July 31, 2026

“Manifestation isn’t about wishing for something to happen. It’s about getting so clear on what you want that you begin acting in accordance with it every single day.” —Coach K

Resources

If you’d like to explore some of the tools I use in my own daily spiritual practice, I’ve included links to a few of my favorites below:

• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks – Learn how to identify and overcome the “Upper Limit Problem”—the subconscious beliefs and self-sabotaging behaviors that keep you from reaching your full potential.
• The Power of Consistency by Weldon Long – A practical guide to creating lasting success through daily habits, intentional action, and a clear vision for the life you want to build.

Podcast Transcript

Kevin de la Motte:

Hey, everybody. I’m back. Sari Swears. It’s Kevin de la Motte. I’m hijacking the podcast for the month and today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite topics. One of the topics that I used to think was a bunch of bullshit, so did Sari. It’s the topic of manifestation. And I know, I know, you’re probably thinking, “Oh God, that woo-woo shit. What do I need to start burning sage and worshiping at altars? I need these magical powers for this to happen. This is just ridiculous stuff. It’s not anything that I could ever do.”

Well, I’m going to push back on that because what I’ve learned over the years, I really wanted to figure out this manifestation thing and I wanted to figure it out in a way that was really, really tangible for me because it just was so abstract. So I’ve done a lot of research over the years and I figured out that most of what’s going on here, I mean, I know there’s the universe that’s at play, but most of what’s going on here is brain science and intentionality and a certain approach to life and having these habits that reinforce what you really want.

So today I’m going to get into how to do it and the research that’s behind it. A lot of research I can give you too is my personal experience in it. And Sari’s told stories about hers, but I can give you mine, which is one of my favorite stories. And I’ll talk about that in a little bit. I used three separate resources for this particular episode. One is, it was a book that I found at the Portland Airport. We have a Powell’s Bookstore, which is a famous bookstore in Portland.

People that have been here usually know about it. It’s massive. It’s one of the biggest bookstores in the world. Well, we have a small little version of it in our airport and they’ve got some pretty good books in there. And I came across this book that was orange so it stood out and it was called Manifest: Seven Steps to Living Your Best Life by Roxie Nafousi. I’m saying her name right.

The other resource I’m using is The Big Leap, which Sari’s talked about a lot, by Gay Hendricks, which is something that is… It’s a very powerful book and a great resource for answering the questions about manifestation, about dreams that you have and how you can actually fulfill them and making it really concrete and it talks about Zone of Genius. I’m not going to get into that today. And you can look back at other episodes where Sari talked about the Zone of Genius.

Today I’m really going to get in what trips you up from manifestation. There’s a really big specific thing that’s in the book and I’ll get into that in a little bit. And then the next resource is Power of Consistency by Weldon Long. Well, you’ve probably heard Sari talk about that too, but this is how you can really start practically doing things to start doing this manifesting thing and start really making it a reality in your life.

Now, I’m going to read this Manifest book, which it’s a pretty cool book. I don’t know, it looks cool, but it’s got a lot of nice little quick quotes and juicy details about manifestation that I thought were pretty neat. One of the things that was a little statistic that I never heard of before about manifestation is how directly related it is to our conscious and subconscious.

So according to this research here, it says according to research, only 5% of our cognitive activity is conscious while the remaining 95% is subconscious. That means that 95% of our thoughts, reactions, decisions and perceptions and behavioral patterns are driven by the subconscious parts of our brain. And it goes further to say, but while our subconscious has unlimited power to drive us towards our dreams, it also has the power to hold us back from them.

This is because our subconscious is home to the two things that block any manifestation, fear and doubt. Ooh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And we’re going to get into that with The Big Leap because fear and doubt, that is the killer of manifestation. It is the killer of those dreams. Fear and doubt. So I’m going to jump into a concept that’s called the upper limit problem. And that comes from this book, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It’s a fantastic book.

I probably read this cover to cover at least three times. So all right, let’s get into this upper limit problem and what it is. So basically he calls it the upper limit problem, but really what it is it’s your saboteur and it’s rooted in your saboteur, but self-sabotage that we run into. So it says here, solving one problem and freeing yourself. By its very nature, the upper limit problem is unsolvable in your ordinary state of consciousness.

If you could solve it that way, you would have solved it a long time ago. Solving the upper limit problem is possible by only a leap of consciousness. Once you learn the way to solve problems, you’ll have a tool you can apply wherever and whenever you want to increase your success. And he goes on to say, the upper limit problem must be dissolved, not solved.

You dissolve it by shining a laser-like beam of awareness on it, underpinning the false foundation that holds the upper limit problem in place. When you shine the light of awareness on the underpinnings, they disappear. Then you are free to soar, explore, and rest at home in the no limit zone of your ultimate success. Okay, so the upper limit problem, that gets into what I was just talking about, how fear and doubt coming from that manifestation book or Manifest book, how fear and doubt are what get in the way. Well, the upper limit problem is…

I mean, what encapsulates it is fear and doubt, what makes it is fear and doubt. Our saboteur is that collection of limiting beliefs, that emotional backpack that gets in the way of our highest self, really realizing our greatness and standing in that. The upper limit problem is basically self-sabotage. So let me tell you a story about self-sabotage. Sari may have told this on the podcast before, but this is an interesting one.

So when we first moved into our dream home that we live in now, we were just basking in the glory of this amazing place. And I had found a spot downstairs that was perfect for my man cave to have my drum set and my records and the big screen TV with all the movies, all the stuff that I love to do in this room. And I was really excited about this room. And I had everything in there to set up, my drums and the TV and everything.

So I thought, okay, well, let me set up the TV. And I look up one wall and I’m like, that’s probably the best wall to put it up. No, maybe it’s this one. And there was this moment where I was hesitant and then I just went with a response, a gut response. And I went over to the other wall and I proceeded to drill into the wall. Well, as soon as I hit what was supposed to be the stud with the stud finder, I went along that stud, right along it and hit a pipe.

And in these newer homes, the pipes are these plastic thin pipes that run up the side of the stud that they can feed through the wall. Well, they have a lot of pressure going through them. And when I went through that stud or went through that pipe with the drill, it just started spraying out like crazy. There was water just rushing into that room, going all over my drum set, which is an electronic drum set, records, everything else.

I ran upstairs to find the main and it took me a while because it was a new house. I finally found it and shut it off. 10, 15 minutes it must have been. Well, that whole area was flooded. We ended up having to do the moisture mitigation with all the fans drying and a lot of my stuff got ruined. And afterwards, Sari said to me, “You know what? Maybe this is an upper limit problem from The Big Leap.”

We had just read it not that long before. And I said, “What are you talking about? Self-sabotage?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I thought a little bit. And I was like, “No way,” but I thought about it. And there was that gut response, that response that was down deep that I talked about in another podcast about your survival instinct. And that place, the amygdala, that happens in the body first and the thoughts don’t come along until later.

And if you react at that first instinct, that first feeling, well, it can be wrong. We can be really wrong. It can be coming from a place of fear. Well, lo and behold, that was an upper limit problem issue. I drilled into that fucking wall and self-sabotaged this dream of mine. It didn’t knock me off the horse, but it sure did make me think about this whole self-sabotaging thing.

So the key to being able to ward off or cut off the past, this self-sabotage thing, this upper limit problem is awareness. Awareness is the key here. Awareness is a huge part of manifestation. But what I’m going to get to now is a part of the brain that actually is rooted in this awareness piece that makes it so important for manifestation and it’s called the reticular activating system.

Now, the reticular activating system in the brain, a big part of it, what makes it work is awareness and proximity. So think about whether you want to buy a car and you look around and you finally find the right car. And you’re like, “Okay, it’s this red Mercedes. This is the car I want. This is what I want.” I don’t know why I picked a red Mercedes, but that’s what I’m picking. This is the car I want. And you’re excited about it. You’re thinking about it. It finally comes. You’re like, “Oh man, I love this car.”

And before you think about, “How come I never saw this car on the road, but for some reason now I’m seeing them everywhere?” Well, there’s a reason for that. It’s the reticular activating system in the brain. So that involves being aware of something and being near something. So that’s why you started seeing it. They were probably all over the place before. You just didn’t notice them. You weren’t aware of them.

Sari de la Motte:

If you’re a longtime listener, you’ve probably heard me say practice makes progress. And what better way to practice than with a fellow group of trial attorneys in person and with me. Our two-day Command the Courtroom masterclass sessions put the H2H method into action and I’m there every step of the way with live coaching and feedback and finish mama fierceness. And don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what PI attorney Sean had to say about our two-day masterclass.

Sean :

My biggest takeaway is that I now have a new approach as to how I’m going to enter the courtroom. It’s a new energy, a new spirit, and it really gets me excited because that’s actually the more fun part of what we do. And I’m looking forward to taking advantage of everything that I learned here.

Sari de la Motte:

Now, seats are limited. These are small group, high impact courtroom sessions, not an auditorium full of board attorneys and dull lectures. If you want to change the way you go to trial and turn your practice into progress, visit sariswears.com/masterclass to register for a 2026 class today. That’s sariswears.com/masterclass.

Kevin de la Motte:

How the reticular activating system in the brain works with manifestation is you start really becoming aware of what you want and start building on what you want in your mind, visualizing, writing it out, getting super, super clear. So it’s always in your awareness and the proximity is close. You’re writing it, you’re thinking about it, you’re visualizing it. And these things all start showing up and the universe starts acting in accordance.

That’s when I get to the woo-woo stuff because I have to say the universe and yes, it does play into this. And I know you might be thinking, “Oh my God, okay, so I just have to think positively and I can have whatever I want.” No, it’s not any Pollyanna bullshit. It’s not. It takes work. It takes consistent work and intentionality. So I’m going to teach you what you can do with that. But first, I’m going to tell you another story.

I had to tell a bad story. Now I’m going to tell you a good story about manifestation. The story of our beach house that we have. I usually get a little teary when I talk about it because it’s a big dream of mine and it’s something that I thought was never going to happen. And I know it sounds silly that I’m tearing up about a beach house, but let me go on with the story. So my wife and I, Sari de la Motte, the amazing Sari de la Motte and I, had just had our baby Elena.

And she was not even a year old. I mean, she could barely hold her head up. And we wanted to take this trip. So we decided, okay, we’re going to take her with us. We’re going to go on this trip. We want to just unplug for a little bit and relax. So we went out to the beach, the Oregon Coast, Lincoln City. And we got this little tiny cottage and we were there with our daughter and we had the in-laws there too.

They were helping watch Elena while we could go and do stuff. And we were sitting out in front in the morning of the cottage and looking up the hill and there was this house being built. And it was almost done. And this was the summer. And I remember Sari and I looking at each other and saying, “You know what? Someday we’re going to have a house just like that.” And I was like, “Yeah, we are.”

And it was just perfect. It was on the hill. It had a view. It looked like a fucking beach house. It was everything that you wanted in a beach house. And then we finished our vacation and we went home. But it planted the seed. And from that point on, I just looked at beach houses. I just wanted to know what the prices were, what the market looked like, what was on there. And I was so into this I started reading manifestation stuff.

And one of the books I read was this book here, Power of Consistency, and I’ll get into that in a little bit and what he does to work through this manifestation thing. And I thought, “Okay, well, I’m going to start doing this. I’m going to start really making this happen.” So in the book he says doing things like really… If it’s proximity and awareness, starting to act as if starting to buy things for the place, starting to do all the things that you would do if it’s actually happening.

Well, I was buying trinkets for the house. I was buying artwork and all these different things because that beach house already existed in my mind. And I kept looking at the beach houses in Lincoln City and I kept coming across this one that was on the market for like, it must have been a year and a half, maybe longer. And I kept looking at this one and I kept going to Sari, “Hey, remember this one? Oh, it’s such a perfect place.”

And Sari’s like, “How could we ever afford that? We can’t do that. What are you talking about?” And then months and months go by and we start deciding, okay, we want to get a house where we can actually run our business out of it too. And we found this house that’s got this whole space down below and it seems perfect, but we had to do a contingency offer because it was what we could do.

We had to have the collateral of the house to be able to afford this big new home. But since it was a contingency offer, somebody else who comes in non-contingency, they can just grab it. Well, that’s what happened. So we had this funding in place and I was thinking, okay, well, shit, we’ve got all this funding in place. And I kept looking at that house and I’m like, well, man, if it fell through, why can’t we buy this place?

And I remember bringing it up to Sari. She’s like, “Come on, we’re going to buy a beach house? This was going to be our home, our dream home with the lower area to be able to do our workout. And we’re going to do something silly like buying a beach house?” So COVID hits. We’re talking like in a few weeks COVID hits and we are stuck at the house and we can’t go anywhere.

So the idea of a beach house has sounded kind of pretty cool actually. But we decided, okay, well, why don’t we check this place out? So Sari and I go out to Lincoln City and the weather’s nice and it’s Memorial Day weekend. And we go up to the place. This gets me every time. And Sari looks up. I look up and Sari looks over at me. And I got a shit memory so I don’t remember.

She says, “Don’t you remember? Remember this is the house.” I said, “What?” And she says, “This is the house that we both sat and looked at and said this would be the perfect place. What if we had this house?” And I was just in total disbelief. And then it all came in and clicked in and I was like, “You’re right. Oh my God!” So we walked up to the house, this house that we looked at, must have been over a year and a half ago and thought, “Wouldn’t that be great?”

We walk up to this house, we look around and it’s perfect. It’s everything we’ve ever wanted. Sari falls in love with it. We have the funding in place. We put an offer on the place. And I’m talking an hour later because everybody’s going out of COVID to Lincoln City to try to find a beach house. Everybody just rushes in and there’s five other offers that are on the same home.

But we had the first offer, so we got the house. That is manifestation. That is manifestation. I believed this. I thought about this. I dreamt this. I slept this. I ate this. I bought things for it and I had it in my mind. And I made this fucking thing happen. I manifested this. This is real, my friends. This is real. I’m getting teary because this is the kind of stuff that makes life worth living.

We do have control of our experiences and our mindsets and the things that we want. And this is a big part of what that’s all about. So let me tell you how to do it. So Weldon Long, the author of Power of Consistency, talks about being the architect, being the architect of your dreams, the architect of the things that you want. And in the book, some of the first stages of starting to get clear on what you want, because this is all about getting super clear.

If you have a clear dream, something that you truly want, the manifestation process, it needs to be crystal clear and reinforced every day. So the first questions that he asks are, what do you want? What do you want to become? What do you want to contribute? What do you need to accomplish these things? And what limiting beliefs are holding you back in your personal life and business?

Now, these are the first questions to ask and answer. Once you’ve answered these questions, you start really getting clear about what the dream is, what you want, what you want your practice to look like, what your trial work looks like, what your personal life looks like, the car you’re driving, your firm, the offices, what they look like, what kind of furniture is in there, all these specifics down to the socks you’re wearing, and get really clear.

He calls this a nighttime ritual where you write all this out and you memorize this and you recite it and visualize it every night. This is something that I committed to doing. Shit, I got my beach house. And every time I’ve ever wanted anything, I get into this clarity and visualization process and it comes true. And the times where maybe it hasn’t, well, something else comes up that’s different.

And I tell myself, well, the universe is offering this up. This is different and this is what was meant to be. So the pieces that you really need to do and need to be able to so that you can make this so is to get clear, to have a ritual around it, which talks about in the book, this nighttime ritual.

So getting clear is writing out all those things, like I said, getting super clear about what this is, what it looks like, how it’s going to be, memorizing what this is, taking yourself there in your mind every night, every day and get it to where it’s so memorized and wrote that you can run through it at any given time and visualize this every single day and start your day thinking about this, visualizing this so that it threads through your day.

Keep it in your awareness at all times. That’s the most important thing. If you keep this in your awareness at all times, if you are actually being like you’re in it, it will appear. You act in accordance with this. The other thing is looking for the signs. That’s something that’s not in The Power of Consistency book, but something that I really like that’s in the manifestation book, the Manifest book.

Looking for the signs that the universe is actually working in this, that your dreams are unfolding and the universe is a part of this. Looking for the signs is that awareness piece. And what will really help you with this is a mindfulness practice, a breathing practice. So to really pair that with this process will make it so that you’re more aware that these things don’t pass you by.

But what makes it even more so is when you are aware of these things that show up, that are connected to your dream, write them down. Things that come up, a person that you meet, something that you do, something that you come across that says, “Hey, this is a part of the dream,” write it down. And that can be also part of your ritual too if this thing came up that showed me that this is so.

Making this so in your mind and looking for the signs. So to recap, first off, the two books that you need to grab are The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks and Power of Consistency by Weldon Long. These books will really help you in this process. So first, be aware of your upper limit and the saboteur and how you can self-sabotage and how it shows up and keep track of that. Keep an eye out for that.

And believing in this, really writing this out and having a ritual so that it’s something that’s always in your awareness. Well, that upper limit problem, it’ll show up. The saboteur will show up and it’ll try to tell you that this is a bunch of fucking horseshit, but it’s not. Don’t quit. Keep this ritual going. Get clear. Keep the ritual going. Visualize. Don’t let the saboteur and upper limit kick in.

Keep it in your awareness at all times and do this every day. This is real. I have countless times in my life where these things have come true because of a process just like this. Same with Sari. So I give you this as a gift and I believe for you first, as I always do, just like Sari does. You start believing. You start doing this. Do it on a regular basis. Be aware of it, be in it, act in accordance and it will happen. Great talking with you, my friends. I’ll see you next time.