Working on The Secret in my twenties gave me a front-row seat to one of the largest manifestation phenomena in modern history — and it also gave me my first honest look at what that teaching can and cannot do on its own. People sometimes assume I look back on that period with regret, or with the cynicism of someone who saw behind the curtain. The truth is gentler than that. It taught me something I’m still unpacking two decades later: information alone, even brilliant information, doesn’t move people. Something else has to be present.

So when people ask how that work shaped how I think about conscious business now, the honest answer is — it shaped almost all of it. Just not in the ways you might expect.

What I saw that millions of viewers didn’t

When you’re inside a project like that, you see the letters. Thousands and thousands of them. People wrote in saying the film had changed everything for them — and many of those stories were real. But a much larger group wrote in confused. They’d watched it five times. They’d made vision boards. They’d written cheques to themselves. And nothing had moved. They felt secretly ashamed about it, because the message was simple and they were clearly failing at something simple.

That gap — between people who applied the same teaching and got radically different results — became the central question of my life. Why did the same idea land like a thunderbolt for one person and bounce off another like a tennis ball?

It wasn’t intelligence. Many of the people who stayed stuck were brilliant. It wasn’t effort. Most of them were trying harder than the people who succeeded. And it wasn’t sincerity. If anything, the stuck group wanted it more.

What I started to notice — slowly, over years — was that the people who broke through tended to have something the others didn’t. They had a nervous system that could actually receive what was coming. They had a body that didn’t flinch at the idea of being visible, paid well, or chosen. They had, somewhere along the way, done work the manifestation teachings never named — work on the patterns their early life had wired in.

The piece nobody put in the film

Here’s what I wish we’d been able to say back then, and what I try to say now: thought creates reality, and the nervous system decides which thoughts you can actually hold.

You can think “I am worthy of $50,000 months” all day. If your body learned at age six that being seen means being hurt, or that having more than your parents means betraying them, that thought will hit an internal wall you can’t see. The wall isn’t a belief. It’s a protection. And protections don’t respond to affirmations — they respond to safety, slowly built.

This is why so many conscious entrepreneurs with adverse childhood experiences end up feeling like manifestation is rigged against them. It isn’t. They’re just trying to solve a 3D problem with 1D solutions. The mind piece is real. So is the spiritual piece. But without the third piece — the body, the nervous system, the patterns laid down before language — the other two can’t fully land.

How that reshaped how I think about business

If The Secret taught me anything about conscious business, it’s this: the inner game and the outer game are not two games. They’re one. And the people who succeed are the ones who stop treating them as separate departments of their lives.

A few things I now believe, almost as bedrock:

  • Mindset alone is a half-built bridge. It’s necessary. It’s not sufficient. If you’ve ever wondered why the affirmations stopped working, this is usually why.
  • Strategy alone is a half-built bridge from the other side. You can have the best funnel in the world and still self-sabotage at the threshold of being chosen.
  • Healing is the mechanism, not the goal. The goal is a working business, a life you actually want, the impact you came here to make. The healing is what makes those possible — not a destination in itself.
  • The body keeps the receipts. Whatever your childhood adapted you to do — over-functioning, under-charging, hiding, perfectionism — is still running in the background until it’s met directly.

This is why I built things like the Three Pillars framework and the 6-Layer Block Model. They came directly out of watching, for twenty years, what actually moves people versus what just makes them feel inspired for a weekend.

One concrete example

A few years ago I worked with a woman — I’ll call her Priya — who had read everything. Genuinely everything. She could probably have taught a class on abundance from memory. She’d been to retreats on three continents. And she was making about $38,000 a year as a coach, working herself ragged, undercharging clients she secretly resented.

When we started, she expected another mindset reframe. What we actually did was much smaller. We tracked, for two weeks, what happened in her body the moment she said her rates out loud. Her throat closed. Her shoulders rose. Her breath got shallow. Her body was producing, in real time, the exact response a six-year-old would produce when she’d been told to stop asking for things.

No affirmation was ever going to outrun that. But once she could feel it, name it, and give that part of her something it had never had — the experience of asking and being met — the rates changed. Not overnight, but within months. And not because she’d “manifested harder.” Because the brake had been released.

That’s the work. That’s what The Secret couldn’t show, by the nature of what it was. And that’s what I’ve spent the years since trying to put back into the picture.

What I’d say to anyone who loved that film and still feels stuck

You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You weren’t failing at something simple. You were given one piece of a much bigger picture, and nobody showed you how the pieces fit together. The thinking was real. The feeling was real. The piece nobody handed you was the one underneath both — the part of you that decides, before your conscious mind ever gets a vote, what’s safe to receive.

If you’d like to keep exploring this with people who are doing the same work — integrating the inner, the outer, and the body underneath both — you’re warmly welcome to come and sit with us inside the Miracles For Me community. No pressure, no pitch. Just a doorway, if it’s the right time.

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