There’s a manifestation technique where you practice thinking, feeling, and believing that you already have the things you want in the present tense. Maybe you’ve tried it. Maybe you’ve tried saying affirmations to yourself. Maybe you’ve prayed your heart out to the universe and in spite of all the visualizing and the praying and the begging with every ounce of desire that you have… nothing happens.

Do you feel like a misfit who is always swimming against the current? Are you looking at the people around you wondering how they all seem to float by so effortlessly? Does it feel like you’re a fish alone in a mob of monkeys, being judged for your ability to climb a tree? Do you feel like an alien who took a wrong turn and found yourself on a planet with people who don’t understand the way you function at all?

The common advice is that you just need to work harder. To finally have the things you want and need, you just need to do more. So you do work harder, and when you don’t get there, you think you must not be working hard enough. You must not be trying hard enough. You just need to read another book or take another class until you can get to the bottom of what you’re doing wrong.

I’m here to tell you there is nothing wrong with you. You’re a highly sensitive person trying to operate in a world that has become numb to the soul of humanity. Welcome to modern-day earth, where dysfunction is the norm, not the exception.

If you’re struggling or feeling stuck, I’m here to give you some strategies that might help. I hope you will find your ailment and the remedy listed somewhere below. If you need a little extra support, this is a gentle reminder that I offer coaching services, and your first session is totally free.

YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS CRAVES SABOTAGE

Here’s one possibility. On a moral level, you’re not doing anything wrong. On a spiritual level, there might be some part of you that secretly wants to fail. There might be some part of you that is secretly scared of success. If you grew up in an unpredictable environment, this chaos might feel familiar. So on a spiritual level, you are actually attracting what you want. 

It’s time to throw that demon a curveball by acknowledging that shadow. Write down “I love living paycheck to paycheck” or “I love worrying about how I’m going to pay my bills”. By integrating your shadow and pulling it into your awareness, it loses its power to hide.

YOU’RE SCARED TO BE HAPPY

Maybe there was a time in your past when you were robbed of happiness. It felt like the rug got pulled out from under you, and you’re scared that if you let yourself be happy now, you’ll get blindsided again. Maybe it’s less scary to not hope at all than to be disappointed. 

Unfortunately, bad luck is part of life. By worrying about the future, you are suffering twice. Logically, you probably know that, but getting through to your nervous system is another story. 

Focus on your inner child. Look for ways to reassure them that it’s safe to be happy. No one gets through life unscathed so we might as well savor the good moments that we have. Picture your soul as eternal and your time here on earth as just a chapter. When you think of it that way, like you’re just visiting, it becomes easier to stop and savor the sweet parts.

YOU’RE FOCUSED ON HAVING

We are often very focused on “having” the things we want to have, the things we feel like we’re missing. This type of thinking is a common symptom of our society. “If I want something I’ll just go buy it”. But then you get the thing and you don’t understand why you don’t feel better. By doing this, you’re actually working backward. Working backward looks like “I want a boat. How do I get the boat”. And making a plan to end up with a boat.

An inconvenient feature of the human mind is that we are actually very bad at knowing what will make us happy.

Long-term change starts with being. And for the highly sensitive among us, we often had to fit a mold. We often had to blend into our surroundings. We often hid our true selves and we've forgotten who we are. Being starts remembering who you are—reclaiming your identity at a core level, and then acting in ways that honor that identity. That's when the trips to Hawaii and the motorcycles just seemingly fall into place organically. 

Being who you are leads to doing things that are in alignment with your true identity which ends with having prosperity in ways that cannot be premeditated. In other words, having becomes the side effect of living in authenticity with your true personality.

YOU’RE ON THE WRONG TIMELINE

At some point in your life maybe you’ve felt like you were riding a current and things were just magically falling into place. There were flashes of serendipity or synchronicity but now it’s gone and you’re not sure how to get it back. That magic is a symptom of riding your ultimate timeline. And riding your ultimate timeline is a symptom of following your full “fuck yes”. 

Picture in front of you an endless array of timelines. The decisions that you make switch you from one timeline to another and every decision has a butterfly effect that causes the timelines to morph and change as you follow them through life. 

We lose our grip on that ultimate timeline when we hide who we are, when we play it safe, and when we stop listening to our inner wisdom. Finding your way back to it takes emotional risk. It means taking the first step not knowing where your foot will land and trust-falling back into your intuition without having all the answers. It means honoring when you feel a “no” and when you feel a full “fuck yes” even though it’s scary.

YOU'RE STUCK IN A LOW-ENERGY FIELD

Guilt and shame live at the bottom of the energy spectrum. They’re like quicksand and they keep you stuck. If you’ve ever talked to someone who is trapped in guilt and shame, you might even feel it pulling you down with them. When you’re stuck in these low-energy fields, you’re more prone to attracting negativity, enablers, saboteurs, and other energy vampires. Don’t feel guilty and shameful about feeling guilt and shame. Just observe them and look for ways to rewrite the negative self-talk that’s happening in your mind. 

Allow yourself to feel grief and anger, too. This might feel counter-intuitive, but grief and anger can be tools to move you into a place of higher vibrations. Love and courage live on the other side of grief and anger, but you have to move through them first. Many of us avoided embracing our grief and anger to survive emotionally in environments that we didn’t have control over. Over time, it became a habit that left us detached even though that original environment has probably changed. Forgive yourself for any mistakes and release all those feelings that have been locked inside your body. It's safe now. Allow yourself to feel it all.

You are also the average of the people you spend the most time with, so look for positive people with strong energetic boundaries to help pull you out of the rut. If you don’t have the right friends for this; therapists, coaches, and support groups can be a great place to start. The more positive people you can interact with, the more you will dilute that sticky shame and guilt quicksand.

YOU’RE LIVING ON AUTOPILOT

When you’re just repeating the same schedule or the same patterns every day, it’s easy to go numb and lose your feeling of being alive. You stop paying attention to your surroundings. Everything feels stale and monotonous. Maybe opportunities are crossing your path but you’re too zoned out to notice them. Or maybe you’re not traveling far enough outside your comfort zone for new opportunities to find you.

Look for ways to jar yourself back into presence. Practice using your senses. Take the backroads home from work. Do anything you can to break up the stagnation. If you’re able to go on a trip, travel wakes all your senses up at once. Everything is a new sensation. There’s room for luck to happen, to meet new people, and to try new things. If traveling isn’t an option, take yourself on dates. Spend an afternoon hunting for inspiration in unlikely places like a flower shop or a toy store. Do something, anything, out of the ordinary.

YOU’RE TOO IMPATIENT

Maybe the things you want are coming your way but they’re just not moving as quickly as you would like. Remember that nature has its own rhythm and does not cater to our subjective deadlines. Practice waiting patiently for change to come like a new season. The universe usually works in slow, quietly unfolding ways.

Sometimes, you won’t get what you want right away because you’re being protected from making a mistake. And then you’ll look back and realize that everything happened for a reason. You couldn’t have what you wanted yet because this other thing had to happen first. Practice surrendering to time and try to make the best of everything while you wait.

YOU’RE OVERTHINKING

Maybe you’re actually trying too hard. Highly sensitive people thrive when we trust our feeling and intuition to make decisions. If you are trying to logic your way through a feeling problem, you are handcuffing your intuitive superpowers. The solution here is to take a break. Do something meditative like taking a shower or going for a drive. Picture yourself assigning that problem to your subconscious, and let it go. 

Sometimes the best insights come when you empty your mind and practice stillness. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.

YOU DON’T TRUST YOURSELF

If you’re feeling indecisive, that’s usually a symptom of not trusting yourself. You’re scared of making the wrong choice. This is a chance to practice trusting our intuition. Ask yourself questions and listen for answers. See if you get a yes or a no and trust it. 

Challenge yourself with the idea that maybe there is no “wrong” choice. Think about which choice allows you the most freedom. If one choice fails, can you still go back and try the other? If your choice doesn’t work out, how can you recover? 

Choices are usually not as black and white as we perceive them to be. When you can focus on the facts, sometimes you can remove the fear that is holding you back.

YOU’RE NOT LEVERAGING YOUR TRIGGERS 

Triggers can be a tool to teach us what to heal. Next time you feel triggered, try to observe instead of reacting. Get curious and think about how you’re internalizing this event to mean something about you. When have you felt this before? Is it linked to something in your past? Does it remind you of a repressed part of yourself that you wish wasn’t there? 

Triggers can be powerful teachers when we stop looking through the lens of our ego. Maybe you keep crossing paths with the same kind of people. Maybe you keep ending up in the same toxic relationships because there’s something there asking to be healed. Embrace an experimental mindset, look for the root, and then look for ways to heal it.

YOU’RE COMPARING YOURSELF TO OTHERS 

The human brain is hard-wired to compare ourselves to others, even though that habit is basically guaranteed to make us unhappy. The best way to leverage this annoying feature of the brain is to compare yourself now to a past version of yourself instead of to other people. Use yourself as your measuring stick and look at how far you’ve come. This helps flip your mind out of a scarcity mindset into one of abundance. The universe responds to gratitude.

It’s hard to remember to focus on what’s going right instead of what’s going wrong. One tool that helps me is Futureme.org. This website lets you draft an email to yourself, and then they send it  to you on a date in the future that you choose. When I get these letters, I’m always surprised how much has changed and how far I’ve gone.

YOUR ENVIRONMENT IS WORKING AGAINST YOU

Managing your mindset is only half the battle. When we try to focus on what we can control, we usually think internally. But in many cases, we probably have a lot more control over our external experiences than we think. Small changes to your home, your room, or your desk can make a big impact on your wellbeing. Natural textures, full-spectrum lighting, green plants, intentional colors, and a clean, organized space are some simple ways to feel more peaceful and grounded. 

Look at the things in your environment and pay attention to how they make you feel. Then make an effort to surround yourself with things that bring you joy. If your home or workspace is cluttered, there’s no room for good new things to come in; this works both literally and metaphorically. Creating physical space in your environment can also invite new opportunities in your life.

YOU’RE NOT PRACTICING SERENITY

Life is like sailing a boat. You can steer to an extent, but you’re also at the mercy of the wind, and you can’t usually get to your destination by going in a straight line. You have some control, but there are also other forces at work. 

Serenity means focusing on what you can control and surrendering to what you can’t. All you can do is steer the boat and accept the rest. If you spend all your time worrying about the wind, you’ll just waste the time and energy that you need for adjusting your sails.

YOU’RE NEGLECTING YOUR IMAGINATION

Imagination is a powerful tool for tapping into your intuition. When was the last time you daydreamed, or practiced a visualization, or invented another world through writing or drawing? Don’t leave these activities behind in childhood. They are medicine for rekindling creative thinking. 

Once you re-open this door, it becomes way easier to go beyond just asking the universe for what you want to actually listening for the answers. Don’t worry about creating things for consumption here. Allow play to be the only goal.

YOU HAVE AN INNER CONFLICT

Do you ever feel like there’s multiple people living inside you?  We usually operate in adult mode but you have an inner child and an inner teenager, too. When you’re too focused on being responsible, successful, and logical, you’re neglecting those other parts of yourself and they will start to rebel. 

If you’re feeling a ton of resistance or procrastination, sometimes it’s because you’re neglecting these other parts of yourself. If you can look for ways to compromise with, acknowledge, and indulge those sides, a lot of that resistance will dissipate.