4 Tips From A Professional Life Coach On Manifesting Your Dream Career
I believe in the power of manifestation, where your thoughts and your energy can create your reality. I've seen how the law of attraction can positively influence your dreams, hopes, and wishes. Even more, the beauty of seeing things change by aligning yourself with the possibilities.
There have many moments in my life where I've manifested trips, gifts, and even love. However, I've experienced a profound transformation in my career in the last three years by understanding that I am worthy of receiving my "yes". Here's the thing, it wasn't easy at times, honestly, sometimes it was painful. Manifesting required me to trust the process of life, by being flexible, and less resistant to change. Sometimes those are the lessons we must learn to have a breakthrough.
- In 2017, I was laid off from my marketing job. There were signs, but I ignored them. I was too focused on pursuing my passions outside of work. This forced me to reconcile with my choices, including not being diligent about finding a permanent position. The harsh reality caused me to fall out ofgratitude. My fears slowly started to eat away at me, and I invited them to the dinner table when I didn't have the heart to keep them away.
- I applied to over 100 hundred jobs; I received only 10% of the interviews. All of the positions I thought were perfect for me did not work out. I took it personally.
- After months of searching for a job, I found a position in my field of communications. The salary was liveable with an hour-commute. Two months into the job, I was told I lacked integrity and common sense, because I wrote for a popular website offering women of color advice. Additionally, I had used my LinkedIn profile for my endeavors, and I didn't change my job title quickly enough. There was no first offense, just an ultimatum, and I quit under duress.
I continued to attract low-paying, low-vibrational positions because, at that time, I was only looking for positions that paid the bills.
That was my issue––putting money and feelings of a lack of abundance over finding meaningful work. Your dream career is the kind of work that makes your energy levels soar and gives you hope for great success. None of my previous positions made me feel this way. That's when I decided it was time to get clear on what I wanted.
By clearing the path to receive my blessings, I had finally landed my dream position at a prestigious university that came with a host of supportive colleagues. Just two years prior, I was Ubering in that same community, picking up researchers, professors, and students.
So, how did I do it?
Write Down Your Hopes, Dreams, and Wishes
I wrote down everything my heart desired, from a salary to the work environment. I had enough experience with incompetent supervisors, so I asked the universe to provide me with leaders that focused on the personal growth of their team.
Align Your Vision With Action
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Aligning with my goals included updating my resume, expanding my network, and telling people what I wanted. Yes, that's right; I asked for what I wanted. Because I was doing the work, my network showed up for me as references and as cheerleaders. When manifesting, you must take action and move towards your desire. Once you start tackling something, it becomes more manageable, and it's easier to know what the next action is to take.
Empower Yourself
As you move work towards your passions, you must continue to reaffirm positivity, because you are what you think. Staying in alignment with my goals required me to reframe my current situation with love, by giving myself grace, and taking stock of every opportunity, big or small. Focusing on what went right granted me peace, resilience, and the ability to fight and withstand adversity.
Visualize the Possibilities
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It's not enough to write your visions; you must visualize the possibilities too. Some people find vision boards helpful: a blank canvas to post images, quotes, affirmations, and drawings of anything you want to create in your life. Creating a vision board is a fun, tangible, and powerful way to say "yes please" to the abundance you'd like to receive (and deserve) in your life. Having a vision board next to my bed allowed me to come in contact with my dreams daily. The "perfect timing" was orchestrated to give me a boost of confidence when I needed it most.
Sometimes manifesting your dream career doesn't come neatly wrapped with a pretty bow. While it may take some time, the reward will pay in dividends. Trust the process.
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Ayana Iman is a certified life coach, professional speaker, and mama of one based in New Jersey. She's also known for her love of big hair, travel, and cooking. Find her across social @AyanaIman.
ItGirl 100 Honors Black Women Who Create Culture & Put On For Their Cities
As they say, create the change you want to see in this world, besties. That’s why xoNecole linked up with Hyundai for the inaugural ItGirl 100 List, a celebration of 100 Genzennial women who aren’t afraid to pull up their own seats to the table. Across regions and industries, these women embody the essence of discovering self-value through purpose, honey! They're fierce, they’re ultra-creative, and we know they make their cities proud.
VIEW THE FULL ITGIRL 100 LIST HERE.
Don’t forget to also check out the ItGirl Directory, featuring 50 Black-woman-owned marketing and branding agencies, photographers and videographers, publicists, and more.
THE ITGIRL MEMO
I. An ItGirl puts on for her city and masters her self-worth through purpose.
II. An ItGirl celebrates all the things that make her unique.
III. An ItGirl empowers others to become the best versions of themselves.
IV. An ItGirl leads by example, inspiring others through her actions and integrity.
V. An ItGirl paves the way for authenticity and diversity in all aspects of life.
VI. An ItGirl uses the power of her voice to advocate for positive change in the world.
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It’s been nearly twenty years since India.Arie’s crown anthem, “I am not my hair,” gave Black women an affirmation to live by. What followed was a natural hair revolution that birthed a new level of self-love and acceptance. Concerns around how to better care for our hair birthed an entire new generation of entrepreneurs who benefitted from the power of the Black dollar. Retailers made room for product lines made for us, by us, on their shelves, and we further affirmed that though our hair doesn’t define us, it is part of our unique self-expression.
Today, that movement has turned into a wig uprising where Black women are able to experiment with colors, styles, and more without causing irreparable damage to our hair. It could even be said that we’ve arrived at a new level of acceptance: one that does not equate love of oneself to one’s willingness or lack thereof to wear her hair the way others deem acceptable. Not even other people who look like us.
However, as with Blackness itself, the issue of Black women’s hair is layered.
On the surface, it’s nothing more than a matter of personal preference. However, in a deeper dive, issues of texture, curl pattern, and of course, proximity to social acceptance, as well as other runoff streams from the waters of racism and patriarchy, rear their heads. The natural hair movement, though a wide-reaching and liberating community builder, also gave way to colorism and often upheld mainstream beauty standards.
Sometimes, favoring lighter-skinned influencers/creators with very specific hair textures, the white gaze leaked into our safe space and forced us to reckon with it. Accurate representations of natural hair in various states of being—undefined curls, kinks, and unlaid edges—are still absent from brand marketing. Protective styles, though intended to provide breaks from styling for our sensitive hair, have become a mask to help our hair be more palatable. A figurative straddle of the fence in order to appease the comfort of others in the face of our hair’s power.
And then there’s the issue of length.
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As a woman who has spent much of the last decade voluntarily wearing her hair in many variations of short hairstyles, from a pixie cut to a curly fro and a sleek bob, what I’ve gleaned throughout the years is that there is a glaring difference between how I am treated when wearing my hair short than when I opt for weaves, extensions or even grow it out slightly longer than my chin.
The differential treatment comes from women and men alike and spans professional and personal settings, including friends, coworkers, and industry peers.
What has become abundantly clear is that long hair is often conflated with beauty, softness, and any number of other words we relate to femininity in a way that short hair is not. That perceived marker of the essence of womanhood shows up in how I am received, communicated with, and complimented.
Even more so than texture, length has a way of deciding who among us is deserving of our attention, affection, and adoration. Whether naturally grown or proudly bought, the commentary around someone’s look or image greatly shifts when “inches” are present.
When it comes to long hair, we really, really do care.
In an effort to understand whether I had simply been misinterpreting the energy around my hair, I decided to take my findings to social media. I began with two side-by-side photos of myself. In both pictures, my hair is straightened; however, in one, I am wearing my signature pixie cut, and in the other, I am wearing extensions.
I posited that treatment based on hair length is a real thing, and what followed was confirmation that I was not alone in my feelings. “Long hair, like light skin, button noses, and being thin are all forms of social capital,” one user commented. “Some Black women enforce the status quo too, why wouldn’t we?”
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This also brought to mind the many times celebrity women (like most recently Beyoncé's Cécred hair tutorial) have done big reveals of their own natural tresses in an attempt to silence any doubt that Black women are able to grow their hair beyond a certain length. Of course, we all know that to be true, so why do we still feel the need to prove it so?
The responses continued to pour in from women of all skin tones, who felt that hair length played a role in people’s treatment of them. “When I have short hair I always feel like people don’t treat me like a woman, they treat me like a kid,” another user commented. “When my hair is long I get a lot more respect for some reason.”
From revelations about feeling invisible to admitted shifts in their own perceived beauty, Black woman after Black woman poured out her experience as it relates to hair length. Though affirmed by their shared realities, knowing that reactions to something so trivial have become yet another hair battle for Black women to fight was disheartening. Though we continue to defy gravity and push the bounds of imagination and creativity by way of our strands, will it always be in response to the idea that we are, somehow, falling short?
Unlike more obvious instances of hair discrimination, the glorification of longer length is sneakier in its connection to Eurocentric beauty standards. Hair commercials, beauty ads, and even hip-hop music have long celebrated the idea of gloriously long tresses while holding onto the ignorant notion that it is inaccessible for Black women.
Even as we continue to fight to prove our hair professional, elegant, and worthy in its natural state to the world at large, we’ve also adopted harmful value markers of our own as a community. It’s evident in how we talk about who has the right to start a haircare line and which influencers we easily platform. It’s evident in the language we use to identify those with long hair versus short hair. And it’s painfully obvious in how we treat one another.
It makes me wonder if India.Arie’s brave rallying cry, almost two decades old in its existence, will ever actually hold true for us. Or will we just continue to invent new ways to uphold the harmful status quo?
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Feature image by Willie B. Thomas/ Getty Images