The Law of Attraction Isn’t What You Think It Is
There is a version of the Law of Attraction that gets passed around on the internet like a party trick.
Make a vision board. Think positive thoughts. Believe hard enough and the universe delivers.
I tried that version. Many of us have. And many of us have quietly wondered what we were doing wrong when the thing we wanted didn’t arrive on schedule.
What I have learned, across years of practice and many very specific experiences that I still think about, is this: the Law of Attraction isn’t a shortcut. It isn’t a performance. It’s a practice of precision, patience, and something that looks a lot like trust, even when trust is the hardest thing to find.
Let me tell you the story of two emails.
The first email
I want to say that the year was 2015, I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom when an email arrived from a production company in the United States. They were inviting me to appear on a show on the Cooking Channel.
My heart leapt into my throat.
Then I read more carefully. They thought I was based in the US.
I wrote back and told them the truth: I was in Trinidad & Tobago. I wasn’t able to travel for the taping.
Just like that, the door closed.
I sat with the deflation of it for a while. I won’t pretend I didn’t. I wondered whether I had made the wrong choice by being honest. I wondered, in a wave of self-doubt, whether all international opportunities were simply closed to me because of where I lived. Whether my location was a ceiling I could not push through.
But underneath the disappointment, something else was quietly true.
They had found me. My work, TriniGourmet, had landed on a producer’s desk in another country and they had thought: her.
That had happened.
The geography was wrong but the recognition wasn’t.
I wrote that down.
Not the disappointment.
The recognition.
And then I wrote something else.
The intention
I have kept a journal for most of my life. Not as a diary exactly, but as a practice space. A place where I think out loud, work things through, and occasionally write things into existence.
After that first door closed, I wrote an intention.
I wrote it as a statement of fact, not a wish.
Not “I hope” or “I want.”
I wrote:
I will be asked to participate in an internationally broadcast show and the circumstances will allow me to appear.
Two things in that sentence matter more than they might seem to.
The first is the specificity. Not “I want to be on television.” Not even “I want to appear on an international show.” The circumstances will allow me to appear. I wasn’t scripting a vague desire. I was scripting the exact shape of what I needed: an opportunity that worked for my actual life, in my actual location, on my actual terms.
The second is what happened after I wrote it. I closed the journal. I let it go. Not because I stopped caring, but because I had done my part. The intention was clear and honest. Holding onto it too tightly, monitoring it, worrying at it, wasn’t trust. It was control. And control isn’t the same thing as alignment.
The second email
The first week of January 2017, an email arrived.
It was from the production company behind Delicious Destinations on the Travel Channel. They had found TriniGourmet. They wanted me to appear as a talking head in an episode on Trinidad.
No travel required.
They were coming here.
The circumstances, exactly as I had scripted them, would allow me to appear.
We filmed two weeks later. And then I waited.
What happened in the waiting
I will be honest about the ten months that followed, because most Law of Attraction content skips this part entirely. And it is the most important part.
I thought about it.
Often.
I checked in with the producer once or twice to ask about an air date.
Nothing had been confirmed.
At some point I made a quiet decision to stop doing that.
Not to give up.
To stop driving myself to distraction over something that was either coming or wasn’t.
My anxiety about it was changing nothing except my own peace.
So I waited.
I went back to my work. I kept writing, kept cooking, kept creating.
There was also the matter of not knowing whether I would make the final cut at all.
I had filmed.
That was real.
But an appearance on camera isn’t the same as an appearance in the finished episode. I held that uncertainty too.
This is the part of the practice that nobody puts on a vision board: the ordinary days in between. The trust that looks less like certainty and more like just continuing to show up.
The episode aired
Ten months after filming, the episode went to air.
I watched it. And there I was, closing the episode, with the exact quote the director had told me during filming that he wanted to end with.
The feeling wasn’t what I expected.
There was delight, yes.
Surprise, yes.
But underneath both of those was something quieter and more lasting. A deep sense of affirmation. A settling.
The door I had scripted had opened. Not the first door, which had been wrong in its shape. A different one, built precisely for where I was and what my life could hold.
I remember thinking: there are no limits to what doors I can walk through. The limit I had feared, my geography, my location, the smallness of what might be available to me from here, hadn’t been real. It had been only a thought. And I had chosen, eventually, not to build my intentions on top of it.
What this practice actually requires
I share this story not because it ended well, but because of what it required in the middle.
It required precision. Not a vague wish but a specific, honest statement of what you need, including what needs to be true for it to work in your real life. The universe doesn’t need you to perform certainty. It needs you to be clear.
It required release.
The intention written and then genuinely let go, not white-knuckled into existence.
It required patience that wasn’t passive.
I kept working.
I kept showing up.
Intention doesn’t replace action. It orients it.
And it required a willingness to trust when trust had no evidence to stand on yet.
This is Pillar 3 of the Elevate + Thrive™ framework in its truest form. Creative Flow isn’t about positive thinking as a performance. It’s about learning to work consciously with your beliefs, your intentions, and your inner narrative rather than being carried along by whatever your fear happens to be scripting on a given Tuesday.
You are the magician of your life. That isn’t a metaphor for wishful thinking. It’s a description of a practice. A real one, with texture and difficulty and ordinary days inside it.
The question isn’t whether it works.
The question is what are you scripting, and whether you are willing to mean it.
How to begin
Take something you want. Something real, not the sanitised version of it. Write it as a statement of fact, in the present or future tense. Be specific about the conditions. Not just what you want, but what needs to be true for it to work inside your actual life.
Then close the journal. Let it go. And go back to your work.
The practice doesn’t require you to believe perfectly. It just requires you to begin.
If you want a quiet place to begin, my Elegant Reset is a free resource for returning to your values and clearing the mental space to hear what you actually want. It’s also a good companion for the journalling practice described here.
And if you find that you have been sitting with an unmade decision for longer than feels comfortable, and you want to speak it aloud with someone who can help you hear what is actually true for you, click here to learn more about working privately with me.
Pillar 3: Creative Flow
Write it as a statement of fact, not as a wish. Use present or future tense. Be specific about the conditions: not just what you want but what needs to be true for it to work in your real life, with your real circumstances, in your real location. Avoid generalising. “I want to be visible internationally” is less useful than “I will be invited to participate in an internationally broadcast opportunity, and the circumstances will allow me to appear.” Once you have written it, close the journal. Go back to your work. The intention does not replace action. It orients it.
Creative Flow, Pillar 3 of the Elevate + Thrive™ framework created by Sarina Nicole, is the practice of working consciously with your beliefs, intentions, and creative energy rather than being driven by fear, doubt, or inherited limitations. It includes journalling, intention-setting, and the ongoing development of a relationship with your own inner narrative. It’s not about performance or manufactured positivity. It’s about learning to hear what you actually want clearly enough to script it honestly, and then trusting the process enough to let it unfold.
Manifesting, as it is most commonly taught, emphasises feeling and belief — visualise, affirm, receive. Intention-setting, as a practice, adds precision and release. An intention is not a wish and it is not a performance of certainty. It is a clear, honest statement of what you need, including what needs to be true for it to fit inside your actual life. The difference matters because vague desires produce vague results. A specific, honestly written intention gives both you and your circumstances something to align with. After setting it, you release it — not because you stop caring, but because holding too tightly to an outcome is control, not trust. And control is not the same as alignment.
Elevate + Thrive™ is a six-pillar framework created by Sarina Nicole to help women build lives aligned with their actual values. The six pillars are: Clarity of Core Values, The Art of Beauty, Creative Flow, Aligned Wellness, Abundant Living, and Elegant Confidence. Pillar 3, Creative Flow, focuses on your conscious relationship with belief, intention, and inner narrative — the inner architecture that determines what you create and what you allow into your life.
The Law of Attraction is a practice of working consciously with your beliefs, intentions, and inner narrative rather than being shaped by whatever fear happens to be scripting for you on a given day. In practice, it requires three things: precision in how you write your intentions (specific, honest, and shaped around the conditions of your actual life, not a sanitised version of it); genuine release after setting the intention, trusting rather than controlling; and patient, continued action in the ordinary days between the intention and its arrival. It isn’t positive thinking as performance. It’s a real practice with texture and difficulty and uncertain middles.
