Manifesting vs Goal Setting

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing all the right things but still not getting the results… this is probably why.

In this episode, I break down the real difference between manifesting and goal setting and why relying on just one is either keeping you stuck or burning you out.

This isn’t about vision boards and wishful thinking and it’s not about hustling yourself into the ground either. It’s about combining identity and action in a way that actually moves your life and business forward.

I hope you love the ep! Please Share it with someone who you think would love it and subscribe for more episodes. 

@samanthagreen.tgh   @alignedandunfilteredpod

YouTube link 

Substack link

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Aligned and Unfiltered. This is the podcast where we speak honestly about what it really takes to build a life and a business that aligns with a future version of you, the one that you keep saying that you're going to be. Expect self-help hacks and tools to be able to help you bridge the gap from where you are now to where you want to be. Let's get started. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for being here and listening to another episode or watching it on YouTube. I am so grateful to have you here. I am so excited about this episode. We are going to be talking about why you need to be manifesting and goal setting and how the two really come together. And actually, if you're just doing one or the other, why it's not working. If you have ever felt like you're doing everything right but just not getting the results, and this is probably why. In this episode, I'm going to be breaking down the real difference between manifesting and goal setting and why relying on one is just either going to keep you dreaming or have you burnt out. It's not just about vision boards and it's not just about working harder, it's about marrying the two of those things together and how you can get incredible results. I have definitely experienced both where I have just been in a dreaming state and really wanting to visualize the life that I want. And then I've also been in the state of just hustling and just my head is on the ground, you know, just nonstop working and not actually spending any time visualizing what it is that I'm trying to achieve and being aware of the situation that I'm in. And I think having a bigger vision and having some structure when they go together, amazing things can happen. So I want to explain the two of them to you first that then you can understand. And if you did listen to my previous episode on manifesting, then that was a really, really good one for really delving into it deep. I'm just gonna brush over the subject for you now. Manifesting is really you understanding the person that you want to be, visualizing the dream life that you want to create. It's really living in this fantasy world of exactly what you want to achieve and how it's gonna feel when you have it and how your life is gonna transform into the dreams that you have, becoming a reality. Manifesting is about changing your beliefs, it's about thinking all about your identity and how you can change your identity and how you can really be anything that you want. It's also about how you see yourself, it's about believing what is available to you and really letting yourself run wild with your thoughts and imagination when it comes to manifesting. And I think that that's something that's so beautiful about manifesting is because you can get so lost in it, like in the best way. You can just spend some time in a quiet space and really dream about your dream life. And the more that you do that, the more that you start to see yourself in it and how that could look for you. And you really have to let your imagination run wild with manifesting. You kind of have to ask yourself if the answer was only yes to whatever I wanted, what would I want? And I think that that is such a powerful question and so exciting to think, and that is what manifesting is. It's really like dreaming about this life that you want to live and how it's gonna look and how it's gonna feel to have it, and it's more of the emotional state, I would say, when it comes to thinking about your future. Your goal setting is more about numbers, it's about targets, it's about a business plan, putting dates on things, it's putting actions in place, it's planning out your year, it's mapping out the quarters of the year and exactly what it is that you want to achieve in each quarter of the year. It's very structural when it comes to goal setting. I kind of think of it as like masculine and feminine, and not in the way that we traditionally know masculine and feminine, but manifesting is almost the feminine, it's the emotional aspect, it's the dreamer, it's the creative, and then the goal setting is more of the masculine, which is more structure, it's um a bit more forceful, it's a bit more ready, get up and go, it's got this like strength behind it, it's kind of a bit tunnel-visioned almost. The reason why, if you're just doing one or the other and not doing both, that's where you can get really stuck. Because if you are just manifesting, realistically, you're just dreaming, you're just spending the time thinking about what it is that you want, but not actually doing anything to be able to make it happen. And if you're just goal setting and being really strict on your goals and strict with your habits, which is amazing, you're not ever really seeing the results happen because you're not allowing yourself to have that vision outside of what it is that you're creating and allowing yourself to think what this could become or where you see this going, or the person that you are that is doing this, and actually, you can get really burnt out really easily when you're just in the goal setting phase. Now, I have very much been in both of these phases before in my life, and I have also been in a state where I've put them together, and when I put them together, that is when the magic happens. You want to really think of it that manifesting is who you are, and goal setting is what you do. And when you hear it as clear as that, it's it's like a light bulb goes off in your head, and you're like, right, okay, this makes sense now. And actually, maybe you're listening to this and thinking, oh wow, actually, I've just been stuck in manifesting, I've been stuck dreaming about it and not actually doing anything, or I've just been stuck in the hustle side of it and not actually taking a minute to think about what it is I'm trying to achieve long term with my goals and actually envisioning the life and the person that I want to be when I create, when I hit those goals, for example. Where people go wrong with this. So if you are just a manifestation person, then you're gonna be mad about your vision boards, your journaling, but you're not necessarily taking action. You are probably avoiding discomfort and you're just staying stuck. You're staying stuck in the pattern of journaling and vision boarding and maybe meditating and just really living in your head, but not actually making the steps to make it happen. Type two, which is the goal setting person, you are gonna be very much the well, I'll just work harder person, I'll stay an extra hour, I'll do this, I'll go home and get my laptop out. Like you're just hustle, hustle, hustle, and you're constantly doing, but you don't have any actual alignment to the life that you want to live or the goals that you're trying to achieve. You're burnt out, you're probably resentful, and you're overwhelmed. And this is why the two things have to come together to be able to create the life of your dream. You're either going to be dreaming your life away or you're working yourself into the ground, and neither works. So, for my personal experience when it comes to this, when it came to setting up the salon, I start I actually went on a holiday first. So I was in Ibiza, and I can remember it was during a Covid time. So we were in Abetha for two weeks, which I was not supposed to be there for that long, and it was like the laziest holiday of my life. But we literally obviously no kids at this time were just lying on some beds all day tanning. I was reading a lot of books, which was great, and a lot of actually um self-development books at that time, and I just remember spending so much time thinking about what I wanted to do, and at that point, it really was wanting to open up a salon. And I remember just dreaming about it when I was sunbathing for these two weeks, and I just kept thinking about it and kept thinking how I wanted it to feel, how I wanted it to look. The hotel I was staying in, I felt really inspired by with their interior and the way that it looked. And they actually, funnily enough, now that I'm sat here, the doors that I have in the salon are very much the doors that were in that hotel. And I felt really inspired when I was there, and I also felt very called to and inspired to wanting to create an online business. And if I didn't know what that would look like, I was so aware of what opening a salon looked like, but I had no idea kind of what the online business side of it would look like. And I really spent my time while I was there just relaxed, thinking about it. There was absolutely no action coming into play at this point. It was purely dreaming about it, getting clear on exactly the vision that I had, how I wanted it to feel, how I wanted it to look, how I wanted to show up as the boss of that salon, as the owner of that salon, as the hairdresser behind the chair, how I wanted my clients to feel when they'd left. And that was what I spent that time doing. And that I really believe was so important that I did that because that has led to me being so clear on my vision still today. And then when I came back, it was like, right, okay, let's map this out. You know, how much money am I gonna need? How many staff am I gonna need? What units are actually available in Dubai? What area would I be in? Do I want to be in an area that I know? Do I want to be in an area that is a bit further away than where I am now? Where can I afford? That was then when the goal setting came into it and actually the action started to, you know, come about. And I also remember at that time I was very much of the thought process. I didn't know how long I wanted to stay in Dubai, um, how long I wanted to be in Dubai for. And it's funny, really, now looking back on it, because at that time when I was so new, still really to Dubai, I think I'd been there maybe three years at that point, and um I was still very much in that phase of like, okay, maybe next year we'll go home. Okay, maybe next year we'll go home. And we didn't really have any like long, long-term plans to be here. And but I really wanted to open up a salon. So I spoke to a girl who I knew really well, who was very successful and in the same industry as me, and I told her my plans, and she was like, I want to do the same thing. So, in my head, I'm thinking, well, this is perfect, let's do it together. And we started mapping out a business plan, we started looking at units, and we really got the ball moving. And then what happened was I got so swept up in this, and that was actually more of the goal setting side of it. So that was the action side of it. I got really swept up in the action side of it that I started to lose my vision. And because all of a sudden at this point, I'm doing it with someone else, so our vision has become, you know, one. So she's got her vision, I've got mine, and we're trying to like blend them together. And part of my vision was always calling the salon the greenhouse because my surname is green, um, and I just always wanted it to be the greenhouse, and I had this, you know, beautiful vision of how I wanted it to look, and it just started to change. It slowly, slowly just started to change because of her vision and mine and trying to put the two together and making it a bit of both of us. And I we both took a bit of a step back over Christmas because um it was so busy in work and you know, we didn't have time to be putting loads of time into it. When we took that time away from you know making things happen, and I took the time back to actually focus on my thoughts, focus on my manifestations, focus on my vision. I then realized that I was slipping away from my vision by what I was doing. And I just had a really honest conversation with her, and I said, Look, I'm really sorry, I think I have to do this on my own. Because as amazing as it would be to do it with you, and how much I would have loved to have worked with this girl, I just didn't feel like it was right. I was like, that isn't the vision that I have, and we still have an amazing friendship to this day, and she was like, That's fine, don't worry, you go and do your thing, I'm gonna go and do mine. We've always supported each other every day since, and I am so glad that I did that because if I had stayed in that hustle state and never actually taken some time to just step back, look at the situation with a different lens, a different view, and focus back on what my vision was and my manifestations for the business, I would have just continued into something that didn't actually feel right. But because I was so busy in hustling, in working hard to make it happen, I wasn't focusing on how I was feeling. I wasn't focusing on how everything started to look and how different it was to actually the vision that I created. And I think that for me, I am so glad now that that happened in the way that it did. Um, but what I want you to realize from that story is you have to take a step back at times. You can't always be in that hustle, you can't always be just work, work, work focused because you have to be aware of what's going on around you, what your bigger reason is, what is your why, why is it that you're doing what you're doing, what is it that you're trying to achieve, what is the end goal, what is the not even the end goal, because I don't believe that there is a final point. I think the goalpost is always moving, but I think you have to stay strong on what your vision is and what is true to you when you're working hard simultaneously. I also think for me, a big part of something where I've had a similar situation was coming away from behind the chair. So, as I mentioned just before, I've always wanted to do an online business. Now, this, funnily enough, has become that online business. But I didn't know what the online business was at that time. And in my head, it was like, I have to make this much money, I have to be this busy, I have to have a duty to my clients, I have a duty to my team, I have to be back behind the chair. And I was again, hustle, hustle, hustle behind the chair all the time. I was then after I'd had the girls, I was extending the salon, I went back behind the chair then, and all of a sudden almost had a mental breakdown, and then had that realization of hang on a minute, I want to be this incredible leader for my team, and I'm not gonna I'm not able to do that when I'm behind the chair because my focus is on the client in the chair, it's not on everything else. But then at the same time, my focus couldn't be on the client because there was so much going on around me, and I was not delivering well in any area in my life, it felt like at that time. Everything was kind of slip in, and I was just holding and spinning too many plates. So, again, when I took a step back, I focused on what my vision was, I focused on what my why was, what it is I really wanted to create, being behind the chair just didn't fit into that anymore. And I had to really be aware of that and take time to have make that decision and step away from that, and that felt so uncomfortable at the time, really uncomfortable, and it was the best thing I did. And funnily enough, I actually sat down recently with my accountant and we went over all the figures over the last four years the salon's about to turn four. And last year in 2025, the salon profited more than it did in the first two, two and a half years combined, and last year was the only year out of that time that I wasn't behind the chair. So, what does that tell you? It tells you that it's so important for me to have eyes on the business, and actually, by me having my eyes on the business, I can make it profit so much more, and I could actually achieve the goals and the dreams I wanted to for the salon that whole time, and I just didn't know it by being behind the chair because I was so stuck, I had no blinkers on, you know. But actually, as soon as I stepped back, focused on my vision, focused on what it was that I was trying to create to be that creative again, be in my feminine, be in my mode of creating and the visionary, I could make that happen. And as I'm like on a bit of a tangent here and speaking, it's making me realize actually how crazy those two situations were and how it has all come about. Steps I want you to do. If you have something that you're trying to create, if you have something that you want to do, these are gonna be the set steps that I'm gonna break down um quite simply for you. I'm not gonna go into too much detail so I'm not boring you, but let's um think about some simple steps that you can take now to create the life of your dreams. So, first things first, decide who you're becoming. So think about the future version of you. And now we're gonna do a whole separate episode at some point on future you, but I really want you to think about who you are in that life that you want. So, for example, if you are wanting to be a salon owner, what do you look like as a salon owner versus you today? What's different in that? Think about that future version of you and how she's different to who you are today. So, really try and embody that person and think about how she wakes up, how she spends her day. I want you to think about your standards as that person, your identity, um, how they dress. Really, really just decide exactly who it is that you're becoming as this person of you, as this version of you who has what it is that you want. Then you're gonna set some aligned goals. So think about your revenue, think about your clients, think about your growth. So, whatever goals it is that you need to be able to achieve what it is that you want to do. Think about what your goals are within that realm. And then you're gonna start to act accordingly. So, you are gonna make some daily decisions that make it one step closer. So, small, just incremental habits or movements that get you to where it is that you want to be. You're gonna set some boundaries, and that means protecting your time, protecting your energy to make sure that you can make that happen. And think about leadership as well. I don't know what it is that you're wanting to achieve, but think you know, if that means you stepping up a bit more in your role and becoming more of a leader, then how does that look for you as well? You don't get the result first, you have to become the person first. So you can't, I couldn't have been a salon owner if I didn't start showing up as one. Because no one's gonna want to work for me if I don't show up as a leader. You know, they're not gonna have any faith in me, they're not gonna trust me, they're not gonna respect me as a salon owner and a leader if I'm not showing up as one. So if you want to open up your own salon, then start acting like somebody who already has their own salon. If you want a fully booked diary, for example, the manifestation side of it is gonna be I'm a fully booked hairdresser, you're telling yourself this every day, you're journaling about it, you're listening to subliminals, you are writing notes and sticking it on your mirror and saying it back to yourself every day. I'm a fully booked hairdresser, I'm an in-demand stylist, maybe you have a screenshot of a fully booked diary, and that is on your screensaver on your phone. You're really manifesting that into fruition. But then the goal set inside of that is how many clients do you need per week to be able to achieve the amount that you want to earn? How much content do you need to post in order to get more clients? How many clients do you need to rebook every time to be able to get to the goal that you want? So you can really see the difference between those two things and how one is a bit more visionary and one is a lot more structured. If your goal is to lose weight, say you want to be this really healthy version of yourself, and you might have a target weight, for example, but you really envision yourself as being this healthier version of you. So the manifesting side of it is like I love my body, I am so grateful for my body every day, I'm so grateful that it moves the way I need it to, I'm so grateful for all the healthy meals that I have access to. And then the goal setting part of it is working out how many calories you need to have every day to be in a calorie deficit, how much water do you need to drink every day? So, can you see the difference between those two things? But actually, if you're just doing one or the other, it really does not get you there. So, really think about what it is that you're trying to achieve, what is the vision behind it, and what is the goal behind it that's going to get you there. Put those two things together and incredible things will happen, trust me. Be a little bit more aware and self-reflective. What have you been doing that's not working? You know, don't be hard on yourself, but at the same time, take some accountability. Where are you not showing up? Is it that you're not taking time out to have a better vision of your life? Is it that you're stuck in the vision and you're not actually making any steps to make the goal happen? Be really honest with yourself, take accountability and start to show up in a way that you haven't been showing up already. I hope that you love that episode. I really enjoyed recording it. And if you think that somebody else would love this episode, then please, please, please share it with them. Stick it on your Instagram story, tell somebody about it, shout it from the rooftop, say it on It means more than you will ever know. And subscribe, tell a friend, find me on Instagram. The links are all down below. And I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much. Bye!