking missile, which constantly makes adjustments as it flies towards its target or goal. You can harness your RAS to motivate you. For example, you can say: ‘I really want this kind of car or this kind of partner.’
I did it when I first started out and I really wanted a BMW – I remember I’d see the car of my dreams everywhere and that spurred me on until I got one of my own!
This is because triggering your RAS gives a message to your unconscious mind: ‘Notice this, look for this, sort for this,’ and you can invest your energy into getting it.
Now try this Luck Generator exercise:
1 Remember a time when you felt lucky or at least that everything was going your way. Remember it vividly, like you are back there again now. See what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel how good you felt.
2 Now, make the images in your mind, the memory of the images, bigger, the colours brighter, bolder, richer, the sounds louder and the feelings stronger.
3 Keep going through the memory again and again, over and over until you feel really, really good!
4 Now, notice where the good feeling is strongest in your body. It could be in your chest, heart or somewhere else.
5 Next, give that good feeling a colour and spread that colour up to the top of your head and down to the tip of your toes. Take your time.
6 Double the brightness and intensity of the colour and feeling and double it again and again until you feel it in every fibre of your being!
7 Now, take the colour and feeling to its absolute maximum, 100 per cent.
8 Take it to 120 per cent, 130 per cent, now 140 per cent…
9 Take it to a million, billion, trillion per cent stronger. Make the colour bright, bold and the feeling strong.
10 While you have that amazing feeling at a strong level, imagine spreading it to every area of your life. Send your luck energy into your health, money, career, lifestyle, happiness, relationships and love. Imagine sending it through every one of those cornerstones of your life and way off into your future. Right now you should be glowing with good feelings and positive luck energy. Do this technique every day and notice how your life changes for the better.
VISUALISE A HEALTHIER YOU TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
Scientists have proven the power of the mind can profoundly influence our health. The mind and body are linked, where one is always influencing the other – a fascinating discovery that falls within the field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI).
When you experience fear, stress and hatred – be it because of a life-threatening danger or through more everyday pressures such as work or family – you produce a set of fight-or-flight chemicals.
Lactic acid and adrenaline floods your system, your immune system is suppressed and blood is pumped to the major limbs so you can fight or run away.
We can rid ourselves of these stress toxins by exercising or through deep relaxation.
Having a mindset of gratitude is an antidote, too.
When you move out of a stressed state and into concentrated periods of gratitude, not only are you rebooting your immune system (as your body is no longer in fight-or-flight mode) but you also affirm at the subconscious level: ‘I’m abundant, I am enough,’ so it increases your ‘frequency’, too.
We constantly emit a ‘frequency’ based on our emotions. We will explore this further in part three of this series in tomorrow’s Daily Mail.
But, in essence, if you are angry or frightened, you are transmitting on a low frequency. Whereas if you are in a state of love, happiness, joy and creativity – all the good stuff – you are transmitting on a high frequency.
In order to Power Manifest good health, you’ve got to regularly see yourself fit, well and happy in your future.
You can do this by harnessing your internal timeline, which is the place where your brain – that astonishingly powerful supercomputer we all possess – codes the past, present and future.
The easy method to discover how you code time is to think of something you know is happening next week, next month and in six months, and see how you visualise it.
The following exercise will see you step into your future, healthy self.
When you visualise yourself healthy and fit, make the pictures bright and bold, as this says to your unconscious mind: ‘Make that happen.’
1 Close your eyes.
2 Imagine floating out down the timeline one year from now.
3 Next, imagine it’s been one of the best years of your life, where the dreams you wrote down earlier have happened. What do you see, hear and feel?
4 If it’s been one of the best years of your life, what must have happened in regard to your health (both mental and physical), relationships and love (both personal and professional), your finances, career, spiritual life and finally, your general levels of happiness?
5 Get a real sense of how amazing your life is. What do you see, hear and feel? What are the things that let you know your life is great? Keep going over them.
6 Now live an ideal day in your perfect future life.
7 Keeping all the good feelings with you, step out of this future and make it a cinema-screen-sized image. See your optimised self on the big screen, looking healthy, happy and successful.
8 Float back from that successful you, one year from now, in stages. First, retreat three months earlier on the timeline and get a sense of what happened and make an image of yourself looking healthy, happy and successful.
9 Next, go back another three months and do the same.
10 Ditto another three months.
11 Now float back to the present day. You will be able to see a succession of images of you looking healthy, happy and successful.
12 All the images lead to the one a year from now that is massive like a cinema screen, with you on it and all the people you love. Everything you know that makes you see your life as amazing will be big, bright, bold and wonderful.
MAKE PERFECT DAYS AND THINK YOURSELF HAPPY
I used to view success as money, fame and power. But my perspective has changed, as there’s no end to that. It is insatiable.
So now my lifestyle is focused on a balance of work, helping others and the things I want to do for pleasure, fun or relaxation.
Feeding your soul can be as simple as spending time with your children, family or friends and experiencing the joy and memories it brings.
And you can use the power of your mind to manifest some of that happiness.
First, I’d like you to visualise living a series of perfect days. These days need to be filled with love, happiness, optimism and creativity. Imagine living a perfect day at home, a perfect day with a loved one and a perfect day on holiday. Choose as many perfect days as you wish.
Have fun with it! See yourself living those perfect days and looking happy and healthy as if they have already happened.
The reason I want you to choose a day is that it has a beginning and an end.
When you know something is finite, you treat it completely differently to something you think is infinite.
If you knew you were going to live forever, you would approach life completely differently.
Endings, in a sense, can be empowering, as they can organise your thinking and behaviour.
There is a saying often attributed to the Buddha: ‘The problem is they think they have time.’
When you put it like that, it puts everything into perspective. Life is so short you need to make sure you are with the right people doing the right things, in good health, and getting as much joy as possible.
Now you have Power Manifested your perfect days, picture these moments on your internal timeline in order to set them in motion.
WRITE DOWN ALL OF YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS
As you wind down at the end of each day, try writing down the one thing you’ve done to make your life that little bit better. It’s amazing how small, incremental improvements start to add up to a more satisfying life.
How to think your way to a bulging bank balance
The following technique programmes your unconscious mind to create more wealth.
Everyone has a method where they can visualise the money they have in the bank and the amount they expect coming in.
In this technique, we will increase that amount until it almost feels too much. When you do it again and again, you are talking directly to your unconscious mind telling it to ‘go and create this’. It then finds a way to do it!
1 Think about how much money you have in the bank and notice what you imagine. Do you envisage piles of banknotes, stacks of coins, a bank statement or something else?
2 Next, think about how much money you have coming in over the next year and again notice what comes to mind. Do you see cheques, notes, bank statements, envelopes or numbers going up on your home computer?
3 Now, imagine double, triple or even quadruple the amount of money coming in. You might see more notes piling up, or the numbers on the screen increasing more quickly. Have fun with this!
4 Next, imagine that this flow of wealth increases every year for the next 20 years. Imagine stack after stack of banknotes being added to your account, making the piles bigger and bigger, or watching the numbers on your bank statement dramatically increase. Again, let your imagination run wild and enjoy it!
5 When you are done, enjoy letting your mind settle on an image that feels expansive and rich to you, making sure that you always finish with more wealth in your mind than you had when you began.
- Power Manifesting by Paul McKenna (Headline Welbeck Non-Fiction, £14.99). © Paul McKenna 2025. To order a copy for £13.49 (Offer valid to 25/01/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.