Sunday, November 24, 2013

Directing Your Destiny - a book review

I just finished reading a book called Directing Your Destiny by Jennifer Grace.  She's a former actress who has turned Shakespeare's famous saying "all the world's a stage; and all the men and women merely players" into a manifesting manifesto.  Grace, who calls herself an Executive Dream Producer, works to help people discover their passions and realize their dreams.  She believes that we all sit in the director's chair of our very own movie and most of us aren't directing anything.  We're just existing and allowing life to happen to us.  She says we need to happen to life.  We need to put on our director's hat and start making things happen.  In keeping with the movie theme, her book tells us how to write your own screenplay, produce it and direct it.

Because she's an actress, her book teaches the reader how to act as if the dream has already happened.  Her affirmations are a tad different from most.  Rather than, for example, affirming "The right love enters my life right now," she says to add the feeling you'll have when the dream happens.  So she suggests affirming, "I feel so happy that the right love enters my life right now."  And "I am so relieved that I have paid off all my bills so easily."  Or "I feel thrilled that I am now working my own hours and helping people by doing what I love."  She's a proponent of the "feel it real" law of attraction secret.  You have to be emotionally connected to what you're trying to manifest.

Grace is an advocate of first getting to know yourself before you can know what you want to manifest in your life.  Her book encourages journaling, meditation and something she calls future self-writing where you write letters to your future self.

She encourages people to ask three questions with their manifesting goals -- WHAT, HOW and WHEN.  What is your goal?  How will you accomplish it?  When will you achieve it?

She also writes about how we need to overcome fear, try new things and ask for help in order to achieve our wildest dreams.  She shares a lot of her own stories -- about how she went from divorced mom to in-love and from out-of-work actress to metaphysical teacher and speaker.

While there is nothing new in this book that students of manifesting can learn, her approach is different and fun.  It's easy to think about our life in terms of a movie and it's fun to spend time script writing the way we want our life to go.  She ends her book by reminding us "you are powerful beyond all measure.  This is your life; this is your movie.  You get to decide how it ends."

That's a great reminder for us all.

Happy Reading!