Have you ever caught yourself making a negative remark, such as “I’m fat,” “I can’t afford that,” “I’m not lucky,” or “I can’t do that?”

Sure, we’ve all done that, but do you realize that you’re truly causing, or manifesting, these negative ideas to become reality? In psychology, this is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the surface, it’s what causes the person who says, “I’m fat” to order the cheeseburger and fries while the person who tells herself “I’m always thin and beautiful” to have the green salad sans dressing. You’re fulfilling the outcome to prove to yourself you’re not lying when you declare yourself fat.

Manifesting occurs at a much deeper level than that. I’m going to risk having many of you think I’m a nut case when I tell you that your thoughts and statements come into your physical reality through universal laws involving quantum physics. The book and movie “The Secret” brought this understanding to the mainstream media in recent years. Perhaps you’re the skeptical type who needs to see it to believe it. In that case, I suggest you read “The Field” and “The Intention Experiment,” in which Lynn McTaggart chronicles scientific experiments measuring the effect of human intentions on machines such as random event generators.

I would remind you that many phenomena exist which can’t be detected through our human senses, but they are real nonetheless. Can you imagine trying to explain carbon monoxide or radio waves or cooking with a microwave oven to someone living a couple hundred years ago? They’d burn you at the stake! Just because you don’t know how to prove the existence of something at this moment is not proof that it does not exist. Think about your cell phone: it translates the sound waves of your voice, finds and transmits the new wave to the nearest cell tower, and then the wave travels 23,000 miles to an orbiting satellite, possibly bouncing to several more before returning to other cell towers, finding the recipient cell phone and retranslating back to a wave that sounds like a human voice. All this happens within a split second; we can hold a conversation with someone on the other side of the earth almost as easily as if he were three feet away. Now, isn’t it crazy to accept the miraculous ability of a tiny little gadget to do that, yet think that we, God’s divine creations, have less power than a cell phone?

This brings me to what I consider the third dimension of manifesting, the spiritual aspect. If you were raised in a strictly religious Bible-belt background as I was, you have likely heard the instruction “Pray without ceasing.” I believe that all of us are actually praying without ceasing all the time, even though we may not be aware of it. Our thoughts are in direct communication with the Universal Mind that most of us call God. We usually get just what we expect, whether it’s positive or negative. There’s literally power in positive thinking.

I have the confidence to say this to you, even though you may think me crazy, because I have been manifesting positive things since childhood. I discovered I had a knack for winning door prizes at will, just by imagining the prize mine. I’ve done it countless times including winning money in Vegas and Churchill Downs – people say I’m the “luckiest” person they know. I am. I won a new Mercedes just a couple hours after declaring it my car.