Jenny Block’s new book, Badass Manifesting, is all about coupling positive thinking with taking action to reach your goals (Photo by Terry Glanger)
Author Jenny Block’s new book says its ok to believe in magic, but you have to take action to make the magic happen
TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
Nash@DallasVoice.com
Author Jenny Block says she “100 percent” believes in the power of positive thinking. But true success in any venture, she says, takes action on top of positivity. And that is the point of her new book — her fifth — titles Badass Manifesting: How to Manifest Abundance, Success and the Joyful Life of Your Dreams.
Back nearly 20 years ago, in 2006, Rhonda Byrne published her best-selling book The Secret, purporting to tell people how to reach all their goals and have the life they want just but thinking it so. But, Block says, a lot of people who thought they would be able to simply think their dreams into reality ended up being disappointed.
“The Secret is grounded in the idea of the power of positive thinking, and a lot of people were really disappointed” when they couldn’t manifest their goals with positive thoughts alone.
“People felt like it was stopping short for them.”
So, she asked herself, what’s the different in just thinking positively and in actually manifesting your goals? Her answer: To make things actually happen, “you have to put yourself in the room where it happens. Whether you are talking about dating or a job interview or meeting people or whatever, you are not going to find the person or get the job or do the thing unless you put yourself in the right place.”
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Meet the Author
Jenny Block is the author of five published books: Love, Sex & Life in an Open Marriage, Ultimate Guide to Solo Sex: All You Need to Know About Masturbation, O Wow: Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm, Be That Unicorn: Find Your Magic, Live Your Truth and Share Your Shine, and her latest, Badass Manifesting: How to Manifest Abundance, Success and the Joyful Life of Your Dreams.
She will be signing copies of her latest work and meeting fans at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Southlake, 1430 Plaza Place, on Saturday, Oct. 1, at 1 p.m. She will be host a launch party for the book on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 6 p.m. at Hotel St. Augustine, 4110 Loretto Drive in Houston.
Visit her website, BeThatUnicorn.com, for more details on upcoming events. All five of her books are available for purchase on Amazon.com and wherever books are sold.
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Block continues, “Do I believe in magic and miracles? Sure! I still see my dead grandfather standing in the corner of the room sometimes. But in general, we need more than that.
“Say I find out I have cancer, and I decide I am not going to do chemo or other treatments; I’m just going to will myself to be well. That is not going to work. If you are ill, being positive certainly helps with healing. But you also have to get the proper medical treatment, too.”
Block says her lessons in the power of positive thinking combined with positive actions started at a young age. When she was a child, every year on her birthday, her father took her to a Baltimore Orioles baseball game. One year, he took an Igloo cooler to the game with them and sent Block to the concession stand to ask the vendor to fill that cooler with ice.
“Then he said, ‘And if you get him to fill it with Coke, too, I’ll buy you that ice cream cone in the baseball helmet.’ “
So Jenny took the cooler to the concession stand and asked the vendor for ice, which he willingly gave her. Then she screwed up her courage and asked for Coke, too, explaining that her dad had promised to get her the much-desired special ice cream treat if she got the cooler filled with Coke. The vendor, she recalls, laughed and gave her the drinks.
“I took the cooler back to my dad, and asked, ‘But why did he do that?’ Dad said, ‘Because you asked him to, Jenny.’”
Her father also played a role in another lesson, one demonstrating the shortcomings of thoughts without actions. She explains that as a teenager and young adult, she wanted a career on stage, and she poured all the positive thoughts she could muster into that goal.
Her father stepped in and said if she wanted to be an actress, she had to put herself physically in the space to make that happen, even offering to finance her move to New York City for that purpose. When she turned down the offer, her father told her, “Then you don’t want to be an actress.”
“I didn’t like that comment at all at the time,” Block says. “But he was right.”
While her acting career didn’t pan out, Block says, she did manifest a career as a writer.
“When I moved to Dallas 20-something years ago, I left my job as a writing professor and decided, without thinking twice, I am a writer,” she recalls. “I told myself, you can say it. Then I sent an email to D Magazine and said, ‘My name is Jenny Block. I am a writer, and I want to write for you.’ I did the same thing with Dallas Voice. In the end, you are who you say you are.
“Am I a best-selling author? Not yet. Am I a screenwriter? Not yet. But I am a writer,” she says. But she has now had five books published and has been writing about weddings and style for the New York Times for five years now, on top of her freelance work for Dallas Voice and other media outlets.
The author isn’t suggesting that anyone just chuck everything all at once in pursuit of a dream. Understand, she advises, that it takes time to build a dream. “I’m not talking about going out and conquering the world if that’s not your jam,” she says. “But every day, take one little step to get you closer. Do the baby steps that lead up to the giant steps.”
Block readily acknowledges that there is a plethora of self-help books out there already. But her book, she says, is different.
“I have poo-pooed these books before, too,” she admits.
“So I wanted this to be different. I wanted this to be an inspiration AND a workbook. Every chapter has a personal story about how [manifesting] actually works and how it worked for me,” Block explains. “Each chapter has a mantra and tells how to go through it. And there is a tool kit in the back for creating new mantras, and for keeping track of what goes well and what doesn’t work.
“This isn’t a rah-rah book; this is a rah-rah-let’s-go books,” she adds. “I am not talking about magic tricks. I’m giving you tools and talking about putting these tools to work. Why wouldn’t you want to give yourself a leg up?
“We can manifest what we want.”