Write It Down Make It Happen

I love this book!

The premise of Write It Down Make It Happen is very simple: writing down clear, specific desires helps them to come true. This is sorta ludicrous on the face of it, isn’t it? Yet Klauser begins by offering several examples of famous people who did it, including Suze Orman, Scott Adams, and Jim Carrey. I do it myself, as I have done on a regular basis for many years, and that’s why I’m always looking for ways to improve my process. What I love about Write It Down Make It Happen is that it focuses on getting more analytical about the wish-formation and writing part of the process, rather than just the yearning part. Writing down what you want is a way of figuring out what you want and planning how to make it happen.

Chapters focus on different areas where someone might want to manifest something. One of my favorites is the chapter “Getting Ready to Receive,” in which a lonely older woman writes diary entries to her future soul mate as though he already existed in her life. I did something similar before dating my current husband. I did intensive journaling exercises to make sense out of my divorce, work through everything I didn’t want, decide whether I was even interested in a long-term monogamous relationship, and figure out what emotional context I wanted if I ever got married again. Without all of that writing, which took hundreds of pages, I know I would not have recognized my husband as an eligible partner. It’s about recognizing how you want to feel while you’re with your partner, not how tall he is or what music he likes.

Write It Down Make It Happen advises that we write about our anger, fear, and resistance around a situation as well as our wishes and positive feelings. This is so hugely important! We are reminded that our understanding of a situation may be incomplete, and that we often assume something can’t go our way without actually asking about it. There’s a really excellent example in the book about a woman who wishes to live in Europe and thinks she’ll have to make a difficult career trade-off. She is astonished to learn that her wish is a win-win for her employer, too. Living a bigger life means contributing at a higher level, and that means giving more to others and the world than you would by staying unhappily stuck.

Write It Down Make It Happen is a classic example of why wishes deserve to come true. Henriette Anne Klauser undoubtedly wrote down her wishes that she could write this book, that it would find a publisher, and that readers would enjoy it. While she wished for these things for herself, what she was really doing was propelling herself to create something more valuable to others than it was to herself. Now we can only wish that she’ll write another one!

Favorite quote:

“Writing a full-fledged description of what you want is one way of saying you believe that it’s attainable and you are ready to receive it.”