In this article, I’m going to cover another principle of the Law of Assumption that manifestors need to be aware of: self-concept. 

Your self-concept includes the thoughts you habitually have about yourself, and how you feel about yourself. It also includes what you think the people around you think of you. 

Do you feel worthy of whatever it is you are manifesting? Does your ‘self-concept’ match your desire? 

For example, if you’re seeking to manifest a fulfilling and healthy romantic relationship, but you put yourself down a lot in your own mind, feeling that you’re not good enough, that means your self-concept simply isn’t in alignment with your manifestation, and you won’t create it. Or if you do, it will be with someone who treats you poorly, or it will be a relationship you won’t be able to sustain. 

I believe that in order to manifest something, you must feel like the person who already has your desire. It doesn’t mean that you need to feel euphoric all the time, but you are going to need to feel good about yourself overall.

After all, if you were in a healthy and happy relationship, to attract and sustain this relationship you would need to feel worthy and positive about yourself, like you have something to offer. Because if you don’t believe that about yourself, no-one else will. 

In this article, I’m going to talk about how you can make tweaks to your self concept so that you have the best chance of manifesting what you want, whatever it may be.

First of all, let’s look at Neville Goddard’s teachings on self-concept.

He wrote:

“Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live. Do not try to change people; they are only messengers telling you who you are. Revalue yourself and they will confirm the change.”

How to know if you need to work on your self-concept as part of your manifesting process

If you agree with any of the statements below, you need to do some work on your self-concept:

• You are self-critical
• You don’t celebrate your achievements or give yourself credit for them
• You take responsibility for things that aren’t your fault
• You have trouble accepting compliments e.g. if someone says “I love your dress” instead of saying “thank you” you say things like: “Oh this old thing, I’ve had it for ages, I should throw it out.”
• You sometimes say self-deprecating things about yourself to other people
• You have an anxious, avoidant or disorganised attachment style in relationships.
• Other peoples’ criticisms really hurt you
• You compare yourself to others and come up short in your mind
• You’re a people pleaser
• You put other peoples’ desires ahead of your own
• You often don’t stand up for yourself or speak up for what you need
• You don’t take risks on your dreams for fear of failure
• You’re often explaining or justifying your decisions to people unnecessarily. 

If you don’t agree with any of the statements above, you can skip the self-concept work. But if you identify with any of the above, you should also work on your self-concept while you also work on manifesting whatever it is you desire.

Here’s how to do that:

Affirmations

In addition to affirmations that you may be using to impress your subconscious mind to manifest (more on that here), you should also come up with statements that affirm your self concept.

Ask yourself: who would I be if I had this manifestation, if my desire was already part of my reality?

Would you be feeling: relaxed, powerful, secure, grounded, enough, safe, free? (to give some examples…)

Here are some examples of powerful self-concept affirmations you can use:

I am enough

I am more than enough

I trust myself and my perceptions

I am worthy of wonderful things in life

I am safe and I trust the process of life

I am capable. I can do anything. I can learn to do anything

I am beautiful

Everything always works in my favour

I am lucky

I speak up for myself freely and easily

I claim my own power 

I am open to receiving

I am thriving in my life

I already have everything I need and want

I am inherently wealthy

I am full of joy

I deserve the absolute best life has to offer

I am blessed to be me

I am securely attached

My world takes such wonderful care of me

I exude self-worth.

Note that if you agreed with any of the statements mentioned above as signs you need to improve your self-concept, you can also create affirmations which affirm the opposite, So, if you agreed with the statement “I am self-critical”, you could affirm “I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

You can also come up with self-concept affirmations for a particular goal you have. For example, if you would like to manifest marriage, you could affirm:

I am husband/wife material

I was always meant to be married

I am worthy of wonderful things in love.

Your current self-concept was formed simply through repetition — of thoughts, beliefs and feelings about yourself. You can change your self-concept by repeating new ideas about yourself. It can take some time to do, but it is definitely worthwhile work. So, repetition, practice and persistence are important here. Most people cannot usually make significant changes to their self-concept suddenly. 

So, that’s one way to change your self-concept to something more favourable. 

What if you are affirming and have been for a while and there’s no change in your self-concept?

It could be that you need some kind of healing to change your self-concept.

Healing for improving your self-concept

Sometimes people struggle to change their self-concept because there was a painful and traumatic event in their past that causes them to believe they’re not good enough, and in some cases, these feelings may be very deep-rooted and resistant to change. When this is the case, it can be tricky to try to shift your self-concept through affirmations, when you feel overwhelmed by past traumas and negative beliefs. I do believe it’s possible over time, but you usually encounter a lot of resistance this way, and it can be more effective to quickly change your self-concept through combining the Law of Assumption with a healing modality. 

Here are a couple of my favourite healing modalities that are particularly suitable for changing your self-concept:

• EMDR
• Inner child healing

I did many sessions of EMDR (a trauma healing therapy) just before I started using the law.

When I did EMDR, I discovered a very significant memory during childhood, where I had concluded that I must not be good enough, because of how someone treated me. This belief stayed with me for decades, affecting everything about my personal relationships. I didn’t even know this was a pivotal moment in my childhood until it came up in the sessions. I had totally forgotten about it. It’s amazing how much one event can impact us so profoundly. 

It definitely improved my self-concept to heal this memory and I believe releasing this supercharged my manifestations later on.

Inner child work is also very powerful for improving self-concept, especially if you had an inconsistent or unreliable caretaker during childhood. I highly recommend this for improving your self-concept. 

Something else that helped my self-concept massively is the coherence healings I had done with the students of manifestation teacher Dr Joe Dispenza. If you read my blogs regularly you’ll know that I am a fan of Dr Joe Dispenza’s work. I’ve read all his books and do his guided meditations daily.

I had multiple free coherence healings with his students, who are advanced students who have attended his week long retreats and learned a method for healing others of their physical illnesses by targeting any incoherent energy in the energy field that underlies the illness. 

This “coherence healing” method has been studied by the University of California in San Diego and what they discovered amazed them. When they put cancer cells in an incubator, and asked a group of coherence healers to send the cells healing energy, they found that the temperature in the incubator inexplicably dropped and the cancer cells stopped proliferating. (You can learn more about this in the video on this page.)

I’ve also had some intense mystical experiences that were very healing, through doing the meditations of Dr Joe, but I’d been doing the meditations every day for several months before I had those healing experiences. So, this may not be a fast route to changing your self-concept, but it can certainly help.

Improving self-concept in other ways

• Treat yourself with kindness, like you would a beloved child
• Try one of the many self love meditations on YouTube 
• Do a Buddhist loving kindness meditation
• Focus on eliminating behaviours that undermine you. If you often speak poorly of yourself to others or put yourself down, stop! If you don’t give yourself credit for things, try to start giving yourself a pat on the back for jobs well done. If you have trouble accepting compliments, practise saying “thank you” to compliments
• Tell yourself “I love you” sometimes and feel a sense of care and love that you have for yourself. If you don’t feel it, never mind. Just keep telling yourself “I love you”. You can also say “you are my beloved” to yourself. Or “I value you”; “I respect you” and “I trust you”. I find it’s best to say these after meditating when your subconscious mind is in a more receptive state.  

Further Resources:

• You can find the next article in this series here: How to Ignore 3D Reality When Manifesting the Neville Goddard Way

And you can find Neville Goddard’s books on the Law of Assumption here: Neville Goddard: The Complete Reader