Self-improvement Obsession

I used to be really into the manifesting mindset. Maybe you’ve heard of the idea: if you just change your thoughts, you can attract anything—perfect partners, your dream car, abundant cash.

I’m not here to debunk the law of attraction, but let’s just say it wasn’t working for me, even though I was really working for it.

I mean really working. My obsession was borderline pathological.

I listened to stories and podcasts, read books like “Think and Grow Rich.” I did guided meditations, worksheets, and online courses. I was so determined to dial it in that I replayed some of the same success stories over and over—people making $85,000 in a single phone call, or “aligning” and getting their dream opportunity.

At one point in this ridiculous adventure, I decided I was going to manifest $100,000. By “manifest,” I mean I was going to get really clear on what I wanted, why I wanted it, and then wait for it to show up.

I confessed this bold declaration to a close friend during one of our sporadic catch-up calls. She’s known me for 30 years, but I’m guessing even this one came out of left field for her. She tried to sound excited for me: “Oh yeah? I’m curious how you picked that number…”

I don’t remember the exact formula for this scheme or why I was so confident about testing the theory. I probably did some back-of-the-envelope “planning” around my financial needs, decided 100k would be a good first installment, and then dutifully notified the Universe I was wide open to receive it.

I haven’t decided if it’s a flaw or a kind of genius, but I have absolutely no shame in turning over every stone in search of an answer—even the weird or woo stuff. Perhaps it’s desperation, but I’m not above trying anything: pendulums, affirmations on repeat, energy clearing…

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say I tried everything to manifest money.

I took exception, of course, to the most obvious and magic-free strategy for manifesting money: getting a stable, high-paying job. Yawn.

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Why I Became a Turner of Stones in the First Place

I didn’t come to this mindset stuff because it was trendy. I came to it out of crisis.

I grew up in Central Florida without things most Americans take for granted like a regular place to live, guaranteed meals, or even consistent electricity or air conditioning.

It wasn’t the circumstances that were unbearable when I was growing up as much as it was the stuckness, the resignation, the total disempowerment that I learned to emulate.

My parents were utterly bewildered by how money worked. They didn’t have bank accounts because they overdrafted them into oblivion. We lived on what little cash they could scrape from their self-employment. Though sharp-witted and hard-working, my mom went into collections over a FingerHut catalog credit card.

We weren’t reckless spenders, shopping at pawn shops and thrift stores throughout my childhood, but the money still had this way of evaporating. Eviction was a cycle every six months: deposit, first month’s rent, then… however long it took to be forced to move again.

And then there’s my weird Cinderella plot twist, where at age 13, I was charitably taken in by our previous neighbors. This family was different: they balanced their checkbooks, drove reliable cars, had air conditioning and cupboards that were stocked. They bought shoes that no foot had ever walked in and clothes right off the rack at places like Dillards and JC Pennys.

But here’s the thing: You can take the girl out of the poverty, but you can’t just take the poverty out of the girl.

I had no desire to perpetuate the lifestyle I’d been resigned to as a child, but I didn’t have any idea how to change what felt like a life sentence. Though I had successful people around me, I thought there was something inherently wrong with me.

The mindset I grew up with followed me. Though I hated it, I embodied it. Though I wanted to be free of it, I didn’t know how. Not only was it steering my life, but it was destroying my sense of self-worth.

Enter: the relentless Turner of Stones in search of answers.

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I Tried It All

I tried so many things to “fix” my money mindset.

I read You Are a Badass, by Jen Sincero eight times while I alternated it with You Are a Badass at Making Money, another eight. That’s sixteen readings total! I told you—I tend toward obsessiveness. I was determined to rewire my brain by sheer repetition.

• I tithed 25% of my income so God would “bless me back”
• Money spells
• Think and Grow Rich
• Affirmations
• Magical thinking
• 30-day abundance journals
• Self-limiting-belief worksheets
• Vision boards
• Vision-board movies I watched daily, trying to burn them into my subconscious
• Creative-finance real estate investing.
• “10X-ing” everything.
• Expensive marketing programs
• ClickFunnels
• Even writing letters to Money like it was an ex I needed closure with.

The list goes on, but I think you get the picture…

I thought I was being spiritual. Really, I was just terrified—trying to control my fear by doing something. Anything. Everything.

But all I was really doing was treading water with my ankles tied to a diving bell. I knew if I didn’t figure it out soon, I’d sink.

And sink I did.

In 2020, I talked my then-husband into throwing in the towel on the business we had just “10X’d.”

When I say “10X,” here’s what actually happened:
He came home after driving all day for our company and said, “I listened to a podcast that says you should set goals that scare you.”

(Side note: terrible advice for two risk-takers whose nervous systems were already redlining.)

Instead of getting a loan for the equipment we actually needed, we decided to get one for 100 containers—despite not having the staff or trucks to deliver them. I guess we figured we’d cross that bridge when we got to it.

Somehow we sweet-talked our bank into another round of SBA funding for our “Big Hairy Audacious Goal.” That one move sealed the doom of our six-year-old company. When the dominoes started falling later that year, we were so leveraged we couldn’t sell.

We filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy. We lost our business, the commercial building we worked out of, and our dream home on five acres.

It was brutal to live through. But that wasn’t even my financial bottom.

That came later, after my former husband moved out of the house we were renting and left me with the lease. I was working part time for $16 an hour at a weight-loss clinic and I had no idea how I’d make rent.

We finalized the divorce quickly because I wanted out without fighting. I took the “high road” and didn’t ask for child support—even though he’d just landed his first well-paying job.

I had to think fast. Somehow, I kept a roof over our heads and food in the fridge. My beater cars broke down constantly, but we always got where we needed to go.

One night stands out: sitting up awake on the balcony of my low rent apartment while my truck was in the shop with a blown motor, tears rolling down my cheeks as I wondered how on earth I was going to climb out of this hole. That was definitely one of the lowest points.

I knew I was resilient and resourceful, but I was exhausted by the constant uncertainty and the years of feeling like I was in a financial black hole.

I knew I couldn’t stay broke forever.

More than once I thought about taking my ex to court for child support. I consulted with a lawyer three times. Every time I was assured it would be an easy win in mediation or court.

I Stopped Outsourcing My Power

But I’d come this far.

I realized I could spend that same energy and money fighting in court for what was rightly owed or I could invest that energy in finding a way to make things work for me.

Honestly, I was just done outsourcing my power.

I didn’t want my financial future in someone else’s hands, particularly someone I now loathed. I needed to be the one in the driver’s seat.

I felt like I’d tried everything. I was running out of stones to turn over.

Without fully realizing it at the time, I chose to try something completely radical for me: conventional thinking.

I decided to take the biggest leap of my life.

I got a real job.

For so long, even the idea of getting a steady job felt like betrayal. And wanting a high-paying job? That felt slimy. Like there was something inherently suspect about wanting that kind of “status.”

I had this deep-seated fear that building a career would corrupt me, or prove I was just as shallow as everyone else.

But at some point, I had to challenge that story. Was staying broke actually more virtuous or just more comfortable because I knew how to navigate within its confines?

I know so many creatives with the same fear that if they take a conventional role, they’ll lose themselves, hate their work, and become numb. The fear is legitimate, but there is a tradeoff. Staying broke, staying anxious, not expanding your skillset, your network, or your net worth is its own form of self-betrayal and smallness.

Choosing stability doesn’t mean killing your art. It can support it. You give yourself the chance to back your own creative work, because you can afford to. It can become a sacred act of devotion.

I think about a conversation I once had with a renowned artist at an environmental conference. He was the keynote speaker, presenting slides of breathtaking sculptures he’d built all over the world where he transformed everyday waste into towering works of art.

At the conference afterparty, I peppered him with questions–some existential, but mostly I just wanted to understand how he’d done it. What was his secret? How did he build enough momentum to escape the gravity of the “starving artist” life?

I’ll never forget his answer as I sat beside him, our chairs pointed away from the music and gaiety of the crowd.

He didn’t get dreamy or philosophical. He wasn’t romantic about it. He was almost a little cynical.

He explained, matter-of-factly, how he drove a big-rig tractor trailer up and down the West Coast, hauling freight along the Pacific Highway. Every time he was home, he spent his time applying to requests for bids on big public art projects.

He learned AutoCAD because it was required for those applications.

And he didn’t stop.

I read between the lines: He didn’t let rejection slow him down. He didn’t second-guess himself. He just kept going until he landed the big jobs.

It wasn’t the answer I expected (recall my predisposition to magical thinking).

There was no secret mantra for manifesting it all.

He worked a normal, steady job that paid the bills. He supported himself. And in the time he had, he poured it all into his craft.

I’m sure there were times when he was too tired. But a night or two off didn’t derail him.

Now he lives in France. He travels the world creating art, speaking about sustainability, and building community. He’s leaving behind a legacy of public works with a profound message. [Check out his Instagram here: John K Melvin]

It took me years to really absorb what he told me that night.

But it stayed with me.

And I guess that’s what I’m doing now, in my own way.

I’m sitting here with my laptop on nights and weekends, pouring out my soul, cathartically untangling the details of my own winding experiences.

Trusting that this is enough.

Trusting that these dreams have merit because I’m giving them life and wings, and letting them fly wherever they choose to and in their own good time.

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That Last Stone I Turned

The last stone I turned, the one I resisted the longest, was choosing the conventional path. And, surprisingly, it didn’t mean selling my soul. It meant coming home to it.

For years, I outsourced my power to everything outside myself:
to partners I hoped would provide
to spiritual rituals I hoped would deliver
to coaches and courses that promised the secret
to the idea that someone else had the answer if I could just pay for it, pray for it, or dig deep enough to unearth it.

But years of outsourcing my power had left me spinning my wheels without real agency.

Taking control of my finances wasn’t just about income or financial planning, it was a reckoning. It was about deciding I deserved a seat at the table and being willing to face my big fat fears:
That maybe there wasn’t room for me.
That maybe I wouldn’t be chosen.
That maybe I wasn’t good enough.

I had to let go of old stories about who I was allowed to be. About how hard things had to be. And about what kind of life was available to a desperate creative like me.

What surprised me:

The power wasn’t in the paycheck, it was in the permission.

I expected structure to smother me. I thought getting a “real” job would be a betrayal of my freedom. But instead of suffocating, I started to breathe.

The job didn’t kill my creativity, it gave me a container for it.
The paycheck didn’t silence my intuition, it supported it.
The conventional path didn’t strip me of my essence.
It gave me solid ground to root deeper into it.

I thought choosing structure meant choosing confinement. Instead, it gave me something solid to build from.

And this fun fact blew my mind: It takes the same amount of energy to struggle at $30k as it does to stabilize at $60k. (Thanks, Gary John Bishop.) Same exhaustion, different return. That truth changed the game.

I have to give credit to someone who helped me shift the belief that the conventional path would strip me of my essence. A friend of mine, who now travels the world speaking, publishing, and guiding organizations in values-based leadership, once told me that working for a major corporation completely changed his life. It gave him the skills, the stability, and the network to eventually build the meaningful, heart-centered career he has now.

That conversation planted a seed in me:
Maybe conventional structure could serve my unconventional dreams.
Maybe a “real job” wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning of a more resourced chapter.

What still challenges me:

It’s not imposter syndrome that haunts me the most. It’s the very real fear that I’ll burn out. That I’ll work so hard securing stability that I’ll have nothing left for the things that make me feel alive.

I walk a fine line between ambition and depletion. I always have.

I know what it feels like to spiral into over-responsibility, to muscle through exhaustion, to become so good at surviving that I lose the sense of the miracle.

But what I’m learning, in real time, is that ease isn’t something you earn after suffering enough.
It’s not a reward for finally proving your worth.

It’s something you practice in the mess:
In the budget.
In the bedtime scramble.
In the client calls and carpool lines.

This whole blog is my experiment out loud: Can I show up fully without draining myself empty?

I’m testing EaseAF and reporting back.
A real gal with no safety net, no trust fund, no special upbringing—just the stubborn belief that ease isn’t frivolous, it’s essential.

Ease is an approach, a way of resting in our enoughness. It’s something we once knew, but have collectively forgotten in the achievement/productivity grind and hustle.

Now it’s a form of rebellion to stop trying to prove we deserve ease—although it shouldn’t be. We really just have to stop resisting it and start remembering it.

In summary, that last stone I turned, the one I never thought I would, was choosing the “conventional” path. And to my surprise, I didn’t have to sell my soul. I was, ironically, choosing to resource my soul instead.

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EaseAF—IRL

So here I am.

Still learning.
Still recalibrating.
Still testing what it means to live EaseAF in a world that often rewards the opposite.

I haven’t mastered it, but I know I’ve crossed a threshold.
I no longer chase the high of spiritual shortcuts or the illusion of financial rescue.
I’ve chosen grounded ease over bypassing. Stability as an act of balance–no pun intended.
A paycheck and a creative life. It’s not one or the other.

Ease, for me, isn’t passive.
It’s not a bubble bath or an escape plan.

It’s waking up and choosing to honor my limits and my longings.

It’s believing that I don’t have to stay broke, burned out, or beholden to struggle just to prove I’m strong.

I still feel the edges of exhaustion some days.
I still forget to soften.
But I come back, over and over again, to my question:

What would it look like to let it be easier, right here? Even now?
Can I end this contract with chaos?

So I offer this to you not as a prescription, but as an invitation:
You don’t need to hit rock bottom to reclaim your agency.
You don’t need to exchange your values and your dreams for stability.
You don’t need to wait for the perfect plan or the perfect version of you to begin.

You just need to stop outsourcing your power.

And maybe your journey is the complete opposite of mine. Maybe it’s time for you to leave the path of stability and branch out into something exploratory. I believe we are all called to do that, in our way, throughout our lives.

Either way, the adage still stands: Life gets easier when we stop making it so hard on ourselves.

What stone is still waiting for you to turn over?

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I leave you with this thought:

Maybe ease was never the reward.
Maybe it has always been the Way.

So tell me, dear reader—what’s the story you’re still telling yourself about how hard it has to be?

And what might shift if you no longer believed that story?

What truth might you hear if you stopped drowning out your own voice?

What’s the craziest approach to manifesting that you’ve ever taken—if any?

I love to hear your stories. I learn from you, the way I hope you learn from me (what not to do!).