Self-help guru Paul McKenna was in the red when he first started manifesting in the early Eighties, while trying to get his hypnotic London theatre show off the ground.
He cut out the red ‘overdrawn’ figure on his bank statement and glued in its place a new number, which said £77,000 in credit.
As he tried to manifest financial freedom, he also imagined walking out to perform to a full house, hearing the applause and feeling success.
A few weeks later he got the London theatre show which would kickstart his self-help career. Within months he was in credit beyond the £77,000, but only after he’d taken a photo of himself next to the ‘House Full’ sign at the theatre before a new run, pinning it on his fridge and repeatedly imagining what it would be like to play to a full house.
The self-help whizz, who has worked with stars including Roger Daltrey, James Corden, Ellen DeGeneres and Simon Cowell and has trained thousands of hypnotherapists, asserts that if you can visualise success and focus your energy on your goals, you can make them happen.
The former DJ, who rose to fame in the Nineties with his TV show The Hypnotic World Of Paul McKenna and has made a fortune trying to make people sleep, happy, rich, thin, positive or confident, understands that the idea of manifesting, which he defines as ‘imagining something and making it a reality’, might seem what he calls ‘woo-woo’ to some.
But he’s keen that his latest self-help book, Power Manifesting, dispels any myths surrounding the practice and aims to actively encourage people to visualise, focus on and realise their dreams. He’s embarking on a UK and Ireland tour in March to spread the word.
The book features quotes from celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Kendall Jenner, Lady Gaga and Dragons’ Den star Steven Bartlett which illustrate how visualisation and focus have played a part in their success.
McKenna, 61, whose self-help books have sold more than 10 million copies and have been translated into 32 languages, had been manifesting long before it became a thing, when he worked for Capital Radio but felt he wasn’t realising his potential.
His colleague suggested manifesting, and he recalls one friend who was able to manifest parking spaces in central London time after time.
“I thought it was very ‘woo-woo’, I was more sceptical than you,” he says dryly. “When someone said to me, ‘Oh I ask the parking fairies to find me a parking space, I said, ‘Oh, f*** off, that’s ridiculous,’ but then a parking space appeared. I thought he just got lucky but he did it again and again.
“I thought, maybe there’s a scientific explanation for these, maybe we’re setting our perception to target a parking space – you’ve trained your brain to notice it.”
McKenna has long been an advocate of neurolinguistic programming, helping people change their behaviour and thinking.
“Where it [manifesting] goes ‘woo-woo’ is when we say, ‘I’m going to wish for this and it’ll magically appear’. I didn’t believe in that.
“What I do know from the science is that people who have goals, and particularly have a route to achieving them, are far more likely to achieve their goals than people who don’t have any goals or any system by which to obtain them.”
For instance, manifesting that you are going to win the Lottery sounds more like a wish, he explains, and involves millions of random elements, while you’re more likely to manifest things that involve your intention, energy, passion and motivation and are grounded in something more tangible.
“Wishing is nice, but it’s not the same as a strategic approach to achieving something,” he continues.
In the book, he recalls a colleague who manifested his dream of becoming a travel journalist and flying on Concorde by creating a vision board of desired destinations, packing his bags every Sunday, joining the queue at Heathrow and then going home to watch a video about flying on Concorde. Within weeks, his boss approached him to do a series of travel reports around the world – and he got to fly on the iconic plane.
The book offers techniques to help clarify what you want in life and how to manifest it, tied in with a series of audio techniques to help programme the unconscious mind to focus on creating the life you want.
McKenna, who married his PA Kate Davey eight years ago, says that manifesting has helped him achieve wealth, health and happiness – but has also helped him with bereavement, earlier with the death of his father, Bill, 12 years ago, and most recently the death of his Great Dane, Misty.
He was out walking the 10-year-old dog near his home in London several months ago, when she suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack in front of him, he recalls.
“It was absolutely horrendous. It was one of the toughest things I’ve been through.”
He uses a technique to float the image away, take the colour out of it so it’s black and white and shrink it so it has no emotional intensity.
“If I think about that moment I can upset myself, but instead of doing that, if I have a flashback I make it black and white and I send it away and bring in a happy memory, because she had a wonderful life.”
Eight years ago, McKenna moved back to London from Los Angeles, where he’d spent a decade.
“Nowadays I do have goals but I have more of a direction in where my life is going, and I live my values of health, love, creativity, laughter and freedom. The other life I was living [in the US] was all about pleasure, how could I get another car, a bigger house, more money.
“There’s nothing wrong with pleasure, but happiness is when you are living your values.”
McKenna, who has ADHD, lives his life differently now, he agrees.
“I used to treat life like a marathon until I burned out and would then try and recover. Now I build in recovery time. I also use things like acupuncture, I juice, I’ve got a Peloton bike and I walk in nature. I do meditation and use my own hypnotherapy trances. It doesn’t mean I don’t have problems. I still have challenges, like everybody else.”
One of those challenges was moving house a few months ago.
“The lorry that came to throw stuff away came seven times because Kate and I had hoarded so much stuff in the last 30 years. Moving house is a big deal logistically and emotionally.”
McKenna has achieved so much in his life – what more is there to manifest?
“Looking to the future, I see myself and my wife healthy and happy. I see us living our values, spending time on projects that we like, with good friends and spending more time in the sunshine.”
They are mulling over the possibility of moving to Europe, maybe Italy, France or Spain. But retirement isn’t on the cards.
“Right now, my big goal is to train a million hypnotherapists if I can. If I can train people who can help other people, the ripple effect is phenomenal. That’s my goal for the future.”
Power Manifesting: The New Science Of Getting What You Want by Paul McKenna is published by Headline Welbeck, priced £14.99. Available now
