Transcript

Ani
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy Podcast. Hi there, Brian.

Brian
Hi, Ani.

Ani
How are you?

Brian
I’m doing great today.

Ani
Good.

Brian
Got my Dummies wear.

Ani
Yeah, you got your Dummies shirt on.

Brian
Sporting some Dummies swag.

Ani
Somebody did ask me, how can I get a Dummies shirt? And I said, you’ve got to be a Dummies author. That’s— you get the Dummies—

Brian
comes with the deal.

Ani
Comes with the contract. You get a cool Dummies shirt. And some Dummies pins. We got a great bag that says something about Dummies on it. And I don’t know about you, but they also send us this really handy-dandy sticky note, like little sticky note tab thing. I use mine all the time.

Brian
I love it. I’m already a little concerned what happens when I wear this Dummies shirt out. Why? I guess I’ll have to write another Dummies book to get another one.

Ani
What do you mean?

Brian
Because I like the shirt so much.

Ani
Oh, you’re afraid you’re going to wear it out.

Brian
Wear it out, yeah.

Ani
I thought you meant wear it out like wear it in public.

Brian
Oh, no, I love wearing it out. I don’t want to wear it out.

Ani
I got you, got you. Yeah, well, I’d offer you mine, but, um, you wouldn’t fit in it.

Brian
That’s happened before. I’ve— I end up wearing like ladies’ size clothing at public events. It’s a whole other side story.

Ani
That was my fault. But anyway, we digress.

Brian
Here we are, gang. We are— this week we are talking about why Manifestation for Dummies is actually a smart read.

Ani
Yeah, when we got the deal with Dummies, they explained to us right off the bat that Dummies books are for smart people. And Dummies actually has a voice and tone of a bit of— a little bit of irreverence. You know, it’s kind of fun to read. They make little jokes. And so one of the biggest jokes is right on the COVID with the title of the book. Um, yeah, they were telling us that, that Demi’s books are for smart people, but smart people who— and there’s some qualifiers. Yeah, smart people who are beginners.

Brian
Yeah, smart people who want, uh, practical, um, information that is actionable.

Ani
Smart people who want a reference guide for whatever the topic is right at their fingertips whenever they want it.

Brian
Yeah, to be able to look it up right away, go right to the right to the point in the book, because as we’ve talked about on previous podcasts, is that the way the Dummies books are written is you don’t have to read them. And oftentimes people are not even encouraged to read them from front to back, but to go to the part of the book that really interests you so you can get the information you need right away to again make it actionable and practical immediately.

Ani
I remember some of the first Dummies books that I got were for taking care of a house. I became a homeowner at a young age and had zero idea how to do anything around the house. And we had a few Dummies books lying around to help us do a few things. And it was just what you were suggesting. We could pull it right off the shelf and flip to whatever part of the house was breaking at the time, whether it was the toilet or the kitchen sink or the tiles or whatever we were doing. And you could just reference it. I think that’s part of an interesting thing about a manifestation book, having it be a reference book. It was super fun to write like that. I think very, very practical. But it was interesting because a lot of books that you read on manifestation are the kind of read where you have to read them from front to back, from COVID to cover, and read everything in the middle. And some manifestation books actually kind of prod you along in this way of, you know, you have to build chapter to chapter, or you’re looking for some kind of secret or, you know, code or whatever that if you read the whole thing, you’re going to figure out or get it.

Ani
And It was a challenge, but also one that we were able to meet with the type of information that we bring with manifestation to not make it such that you had to— that it had to build and you had to read one, you know, one chapter after the next, after the next. And you could literally pick up the book and just read a section and it made sense.

Brian
Yeah. You know, the other thing that’s occurring to me too is if you’re a person who doesn’t really jive with AI. You might be kind of someone of my generation who’s like, what is this with all the AI stuff? But I actually have some dummies books that I liked reading that were like science-based dummies books, like Neuroscience for Dummies and, you know, Brain Anatomy for Dummies and those sorts of things. And the cool thing about AI that a lot of people use it for right now is they use it to actually kind of get them on the page of learning. Like they’ll put a prompt in the AI and say, how do we even start with this? And AI will just kind of like put something up on the blank page. Because, you know, for a lot of people just getting started with a project, like the blank page is the hardest thing to get started with. They’re like, well, how do you know where to start? So they use AI to prompt them to do that. Well, I think that’s what the Dummies books have been doing for a really, really long time. Because if you’re like, what do I want to know about what?

Brian
You can just go to that page in the Dummies book and it gets you on the page, it gets you started. Oh, that’s what I need to look up. Oh, that’s what I need to learn more about. Oh, that’s what I need to bring into action. Oh, that’s what I need to do here. Right, so that’s kind of, um, I think these dummy books are actually AI before AI happened. I mean, they’ve been around for, I don’t know how many years these books have been, uh, in published circulation. Like, this, uh, this brand, in other words, Dummies, has been around for at least since I was a kid. So, you know, we’re talking like, what, 20, 30 long years, a really, really long time sort of thing. So these are the books, yeah, that would just help you kind of get it. I used to love just saying, hey, I need to, I need to like learn about the anterior cingulate cortex. And instead of going looking up encyclopedias or looking at my anatomy books, I’d pull open a Dummies book and it would just like, oh, that’s right. Okay, now that’s where I need to go from there.

Ani
Even on webpages, to your, uh, point about AI, even webpages and trying to fish through the whole webpage and figure it out. And one of the reasons this works is because in a Dummies book, the first thing you’re gonna get is the contents at a glance, and it’s gonna tell you the different parts of the book and the ma— the major parts of the book. But then you flip the page, another page, and you get this table of contents, which is pages worth of table of contents, and it’s incredibly detailed. Fun fact: when we wrote the book, we were tasked to write this detailed table of contents right away, and we were really excited about the project. And when they told us about it, they told us, you’re going to write the table of contents and you’re going to write a sample chapter or two, I don’t remember. And then after that’s done, we’re going to write the rest of the book. And so of course we’re, yes, of course, that’s what we’re going to do. And I remember we got off the call and we looked at each other and went, oh no, are they talking about like the contents at a glance or that incredibly detailed table of contents at the front of every Dummies book?

Ani
And yes, they were talking about the detailed, the, I mean, minuscule, we’re talking about half pages. Like this half page is gonna talk about this.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
And this half a page is gonna talk about that. So to your point, one of the reasons why you’re able to just pick up a Dummies book and go right to that section is because of this incredibly detailed a detailed table of contents. It also in the back has an index, which is super cool, but that table of contents is really what directs you. Now, from a standpoint of manifestation, one of the things that I think is really smart about how this book is laid out, if we can, you know, not just give ourselves a pat on the back here, but also our editors who helped us to really craft that table of contents. Well, we start with talking about more the foundations of manifestation. So you can kind of get that right there if that’s what you’re looking for. And then we hop into the natural laws of the universe. And this is something that people have been asking us about. I’m sure they’ve asked other people about us about for years and years. Where can I get a simple resource for the natural laws of the universe? And we never really had something to point to that was really simple.

Ani
And I think to your point about, you know, smart— is there smart read? It’s so smart to have something like the Natural Laws in a quick reference where you can just grab, read a little bit about it in a paragraph or a half a page or a page, and then really think about it. Because the— well, I would say everything with manifestation, but certainly the Natural Laws are the kinds of things that you don’t just read it once and you know it forever. It’s the kind of thing that you read over and over again and you absorb the information, you think about the information, you live your life, and then you read read it again and you get more information and more in depth. And so having that reference guide to go back and, you know, geez, I was just thinking about the Law of Polarity or the Law of Relativity. Let’s just flip to that section and read that again. And it’ll only take you a minute or two.

Brian
Yeah, to really like, again, get in on the core, the core feature of each one of those laws. And of course, throughout the rest of the book, we integrate those laws into the other parts of the book. Which is health, wealth, and relationships. Those are all separate parts on those three primary areas of life that we’re all, we all live in. And many of us are looking to manifest something in one of those three areas primarily.

Ani
Well, let’s talk about why that’s, that makes this book a smart read too, because a lot of manifestation books are written on a certain area of manifestation, whether it’s wealth manifestation, relationship manifestation, or health manifestation. And one of the things that we really know is they all go together in important ways. And we even— I’ll let you in on a little secret— we built the book Health, Relationships, and Wealth because if you were to read them and do them in that order, it’s really how they build on each other in terms of understanding and integration. First, it’s about the body and health manifestation. Then you extrapolate that and more into relationship manifestation, build that into wealth manifestation. It’s really the way to go. But back to what I was saying about, you know, books are written on a specific topic. This is such a smart read because it really is a holistic view. And learning about health manifestation helps relationship and wealth manifestation make more sense. Learning about wealth manifestation helps to give more context into health and relationship manifestation, all those things. So, they go together.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah. And so, another reason why this is like a smart read is in the beginning of the book, we make some, what they say, foolish assumptions. About, um, you as the reader. And, um, I don’t have them in front of me right now, but the foolish assumptions are things like, um, you have maybe heard of manifestation before, maybe you’ve even tried to practice a little bit, but again, you’re, you’re lacking or have missed like the practical actionable tools that go along with, uh, the practices of manifestation. So there’s all these kinds of things, you know, that you’re actually a well-read person. You actually, um, can understand things. You’re intellectual, you have life experience, like all of those things. And to Ani’s point, in the beginning of our podcast today, one of the things I love about the Dummies books is throughout the Dummies books, there’s all this kind of irreverent humor that happens, which I think is really, really important, especially when it comes to manifestation, but learning in general. And we’ve talked in earlier podcasts about the idea of being lighthearted about this idea of cheerful indifference, about the idea of meeting the world in a way where we’re just not taking ourselves or the world really too seriously.

Brian
Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious things that happen in the world, but do we have to take all of them seriously? Because the more seriously we take things, the more constrained and locked down we get in our cognitive capacities and our abilities to learn. So we know that humor and learning— actually, humor helps support learning and memory recall. Which is why, again, these dummy books are so amazing with these little pointers, like the, you know, reminder sections, the warning sections, the tip sections. It really, again, makes learning easy, which is the, um, uh, the kind of the motto of these books, right? They are learning made easy. It says it was right on the, right on the top of the front cover. Manifestation books, learning made easy. And so who wants to spend a lot of time and energy learning?

Ani
Now, some people do.

Brian
Some people love to just wade through the complexities of the reading. I’m one of those people. I don’t like to do that all the time, but when I want to really know like the nitty-gritty, like insides and outsides of a topic, like I don’t mind wading through like complex reading, but, um, you can only do that for so long. And, and then it takes you, you have to go back and read it again and again and again to really integrate it. And you can become expert that way, but it requires so much energy and so much just like digging into it. It’s not learning made easy.

Ani
Well, one of the things I’m thinking about as you’re talking about that is wading through jargon, and there’s no jargon in this book. Like, there’s a lot of depth. There’s history of manifestation, there’s stuff about spirit, uh, uh, different religions and manifestation, there’s stuff about science and manifestation. Certainly there’s tons of physiology and manifestation. I think you’re going to find it just so rich in a wealth of important depth of information, but it’s not weighted down in jargon, right?

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
And again, I think smart people, they don’t want to read all the jargon. If you’re in a, if you’re in a business where it’s like all the jargon is actually something that you learned in your master’s degree or whatever, and that’s part of the vernacular of your job, great. But that’s not what Dummies books are for. And again, especially for a topic such as manifestation, to make it really simple and to get rid of the jargon so that you can get the facts, I just— it’s really cool.

Brian
Yeah. Well, one of the other, uh, reasons I, I think why, again, the manifestation and the Dummies kind of brand go so well together is because manifestation— I think you spoke to this a little earlier— Bonnie, um, it can be, it can feel lots of times like such an ephemeral, amorphous kind of experience. And it feels like we can kind of get lost in it sometimes. And a lot of manifestation practices, um, come along with things that, you know, like meditation and, and, uh, who knows, chanting and, you know, uh, spell casting. And there’s a lot of, uh, books on manifestation out there that offer an opportunity or even a requirement for someone to kind of enter into some some type of altered state of consciousness. And when you go into the altered state of consciousness and then you return from it, you know, in some ways you’re kind of still altered a little bit, and it could be a little confusing, a little disorienting. You’re like, what do I do now with that? I’m not sure what to make of that experience, how to integrate that. Cool thing about the Dummies books is, again, it gets you right back on the map again.

Brian
So you can go, what am I supposed to do? Oh, let me go to chapter page 152. Oh, there’s— that’s it. Okay, boom, I’m back on the map. I’m ready to engage. So I think it’s important when we do these practices that we understand that kind of these, uh, altered states of consciousness are potentially like really, really important parts of manifestation. We talk about those things in the book, and we even give you some practices, somatic practices, to include the body into those practices so that it’s not just an intellectual, uh, you know, higher, um, experience like that happens in the head, but it’s actually a whole embodied experience, which by the way keeps you grounded through throughout those altered state of consciousness experiences. But that’s all the stuff that’s in the book. I mean, I could keep talking about it, but that’s why these books are really for people who are intrigued by the topic and, and are just like, you know, savvy and smart around this topic, and they want to actually learn how to create actionable stuff.

Ani
I can think of one more thing— the exercises in the book. So a lot of manifestation books have exercises in them And one of the things that I noted and actually got frustrated when I was reading other manifestation books and thinking I want to make something more simple is some of the exercises can get really long and drawn out. And I am busy. I know you are busy, listeners, and people want exercises that work but don’t take forever. You have other things to do in your life. And so when you pick up the Manifestation for Dummies book, you’re gonna get plenty of exercises. But they’re gonna be very on point with the thing that you’re reading, and they’re going to be short enough that you can do them in an encapsulated period of time and feel like it’s not taking all day, so that you have plenty of extra energy for the other things that you’re doing in your life. They’re still gonna feel really rich and deep. So they’re on point, they’re short enough to digest and to integrate. I think that’s— I think that’s really wise. One of the things that can happen in the manifestation topic is the exercises take so long and that then the integration into your real life doesn’t happen because it’s too much swimming around in the exercises.

Ani
An exercise doesn’t have to be long to be powerful. It needs to be powerful to be powerful. So do the exercises and they might even be super short, but then have your aha moment, your breakthrough, and process that and think about that and contemplate that. And that’s really where the power is.

Brian
Yeah, yeah, really. So one of the reasons we want to do this podcast, just in full transparency, is because as we have been out there talking about this book, Manifestation for Dummies, and how excited we are about rolling it out, we’ve got some feedback from some people saying, well, I can’t share this book with my friends because they’re not dummies and they might be insulted by me giving them this book. And so this podcast is for you to help you kind of understand a little bit about why we wrote the book and why it’s a really, really really smart read, right? We’ve had other people say, well, geez, it’s a— it’s a— other, other authors say, well, it’s just a dummy’s book, you know, it’s not like a real— it’s not like a real manifestation book. And again, we want to just say, hey, this is the stuff that’s in the book, or this is based on, on our sci— not only on our personal experiences of doing this for a really long time, but all of our research around it, the research, the science behind it, the physiology behind it, our work in research with the natural laws, The things that actually we’ve been teaching for years with our private group clients.

Brian
So here’s the thing, the Manifestation for Dummies book is a starting point, and it’s a starting point that we have, um, uh, let’s say curated out of the work that we’ve been doing with our private clients and with our group programs for years here at the Somatic Coaching Academy. This is just a starting point, um, beyond Manifestation for Dummies book. I mean, if you’re like, hey, I want to actually go deeper with this material, I want to really be able to to chew on it and experience it. Well, we have year-long masterminds that we do with people, right? We have programs that we do with people, accountability programs, all those kinds of things to help people integrate the laws and these manifestation practices into their lives in real time with personalized attention from us in doing so. So a lot of the stuff that’s in this book is actually stuff that we have pulled out of our group programs that we’ve done for years with people.

Ani
That’s another thing about dummies books though. They hire experts to write their book. They don’t hire the people that necessarily have the largest social media following or have been on Good Morning America, which Good Morning America, we’d love to be on sometime, but, um, and go Dummies. They hire people who are experts in the material. Uh, so I know when I pick up a Dummies book that I’m getting somebody who has done this for years and years, who’s an expert in, and actually that’s another thing. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this at all on any of the podcasts or whatever, But when you write a dummies book, they have a— I don’t remember what they call it— they have somebody else who’s also an expert vet your stuff. They didn’t do that with us because there’s the two of us who are vetting each other and making sure that we’re on track, but they always make sure that the content has multiple people looking at it from an accuracy standpoint. Um, and I really appreciated that when I saw it in the contract because I was like, wow, that’s That’s another reason why these books are so powerful is because they’re written by experts and they’re edit— they have content editors that are, that are looking at the efficacy of the things that, that you’re bringing forward.

Brian
So anyway, that’s a good point. Good. Remember, um, so here’s the thing, you know, if, if you like to like swim around in complexities all of the time, if you like to only, uh, think about theory, if you like to take in intellectual information and not do anything with it, then this book probably isn’t for you.

Ani
That’s true, right?

Brian
Because this book is going to make it simple, it’s going to make it actionable, it’s going to make it crisp and smart and help you put it into practice and get you manifesting things that you want in your life pretty darn quick without a lot of extra, um, quicksand in there. So yeah, so that’s— if that’s what you want, then the book’s for you.

Ani
We know a lot of you listening have already been digesting and reading Manifestation Dummies. So if you already have your copy, we really hope that you love it and comment below, or whether you’re watching this on YouTube or on a Spotify or something like that where you can leave a comment and comment about what you think about the things that we’ve been talking about today. Do you find the book is actionable and how? Do you think it’s a smart read and why? We want to hear what you have to say about it because we know that, uh, you’re reading the book and excited about it too. So thanks so much for getting your copy. We really look forward to hearing what you have to say. Yep.

Brian
So go out there and let’s manifest together, friends. Until then, we’ll see you, uh, on next week’s podcast.

Ani
Bye-bye.