Why your dreams are not manifesting (and why you may hate me when you read this)

So, you’ve held a dream dear to your heart for months, maybe years, and you are still not seeing it manifested in your life.

You’ve bought the courses, done the affirmations, lit the candles, visualized, taken plenty of action, and even “let go” of your desire, but still, nothing happened.

You probably thought that you must not be doing enough manifestation techniques, so you’ve invested in a coach, bought the best selling books, repeated time after time that you are worth it of living your dreams, and filled your office with posted notes assuring that you dream IS a reality.

But yet again, nothing happened.

Crippling anxiety is making you believe that you may be doing something wrong.

What else to try? What else should I do? You may ask….

You’ve probably heard about surrendering, and I know, I know what you’ll tell me…

“I’ve already surrendered, Mercedes!”

But, have you really surrendered though?

Surrender is that broad word that means so many different things, and reminds us of “failure” and “defeat”.

There are so many ways of surrendering, and it’s for each of us to find what it means for us. In my case, surrendering meant at the lowest point of my life literally going on my knees and praying to the Higher Power of my understanding:

“You guide me from now on. You do through me, you show me, you take me where I need to go”

That prayer was the opening door to surrender, but true surrendering, to me was to take action in a different direction than I was taking at the time.

Many of you know, that around a decade ago, I had a successful coaching business. Many of you were my clients and followed my blog posts at the time. You may also know the story of how it all quickly crumbled after I suffered a TBI in a big-wave surfing accident, that completely changed my life.

The dream of being a successful coach, motivational speaker, and published author vanished in the years that followed my accident. My world become more about survival than about growing a career that died at the moment that my surfboard hit my forehead that cold morning in the Oregon outer reef.

I tried for a couple of years to stay afloat in Hawaii, I pushed to sell my Abundance courses, yet I was literally going broke. Nothing was working for me. Believe me, I’ve tried it all.

So I had to surrender. I didn’t want to, but I had to in order to survive.

The Universe is funny in giving us clear signs. A week after my prayer on my knees, I went to Texas to a meditation retreat, and one of the retreat participants offered me a 6-figure job selling life insurance in Austin.

It hit me like a blast of energy, I asked for guidance and help and here I was being offered a great income that would resolve all of my financial troubles.

I didn’t want to, but I said YES.

It was heartbreaking to leave my beloved Hawaii behind and move to a landlocked city. Leaving my dog Ella with my ex-husband was something too painful to even write about, and let’s not even talk about stopping surfing.

My heart was absolutely ripped. But I had to do what I had to in order to survive (financially and literally physically). My brain was too damaged from the concussion and every time I went surfing I was damaging it some more. I had to stop surfing and focus on healing.

I won’t bore you with a long, 7-year journey into my 6-figure life insurance job, that eventually led me to a breakdown (dang, sales are too stressful for me!), that led me to a chill waitressing job, and many other gigs in between.