How Affirmations Actually Work
And Why “The Secret” Doesn’t
Here’s the thing: Like so many others, I was obsessed with The Secret when it first came out. When I was a child I had yearned, endlessly, for magical powers. I wanted the kind of abilities Mara Wilson spouted throughout Matilda. Or perhaps Carrie White. But I would settle for anything really; mind-reading, the ability to fly, time travel–-sure! I’ll take it! I wanted magic so badly I would even ask for it for Christmas, writing a string of letters to Santa Claus with my very special request.
So, at 15, when I had long grown out of my childhood fantasies and graduated to the world of “thinking like a grownup”, I was overwhelmed to discover a book that suggested magic was real. Not only that, it was being recommended to me by adults whom I trusted; smart, driven and moderately successful grown-ups. This wasn’t some sort of childhood fantasy. This was the real deal.
I became obsessed with The Secret, devouring the book in a single sitting, watching the movie hundreds of times, and reading the follow-up books that were published in the years after its success.
It was pretty blissful for awhile there.
And then I grew up.
I faced failure; I faced disappointment; I faced outcomes that were not at all what I had spent months and years visualizing.
I’m grateful for that coming-of-age period, however. In the 16 years since first reading The Secret, I have successfully grown out of it and come to view it for what it always was: a clever marketing tool that aligned itself well with the success and phenomenon, at the time, of The DaVinci Code (positioning itself as a recently uncovered, well-guarded relic of information). However, it was one that lacked the incredibly important technique behind what is known in many (much older) publications as The Law of Attraction. Since falling out with The Secret, I have stopped believing in manifestation, visualization, and positive affirmations to believing in them all over again, in a fresh, more grounded sort of way.
Visualization + Action
Along with The Secret, I was constantly reading stories of how simply visualizing the life you wanted could bring about desired results. There was, of course, the famous story of Jim Carrey writing a check to himself for $5,000,000, post-dated for five years. He kept that ratty, dog-eared check in his wallet and sure enough, within that time period, he signed movie deals for Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura, and The Mask that would earn him $5,000,000 in one year.
The part that The Secret (and Cole’s notes versions of Jim Carrey’s story) leave out is that visualization and affirmation is nothing if it is not matched with action. And this took a lot of growing up to realize. Perhaps I should have clued in sooner. But can you blame a kid who so badly wanted magic to be real, he wrote letters to Santa asking for it?
The Secret shares stories of people who visualize money and randomly get checks in the mail, or who visualize the perfect spouse and one day, out of the blue, run into them; the exact person they pictured. All of this just happens because people wish for it, and, if the life you’re after isn’t happening, it’s because you are not visualizing strongly enough or are trapped in a lower, negative vibration.
As I’ve grown up, made mistakes, had some really cool successes and many, many failures to back them up, I’ve come to realize that The Secret is both very right and very wrong–-but it’s formatted and delivered so poorly that it becomes confusing, inconsistent, and a somewhat dangerous tool to rely on. Indeed, there was a rather tragic case of a woman who, while battling terminal cancer, refused any kind of treatment other than positive visualization. She, unfortunately, passed away.
I relied on The Secret so heavily, I wrote letters, while still in film school, to people like Ron Howard, JJ Abrams, James Cameron, The Jim Henson Company, and more, believing SO deeply that they would read my words, see my potential, and snatch me up as their apprentice. My career as a filmmaker would be set, handed to me on a silver platter that I had visualized. I believed in it so fully that I refused to get a job after film school and spent days at home simply imagining a production company discovering my work online and hiring me. I went 6 months living in Toronto without securing work and only caved when I had $400 in my bank account.
I began journaling, off and on and a young age, and it was writing in those pages that became the turning point in my self-discovery of inner-magic. Looking back on my writing revealed to me how positive affirmation and goal-setting actually worked.
Every New Years Eve I would write in my journal and set goals for the year; things I wanted to see happen; things I wanted to achieve. On New Years Eve 2012, I wrote a line that stuck out to me like a glimmering light when I looked back over the entry years later:
“I will expand my reach as a performer, internationally”
The interesting thing is it actually ended up happening! Just not in the way I expected it to. A mere two months after writing that affirmation in my journal, I was contacted by an entertainment company in the US and flown out to do a seven-city tour, beginning my career as a professional, paid entertainer. It was only in looking back over my entries, years later, that I realized I had set an affirmation and it had come true. But here’s the real secret: it came true because of YEARS of hard, dedicated work. Prior to being flown out to the states, I had spent a couple of years perfecting my act in nursing homes across Ontario and later, debuting a one-man show (self-produced, self-directed) at to a room of 200 people-–in which I had seriously bombed. I did, however, come away with great footage. I spent months editing it into a decent looking reel and it was that demo that caught the attention of the entertainment company almost a year later. Within three months of my written affirmation, I had expanded my reach as a performer, internationally. Not in the way I expected to, but I had done it. Hard work + positive intentions was the formula.
Your dreams won’t happen the way you expect them to. It’s a truth I’ve come to realize. A large part of life is being open to opportunities and following the threads to see where they lead. And this is where positive affirmation actually is a very good thing. It’s true, we do shape our own realities. If we think negatively and only lament over our current situation (finances, relationships, work, etc…) then we close ourselves off to seeing the opportunities that could change it. It’s not that the opportunities aren’t there or that they magically manifest out of thin air if we start thinking positively. They are always there, but if we are too preoccupied with our frustrations, we simply won’t see them. When we set positive affirmations (I will turn my financial situation around, I will get an agent, I will get 100 followers on Medium — Lord knows, I see that intention on here a lot), we open ourselves up to seeing the opportunities that could lead to those outcomes.
And the truth of it all? You’ll rarely notice when it actually does come to fruition. Since I was 13, I had dreamed of doing a professional Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis tribute act. It took years of performing for hundreds of seniors, bombing in front of 200 people, touring the US with a show to finally land the incredible concert I ended up doing for over three years and 100 performances. I barely noticed when it all happened. One day, I just took a step back and thought “Wow…it’s exactly what I wanted!” It didn’t come out of thin air. It came out of picturing, dreaming it, but then applying hard, concrete, determined action. Years of it. When I decided I wanted to focus more on speaking, within a month I booked two gigs and an emcee engagement, and a TEDx talk in 2020. It wasn’t magic. It took hard, strategic platform building of my website and online presence.
Forget The Secret. It’s problematic at best. Don’t even call it The Law of Attraction if that’s too ‘New Age’ for you. Do use affirmations. Do set intentions. But combine them with a steady, unprecedented work ethic. Do that and you will see the desired results, not necessarily in the way you expect or the timeline you want, but in a way that will make sense and matter in the end.
You shouldn’t want things to happen to you automatically. That takes the story out of your journey. Things will happen if you set your mind to them, if you articulate concrete goals, visualize them, and then apply the appropriate action. When you step back and look at it all, it will feel like magic. It will feel like magic in a way The Secret could never properly articulate.
