There are 3 ways to manifest business success. Almost no entrepreneur is brave enough to use the most powerful one.
- Mar 30
- 9 min read
Updated: May 7
The purpose of this essay is to explain the 3 main ways to manifest, why I believe that spiritually based manifesting is not optional but necessary for entrepreneurs (and why we are so afraid of it).
In this essay:
I - Why This Conversation Is So Confusing
When The Secret was published and the Law of Attraction was going mainstream, I was still deeply Christian and watching from the sidelines as this “demonic” mindset took hold of the narrative. I was very critical of it. And I wasn’t the only one.
It didn’t take long for the critiques of the simplistic “ask, believe, receive” to start pouring in. The idea that your thoughts create reality was lacking too much nuance: What about the people in war-torn countries?
But the most controversial part of the law of attraction wasn’t even that thoughts create reality. It was the idea that action was not required to attract your desired life.
Surely action must be required?
I definitely thought the same thing. I thought that the omission of action was filed away under the “spiritual bypassing” of reality. And now, so many years and awakenings later, I think slightly differently.
The thing is, manifesting means different things to different people.
Some say manifestation is simply about focus, strategy, and consistent action toward your goal. Manifestation as applied psychology. Show up, do the work, get the result.
Some say action is entirely unnecessary, that you can sit still and allow the universe to do its divine rearranging, and the thing will arrive without you lifting a finger.
Some say it’s all about the nervous system, that your capacity to receive is governed by how safe your body feels, and that no amount of strategy or surrender will work until your system is regulated enough to hold what you’re calling in.
Others say it’s the mind, that the subconscious is running the show, and until you reprogram the deep beliefs, nothing external will shift in any lasting way.
Confusing? Absolutely.
II - The Three Ways to Manifest
What I have come to realise, and you will see that this makes complete sense, is that there are three primary ways human beings manifest reality.
The first is through the body — through action, movement, showing up, doing. This is manifestation as applied human effort. Strategy, consistency, discipline, skill. You identify what you want, you determine the steps, and you execute. This is the mode that the productivity world understands and celebrates.
The second is through the mind — through thought, belief, subconscious reprogramming, nervous system regulation, inner work. This is manifestation as the internal architecture of your reality. What you believe about yourself, the stories playing on loop beneath your conscious awareness… these shape what arrives in your life as surely as any action you take. The mental approach includes everything from cognitive reframing to somatic work to hypnotherapy to emotional processing.
The third is through the spirit — through surrender, co-creation, divine partnership. This is manifestation as collaboration with something infinitely larger than your individual effort or your individual mind. Call it God, Universe, Source, your ancestral lineage, the field of all possibility, the name matters less than the recognition that there is a limitless intelligence available to you that operates entirely beyond the ceiling of your personal potential.
You can work in one mode. You can work in two. You can work in all three simultaneously. But they are not equivalent.
III - Manifestation in Safe Mode
Manifesting through the body and the mind is indeed powerful and for most people, it represents a significant expansion beyond where they started.
It is also, and I say this with love, entirely safe.
It rarely asks you to look foolish. It rarely requires risk or faith, the kind where you cannot see the ground beneath your feet and you walk forward anyway. It almost never asks you to do something that cannot be explained rationally after the fact.
And because it is safe, it is celebrated. When someone sees your results and knows you worked relentlessly for them, they will say she earned that. They will say of course she succeeded, look at how hard she worked. Your effort becomes the story and your results, explainable. And your ego will love every minute of it!
There is nothing wrong with that. But I want you to notice something, the body and the mind, as magnificent as they are, are working within the territory of your potential, the potential given to you as a human being in this body, with it's ancestral history and lineage, and with these gifts.
Yet, your potential still has a ceiling, (albeit one that can expand, slowly, over time).
The ceiling is where spirit begins.
IV - Why Spiritual Manifesting Is Not Optional
Manifestation goes far beyond the realm of your business results and your personal income goals.
We are living through a critical moment in civilisation. A climate crisis. Widening inequality. The erosion of mental health on a global scale. Political systems that cannot hold the complexity of the problems they are supposed to solve. A loneliness epidemic so severe it has been declared a public health crisis in multiple countries.
These are not problems that the human mind, however brilliant, however well-resourced, however focused, has been able to solve. And this is not because the right people haven’t tried hard enough. It is because the mind can only work with what already exists. It recombines. It iterates. It optimises. But it cannot access what has never been thought before.
Novel solutions, the kind that genuinely shift the trajectory of human experience, do not come from strategy. They come through people who have learned to be conduits for something beyond themselves, even if they do not realise that they are. They arrive as revelation, as inspiration, as inexplicable knowing. They come through spirit.
This is why I say spiritual manifesting is not a luxury for people who have already handled the practical things. It is not an advanced module you unlock after you’ve sorted your mindset and built your systems. It is a necessity. Because the world does not need more optimised humans. In fact, humans are no longer available to be optimised. We are collectively burned out. We’ve had enough, we’ve reached our limit.
No, we need humans who are in active, surrendered collaboration with the intelligence that created them. And those of you reading this and drawn to this conversation, are almost certainly one of them.
The work you are here to do is likely not work the mind alone can produce. The contribution you are here to make probably requires access to something that lives beyond the ceiling of your personal potential. The question is not whether you are capable of spirit-based manifesting. The question is whether you are willing to stop pretending that the first two modes are enough.
V - Why We Are So Afraid of the Third Mode
Before I tell you what spiritually based manifesting makes possible, I need to tell you why most people never experience it in its fullness.
It's very simple. They are afraid.
The first fear is the fear of looking foolish. Body-based and mind-based manifesting both have a psychological safety net. If it doesn’t work, you can point to something. I didn’t work hard enough. My mindset wasn’t right. I need to do more inner work. There is always a rational explanation available, always something to adjust, always a reason that protects you from the truly terrifying conclusion that you trusted something invisible and it didn’t come through.
Spirit-based manifesting offers you no such protection. It asks you to act on a prompting you cannot justify. And if it doesn’t work, or if it takes too long to work, you will look like someone who was deceived by their own faith. The ego finds this intolerable.
The second fear is the fear of surrender. We are, most of us, deeply attached to the feeling of being in control. Strategy feels like control. Inner work feels like control. Even shadow work and nervous system regulation, as valuable as they are, can become sophisticated ways of staying in the driver’s seat.
Surrendering to spirit means releasing the controls. It means accepting that something larger than your ambition is making decisions about your life. And that is not a comfortable place for a high-achiever who has built their entire identity around being capable.
The third fear is the fear of what arrives when you stop controlling the outcome. Because when you open yourself fully to divine co-creation, you do not always get what you planned for. You get what you were made for. And sometimes those are different things. Sometimes Destiny reroutes you. Sometimes the miracle that arrives is bigger, or stranger, or it requires something of you that the old version of you was not ready to give.
Spiritually based manifesting is not about getting more of what you want. It is about becoming who you were sent here to be. And that is a far more radical invitation than most people realise when they first begin to pursue it.
So we stay in the first two modes. We dress our hustle in spiritual language. We call our mental strategies manifestation. We feel safe, and seen, and in control.
And we never find out what was possible on the other side of the surrender.
VI - The Lie We Were Sold About Action
Back to where we started. The dominant narrative of the personal development and business world tells you that action is the cause of your results. That reality shifts because you pushed it hard enough.
Buried inside this is the assumption that action is how you earn your desires, that there is a cosmic ledger and sufficient hustle tips it in your favour.
Both of these are false.
Action is absolutely involved in manifestation but it is the effect, not the cause. It is the result.
You are not working toward deserving your desires. You arrived here infinitely deserving.
The purpose of action is not deservedness. The purpose of action is Destiny.
You paint because you are an artist and to not paint feels like slow suffocation. You write because the words are already inside you and not releasing them is a kind of imprisonment. You build your business because you can feel the weight of the Destiny waiting to move through you and income is a consequence of that, not the reason for it.
The distinction seems subtle but the energetic impact is not.
VII - The Realm of The Miraculous
When you begin to manifest through the spirit, through genuine co-creation with the divine, you enter territory that the first two modes simply cannot access.
This is what I mean when I talk about Destiny. Destiny as an active collaboration between your soul and the intelligence that created it. The unfolding of a plan that is larger than your ambition, wiser than your strategy, and more rewarding than your most optimistic goal.
Most people desire to maximise their potential and to see what they are truly made of. They desire to build something impressive with the gifts they were given.
But where your potential ends is where spirit can take over. And what becomes possible there is what genuinely excites me.
The night-time dream that created Google
When Larry Page was a 23-year-old graduate student at Stanford, he woke in the middle of the night from a vivid dream. In it, he had downloaded the entire internet and kept only the links. He grabbed a pen and spent the rest of that night scribbling out the details. He had no intention of building a search engine, that idea wasn’t even on the radar. But what came through him in the space between sleeping and waking became the algorithmic foundation of Google. One of the most consequential companies in human history arrived not through strategy, but through a dream. Page himself said it: “When a really great dream shows up, grab it.”
The $80m ancestral hookup
Then there is Beatrice Dixon. Suffering for months with bacterial vaginosis, having exhausted every medical option, she received a visit in a dream from her ancestor, her grandmother, who told her she had been walking with her and watching her struggle. Her grandmother gave her a specific list of ingredients. Dixon woke up, went to the store, made the formula, and within days her symptoms were gone. That dream became The Honey Pot Company, the world’s first plant-based feminine care line, which she eventually sold in a deal valued at $80 million. She has said of her ancestors: “I have an army of ancestors always with me.” She was not speaking metaphorically.
Two moments where something arrived from beyond the ceiling of ordinary human cognition, one through the dreaming mind, one through ancestral communication . Neither could have been strategised or hustled into existence. And these are not the only stories like this. I love finding these and learning about them.
This is what becomes available when you stop insisting that everything must come through your effort or your intellect alone.
VIII - The Questions You Should Sit With Now
The problems we face as a species will not be solved by people who are only manifesting through body and mind. They will be solved by people who have learned to be vessels. People who have moved beyond the ceiling of their personal potential and into genuine co-creation with the divine intelligence that placed them here.
So I want to leave you with two questions:
What would my life and work actually look like if I were manifesting with spirit, not just with my mind and my body?
And:
What am I still pretending the first two modes can produce that only the third mode can actually deliver?
You were not sent here to optimise yourself into contribution. You were sent here with a Destiny. And spirit has been waiting, patiently, for you to stop pretending that you can get there alone.
If you got to the end of this and are a business owner who is now curious to explore how you can tap into the power of spiritual manifestation for yourself and your business, you may be a good fit for my programme Manifest Results.
Lola Seshat
Founder, The Business Priestess
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