I am going to tell you something that's going to sound like nonsense at first, and then, if I do my job right, it's going to sound like the only sane thing anyone's said to you all year.
Every goal-setting workshop you've ever sat through. Every 90-day blueprint. Every script you were handed and told to practise in the mirror until it stopped sounding like a script. All of it, every last laminated page of it, is built on the same instruction, and the instruction is this: want it harder.
Want the listing harder. Want the referral harder. Want the closed deal so hard that you can taste it, visualise it, write it on a sticky note and put it on your bathroom mirror so it's the first thing you see when you wake up desperate for it.
And I used to think that was just enthusiasm. Turns out it's a signal. And it's the wrong one.
Here's the thing nobody in the coaching industry wants you to sit with, because it would put most of them out of business by Tuesday: wanting is not a strategy. Wanting is a confession. Every time you want something out loud, what you're actually broadcasting is "I do not have this." That's the whole transmission. Not your hustle, not your hunger, not your grind — just the plain, undignified fact of lack, dressed up in a blazer.
And the maddening part is that people can feel it. Clients can feel it. That slightly too-eager follow-up text. The phone call that comes one day too soon. The pitch that tries a little too hard to convince. None of that reads as competence. It reads as need. And need, however competently it's scripted, has never once been magnetic.
The client you're chasing already exists. You didn't lose them. You were never short of them. You just haven't become the kind of agent they can find yet.
I want to sit with that sentence for a second, because it undoes almost everything the industry has sold you. You've been taught that the client is out there somewhere, hiding, and your job is to hunt them down with enough activity — enough cold calls, enough door knocks, enough follow-up sequences — that you eventually corner one into saying yes. But that's not attraction. That's a stakeout.
What if the client isn't missing? What if they're simply going about their life, and the only real question is whether you've become visible, specific, and true enough to be the one they notice?
There's a Russian physicist named Vadim Zeland who spent years working in quantum optics before he went and did something far more useful with his life: he wrote about why chasing what you want pushes it further away. His theory, in the simplest terms I can manage, goes like this. Every desire creates a kind of energetic pull. That pull creates an equal and opposite push against it. The harder you want, the harder reality resists. Not because the universe is cruel. Because wanting, by its nature, is a statement of absence — and nothing rushes toward an announcement of lack.
I'm not going to pretend I can verify the physics of that, and neither, frankly, could most of the people teaching it to you as certainty. But you don't need the physics to be exactly right to recognise the pattern, because you've lived it. You've felt a deal slip through your fingers the exact moment you pushed too hard for it. You've watched a client go quiet the day you got needy. You already know, in your body, what happens when wanting turns into gripping.
So here is the reframe, and it is the whole of what this article is about: manifesting — if we're even going to use that word, and I say we should, because it's ours to reclaim — is not the act of wanting something into existence. It is the act of becoming someone for whom that thing is simply the natural consequence of who they already are.
I think about the eight-hundredth-year-old poet Rumi here, because he said this whole thing better than any of us will manage in a newsletter. He wrote that when he chases what he thinks he wants, his life is a furnace of distress. But when he sits in his own place of patience, what he needs comes to him without any pain. And then the line that undid me the first time I read it properly: what I seek seeks me too.
Read that again. Not "what I seek is out there, waiting to be caught." What I seek is already in motion, already reaching back. The relationship was never one-directional. You were just too busy chasing to notice it was mutual.
Patience, in that reading, isn't passivity. It isn't giving up and hoping. It's a kind of self-possession — the settled certainty of someone who no longer needs to perform lack, because they've stopped believing in it.
My life is awesome as it is. If this comes now, wonderful. If it comes later, also wonderful. I don't give a damn about the timeline. That single sentence, felt rather than said, does more for a business than any script ever wrote for you.
I know how that sounds to an industry built on 10x urgency. "Don't give a damn" is not a phrase anyone's put on a whiteboard at a sales conference. But I'd ask you to notice what urgency actually is, underneath the training. Urgency is neediness with a deadline attached. It's the industry teaching you to manufacture the very signal that pushes people away, and then selling you a better script for when it doesn't work.
None of this means stop working, stop showing up, stop being excellent at what you do. It means something more precise than that. It means the striving was never the part that worked. The part that worked, on the rare good days when it did, was the moment you stopped performing and simply were yourself in front of someone who needed exactly that.
The client already exists. They are not hiding from you. They are not playing hard to get. They are simply waiting for a version of you specific enough, congruent enough, at ease enough, to be unmistakable.
That's the whole shift. Not wanting harder. Becoming truer. Everything else in this series is just going to be us working out what that actually looks like, one uncomfortable, unlearned habit at a time.
— Chris
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Originally published on LinkedIn.