In 2009, I found myself at a seminar that had me out on the streets of Vegas, asking complete strangers for money.
The promise of the seminar was that we could completely change our experience with money, and as a result, double, triple, even quadruple our income.
Needless to say… I was skeptical. 😎
I was also in full-on meltdown mode.
Two years earlier, I’d quit my Silicon Alley engineering J-O-B to follow my calling: write, teach magic, and get rich. Not necessarily in that order.
It was not going well.
Let’s just say that I found myself ill-prepared for the prolonged body-level freak-outs that result from NOT having a paycheck. So the promise of “double / triple / quadruple your income” hit perfectly at the intersection of bold claim (which pretty much always gets my motor running) and the exact kind of magic bullet I was craving after two full years of bananas-level money stress.
So I scraped together money for the ticket, hotel and plane. I cancelled my calls and did my best to tell my husband where I was going without really telling him where I was going.
And in short order, I found myself in a freezing seminar room, awaiting instructions for what the mentor called… “The Exercise.”
The instructions were simple: Manifest $1000 in 48 hours.
Then came the rules.
You couldn’t get it through your business. You couldn’t ask anyone you knew.
You couldn’t put it on a credit card, or phone home. There was no passing “GO” and collecting $200, or $1000.
Basically, he sent us out onto the streets of Vegas to ASK for it.
AND… you couldn’t tell anyone what you were doing. You couldn’t try to sell them anything. You couldn’t just belly up to someone at the craps table and start a sales conversation.
“Can I have $200?”
“Can I have $1000?”
End of sentence.
Now, this wasn’t “just” a cute l’il manifestation exercise.
The whole thing was designed to put you directly up against what he called the Terror Barrier.
And people FREAKED. OUT.
Breakdowns. Shame spirals. Confessions. Buckets of bawling.
One on-the-cusp-of-big-name coach quietly confessed that asking strangers for money “made [her] feel like a prostitute.”
It was painful to watch.
But then… something amazing happened…
I saw people change.
Really, truly change. In real time.
In what felt like an instant.
Now, I suppose this might be old hat for you, dear reader, if you’re on your seventeenth Tony Robbins seminar.
But for me, in 2009, as a broke former engineer and aspiring “transformation pro”… it was completely wild.
People would do something that five minutes earlier, their entire system was screaming at them NOT to do. Afterwards at the mic, they were markedly different.
And you can choose to believe me or not, but…
My highly empathic, emotionally sensitive, intuitive, pattern-matching-perceive-below-the-surface-whether-I-want-to-or-not brain (hi, ADHD) could practically SEE the synapses firing while the pathways were re-wiring.
Then, these people would go home and make GOBS of money.
That NOT-prostitute coach I spoke of?
She came to the seminar at the multi-six range and went on to grow her biz to at least $4m/year in less than 3 years.
Another, the coach who introduced the rest of us to the mentor leading the seminar, had already doubled her million-dollar income. That’s why she wanted everyone to go.
I watched another teacher, who was making about $200k, march her way to the back table without a moment’s hesitation to sign up to work with the mentor. A year later, she hit her first seven figures. (She’s had many, many, many since.)
I didn’t have language for what I was seeing yet.
But I did have one key question…
Was this shizz for realsies? Like, for realz, for reals?
Can we really change that fast?
Because this stood in direct opposition to a lot of what I’d been taught about transformation… and frankly, what we’re STILL taught.
“You need to heal…”
Remove your blocks. Find the limiting belief.
Clear. Change. Shift. Regulate.
And once we’ve done enough work on ourselves to feel safe, certain, worthy, confident and READY... then we do the thing.
But what I had just watched in Vegas was the reverse.
They did the thing they thought they could not do.
And doing the thing changed them.
To be clear, I’m not talking about hot coals here. If you’ve ever taught sales to peeps fresh off the turnip truck of working-at-a-JOB, you know that for them, walking on hot coals is infinitely preferable to asking complete strangers for $1000.
The people in that room walked through that fire… and their experience of money, reality, and their power to manifest… changed forever.
My $50,000 Manifestation Experiment
Unfortunately, I did not leave the seminar changed forever. The magic bullet I craved so intensely didn’t exactly come through. 😆
I think I made maybe $100 during the exercise. Maybe it was $30. Asking strangers for money, dawg! Are you kidding me?
And when I got home, I was still IN IT.
Fear. Reactivity. Trying to figure out how I was going to make my business work so I could stop living off credit cards.
But something DID shift, though…
Because a few weeks later, in the comfort of my Brookly apartment… I quietly, definitively hit my limit.
The moment came while washing dishes. Arthur, one of my two black cats, was at my feet, threading through my legs jockeying for his afternoon snack.
I remember looking down and seeing soapy water up to my elbows.
I am NOT living like this. Not now, and not ever.
And I made the decision to conduct a manifestation experiment of my own.
I remembered a scene from The Secret where Jack Canfield talks about W. Clement Stone telling him to “pick a number that would blow [your] mind.”
$50,000, I thought.
I’m going to manifest that, I told the cat.
Now, please understand what I had going for me at this point, biz-wise…
Basically nothing. 😂
I had no offer. I had no clue. I had NO idea what a “sales conversation” was, and why I wanted to have one.
At the time, nobody was teaching sales conversations. “There’s this book called SPIN Selling,” all my direct response copywriter friends said when I asked for help.
But I had more time than I’d had in Vegas. I had space. My nervous system wasn’t quite as jacked. 😉
I was in my own home, which meant that when Inner Friction came calling, I was 2% more equipped to deal with it.
And away I went, to talk to people and ask them to buy… something? Anything. WTF was I even selling?
Thirty days later, I had NOT created $50,000.
Thirty days later, I’d sold $20,000, with much of that in cash. Starting from basically zero.
And I had just recreated, in my own way, what I’d watched happen in Vegas.
I didn’t heal myself into being someone who could create $20,000.
I created $20,000, and the doing of it changed who I was.
We Have Over-Weighted One Path to Transformation
I want to be careful with this bit because healing is a significant part of magic.
Your human system has mechanisms that keep you on the planet and also mess you up.
Healing is an important part of our pursuit as humans. And sometimes we absolutely DO need to heal in order to do the thing.
But what I’ve seen, over and over again… is that we’ve gone waaaay too far to one side of the pendulum. Especially in the conscious biz and transformation space.
Methods and modalities and awarenesses that had long been in the dark have finally come into the light over the past 20 years or so, in no small part from the efforts of the master healers. My main mission in life, given to me by the Goddess a few months after my manifestation experiment, is to be a part of the movement to bring magic to the mainstream.
And we’re doing it!
What I see, though… is that the “solution” is always more.
More healing, more fixing, more clearing the past, more processing, identity work in 2-hour re-imprinting sessions, nervous system work and now trauma work.
Again, all of this is important. Thank Goddess dudes like Bessel van der Kolk are on the covers of mainstream magazines now. The work has broken through.
But just like the brain can’t break out of the patterns that mess up our lives without intervention… I’ve seen the healing work followed up with more healing work. Followed by extensive inquiry around why all of the healing hasn’t healed you yet.
I see healing galore at your favorite store. Healing loops a go-go.
Healing reached for… when what is being asked is to do the hard thing.
I believe this begs a question.
I’ve talked before about being a wee witchlet in my early 20’s, running around New York City trying to find the magical tradition and community I wanted to plug into.
I wanted the “sane Pagans,” you see. (Context: this was the 90’s and I was 24.)
I remember looking at some of the elders around me and thinking, from my admittedly very arrogant early twenties lens:
So you can WHAT?
You’re doing that candle magick so you can… what?
You’re healing your inner child so you can...what?
As a copywriter, “so you can” has always been one of my favorite phrases.
Because it forces us to get down to brass tacks.
What are we doing all of this FOR?
What’s the OUTCOME we really want to create, here?
Edgy POV incoming…
Personally… I don’t believe we’re put here to heal. At all.
Yes, a soul fragment of our Oversoul came on down to Earth school in a human body, and forgot that We Are Not Separate. Yes, there is that remembering. Yes, there is bringing ourselves back to a place of wholeness and completion. Yes, this has happened many times since your Oversoul and soul extended from Source.
So you can… what?
What I know, from many many years of the search… is that Divine Beings in a Human Body are also already master manifestors.
Take this in for a second.
You’re already a master Creator Be-ing.
Not… a person who has “achieved” and “accomplished” All-the-Things.
A Creator-BE-ing.
Indeed, you’re so friggin’ great at manifesting that the second you think a thought, it becomes a thing on the non-physical plane.
Where does that leave our Human Nature?
With the task of fully developing our powers of Creation.
I believe we’re put here to CREATE.
I believe we’re here to master the incredible power of co-creation we already have.
And that gives us another path. One I’ve devoted the last 17+ years of my work to attempt to master.
Instead of…
Heal → CREATE
We can also:
CREATE → heal
Or, as I’ve come to think about it:
Create FIRST. Then NORMALIZE.
Instead of spending all kinds of time healing so you can do the thing...
Do the thing, and let the thing transform you.
That doesn’t mean white-knuckling your way through every fear response or pretending your Human Nature doesn’t exist.
It means you stop making the absence of fear, discomfort, uncertainty or Inner Friction a prerequisite for creating what you want.
It means that you prioritize Doing the Thing.
It means that at a certain point, and sooner than you might think… you switch your orientation to Desire.
Healing is the foundation. Creation is the point.
What Happens When You Stop Stopping
The “Manifest $1000 on the streets of Vegas” seminar was designed to disrupt a simple-yet-frustrating mechanism…
Your brain likes what it already knows. And it will do every friggin’ thing in its power to keep you in a familiar state, because a familiar state means you’re not dead yet.
When you choose something substantially bigger, you’re going to bump into the edge of that known reality.
That’s when what I call Inner Friction starts up.
You tell yourself a story about what’s happening. You emotionally react to the story… and things get hard. You slow down.
And then you stop.
The opportunity was right there, but you didn’t follow up. You explain and justify instead of just stating your fees.
You decide what you’re creating this month, but then Day 8 looked nothing like you’d planned, so you start changing the plan.
You knew the conversation you needed to have, the offer you needed to make, the decision you needed to make... and then your brain gave you 22 fantastic reasons why now wasn’t the time.
This is where we can lose DAYS. Weeks. Months.
Because we’re waiting to feel like the version of us for whom the thing is already NORMAL.
This is very backwards.
You do not need a $50K month to feel completely normal before you create your first one.
Create it, then work with your system to have it catch up.
This gives your brain something it desperately needs to make a change: a new piece of evidence.
Oh. This is how we do now.
Maybe it’s not a $50k month right off the bat. There is a nervous system regulation piece to this for sure.
But maybe it is. 😎
You don’t need for a $50k ask to feel like the most natural thing in the world first.
You ask. You survive. Maybe they say yes.
And now your human system has something new to work with.
And notice…
When you make the ask, you create evidence whether you get the YES or not.
You don’t need to become completely comfortable being more visible before you make the bigger move.
You make the move. And then you normalize the new reality you just created.
I have seen this so many times in my mentoring career that I’ve lost count.
Create FIRST. Then NORMALIZE.
This is the big idea underneath a body of work I’ve been teaching for years called The Standards.
The Standards are a framework for the energetic signature of the Version Of You Who Already Creates what you want. 10 “switches to flip” to Be the One Who creates it and holds it.
IF you’ve ever read a manifesting text that said, “You need to BE HER” and you thought, okay, WTF does that even look like…
Same same.
So, engineer me… I asked the Goddess for the full breakdown. And for it to be consistent and repeatable, and work for anything you’re Desiring to manifest.
At first, I taught the Standards as the energy of ultra-premium fees.
Later they became what many people in my world know as the 7-Figure Frequency Formula, the energy of a 7-figure business owner.
But I knew from the jump that they weren’t only about money.
And they weren’t only about seven figures.
They’re a way of snapping out of Inner Friction and back into the frequency of what you’re creating, so you can take the aligned actions that bring the non-physical into physical form.
Which is why I’m expanding this body of work now.
The Standards are becoming The Creator Frequency.
And the question underneath them is bigger than…
How do I BE the One Who makes the leap from six to seven figures in record time?
It’s:
How do I BE the One Who has already created what I’ve chosen, before physical reality gives me any evidence that it’s coming?
Because that’s where your Creative Power begins.
It’s also a shortcut to creating huge goals in a fraction of the time.
Try This Now…
Step 1: The Desire.
Pick ONE outcome you’ve been working on that hasn’t manifested yet.
Money. Monthly Income Leve. Clients. An opportunity. The iteration of your work.
Soooo many creative entrepreneurial women are going through massive pivots right now. The Standards are perfect for bringing through your next Highest Level Transformation.
Step 2: The Observation.
Whatever outcome you’ve chosen…
… look at where you’ve quietly made creating it contingent on changing yourself first.
Maybe you think you need to feel more confident.
Maybe you’re waiting to feel certain.
Maybe you think you need to heal the visibility thing, the receiving thing, the money thing, the nervous system thing.
Maybe you’ve turned preparing to create the thing into a full-time job.
There’s some-thing underneath that stops you.
Ditch the surface-level answers and go deeper.
Step 3: The Move.
Now bring it down to one question…
What would the One Who has already created this do next?
Not for the next year, or even for the next month.
Next.
There is an action. A decision. A conversation to be had, a piece of content to create, a communication to write.
Go do THAT. And one of two things will happen…
You’ll do it and think, ok so that wasn’t such a big deal.
Great. Keep moving.
OR... 😎
You’ll hit the bit where some part of you says “Nope-ers.”
I can’t send that. I can’t charge that. I don’t know what to say, I need to think about it, maybe I should do these other 14 things first… and and and.
That’s the moment, right there. Because now you’re no longer trying to manage every possible thing that’s stopping you from Doing the Thing.
You’ve found the actual Inner Friction that’s stopping you NOW.
The Standards help with this. This is the exact moment where they go. Download them here.
And… don’t stop.
And don’t turn it into a three-month project.
Make the move smaller.
What is the smallest action you can take in the direction of the thing without dropping out of motion?
Take THAT step.
Then ask again:
What would the One Who has already created this do next?
And keep going.
This is how you work with Inner Friction in motion, instead of making the elimination of Inner Friction a prerequisite for motion.
It’s how you Create FIRST...
…and normalize the expansion while you’re actually expanding.
And if you want the 10 energetic switches to flip, with concrete ways of BE-ing that will have you flying through this… I’ve got you.
Download the Whole System, for FREE.
I’m deep in the creation of a new free Guide called The Creator Frequency: 10 Standards to BE the One Who Has Already Created Your Biggest Goals.
Get on the waitlist and download the current book here.
It’s the next evolution of the work I’ve taught for years to lead conscious entrepreneurs, creatives, change agents and experts make income leaps in a fraction of the time.
Based in Hermetics and Universal Law, the Standards lay out 10 specific ways of BE-ing that create the energy pattern, or Frequency of the Version of You Who already has the result.
You’ll…
Create certainty within yourself instantly (yes, really – there is a mechanism for this)
Catch the invisible places where you’re contradicting what you say you want
Move through uncertainty without losing weeks to it
Collapse the lag between vision and physical reality by BE-ing the One Who Has It / Does It / Creates It / Holds it.
I’m releasing the new Guide soon. Join the waitlist and I’ll also send you my current book, 7-Figure Goddess®, so you can start working with the 10 Standards now.
This article made something inside me "click." Thank you!! I can't wait to check out your material.
Hi Elizabeth, I was in the goddess business school years ago with you and I love seeing how your work is evolving. I too think that way here to create and when we focus on that and then take small steps we can get so much further than we can even imagine.