"I’m a diehard fan of manifestation. In the spring of 2021, I made a conscious decision to start changing my life starting with my thoughts, and ever since then, I’ve been a wholehearted supporter of all things manifesting. However, I’ve found that I need something a little more concrete than just visualization techniques and open-ended journaling. I know I’m not the only one who gets turned off by the more “woo-woo” manifestation techniques, which is why I’ve gravitated toward one specific method of manifestation: Tori DeSimone’s “life pie” method.
This Baggy Dad style from Levi’s is a tried-and-true favorite our team swears by, made famous by an effortlessly cool fit and PJ-like comfort.
Tori DeSimone is an entrepreneur and podcast host (her podcast is literally called Manifest), and her advice became a huge part of my own manifestation journey since the beginning. Back in March, Tori shared her journaling method, and I was completely blown away by how concrete the steps were for her manifestation strategy. In the past seven months, I have used this technique twice, and it’s already changing my life. Read on to learn all about the numbers-based manifestation method that will make you feel aligned, excited, and ready to achieve your goals.
First of all, redefine what “journaling” looks like…
With this specific form of manifestation, “journaling” has a broader definition than how we might traditionally think of it. Tori considers journaling any physical manifestation of your own thoughts. Every day, we journal without even realizing it, whenever we put our thoughts out into the world in any form: when we are writing our to-do lists, when we are writing our grocery lists, and even when we are sending texts or emails.
This method filters down from broad, big goals and dreams into actionable, everyday steps. What starts as a more traditional manifestation journaling session trickles down into the mini “journals” that you create every single day, and that is why this manifestation technique works: It provides you with a streamlined system for showing up as your highest self in everyday moments.
Tori DeSimone’s “Life Pie” Method:
Step 1: The Future-Self Letter
The first step to Tori’s manifestation technique is something that anyone who has ever done a manifestation journaling session in the past will likely be familiar with, and that is a detailed letter to your future self. On her podcast, Tori recommends writing a letter to yourself one year in the future, but you can choose any increment of time that works for you. Like any future-self letter, this journal entry should be incredibly detailed. What is the first thing that your future self does when she wakes up in the morning? Where does she wake up? What does she eat for breakfast? What is her wardrobe like? What does she do for a living? How does she show up in her personal relationships? It’s impossible to dream too big here, so let your imagination run wild as to all of the amazing things that you are capable of bringing into your life within a single year.
Step 2: Highlighting Your Priorities
Once you have allowed yourself to tap into that imagination about all of the good things that are possible for you, it’s time to systematically turn that into action steps. In Tori’s method, once you have finished your letter, take a few different colored highlighters and highlight the priorities that come up multiple times throughout the letter.
For example, there might be a few separate times in your letter when you mention your future self doing things related to health and wellness; maybe she takes vitamins and supplements right when she wakes up, goes on a long walk in the morning, and avoids screens before bed at night. Anything related to health and wellness in the letter gets highlighted in one color. Likewise, anything related to career, finance, or personal relationships gets highlighted in their own color as well.
As you read back over your future-self letter, your priorities will start to leap off of the page. It’s like treasure hunting: You will slowly start to make note of things that mean a lot to your future self. For example, in the letter that I wrote to my October self back in late April using this method, I noticed that I mentioned meeting up with friends several times throughout the letter. The more these instances jumped out at me, the easier it became for me to recognize social life as one of my personal priorities. Tori recommends settling on five or six categories of priorities to seek out in your future-self letter, but you can certainly do more or less depending on what you envisioned for yourself.
Step 3: The Life Pie
Numbers and data people, this is your time to shine. Once you have chosen your priorities and highlighted each time they are mentioned in your future-self letter, go through and count each time you wrote something down in each priority. For example, in one of my past journaling sessions, I counted 11 mentions of physical health, five mentions of mental health, eight mentions of social life, five mentions of love life, seven mentions of finances, and eight mentions of career. You get a numerical breakdown of your personal priorities; these numbers are going to show you exactly how much of your time, energy, and attention to devote to each of these priorities over the next several months.
This step includes the part of Tori’s manifestation method that has been the most life-changing for me: the creation of the “life pie.” Once you have counted your priorities, you can convert them into percentages, and voila—you can draw out a pie chart, elementary-school style, that visually shows you how much each of these priorities ought to be weighted in your day-to-day life over the next year. So, for instance, my 11 mentions of physical health priorities in my future-self letter translate to 25% of my life pie. My 8 mentions of career priorities translate to 18% of my life pie, and so on. By the time you have completed this step, you will be left with a visual representation of the things you know you want to prioritize in the days ahead, all in a neat little pie chart.
Step 4: Goal Setting and To-Do List Writing
I’ll be honest—this is the point in the process where I need to take a stretch break. This method is by no means a quick fix, but in my opinion, that’s why it works. The detail and effort that goes into systemizing your aspirations is what allows you to become aligned with your highest self.
Once you have finished your life pie (and grabbed a fresh cup of coffee), sit down and write out one goal per priority over the course of a few different increments of time. In her method, Tori recommends increments of five years, three years, one year, six months, one month, one week, and today; however, you can adapt these timelines to whatever works best for you. The important thing is that you are whittling down what may have felt like a huge aspiration when you jotted it down in your future-self letter into a single actionable step that you could do today.
Finally, your daily to-do list is where the magic happens with this manifestation method. Each day, you can flip back to your life pie and try to balance your daily goals around those numbers. Of course, my to-do list and daily schedule are never perfectly divided among the weighted sections of my life pie, but knowing that it is there helps guide me each and every day, eliminating decision fatigue and automatically putting me on the path to becoming the version of myself that I wrote about in my letter.
Rinse & Repeat
And just like that, you have a guiding light for writing your to-do list every single day! Luckily for digital-planning lovers, you can find this method easily laid out for you in Tori DeSimone’s Daily Manifest Planner (below), but writing it down in your own journal and planner works just as well. Personally, I love to simply keep my journal flipped open to the page with my life pie whenever I am sitting down to create my to-do list in the morning. In the past several months since using this method, manifestation has become something I feel that I can truly access on a regular basis. By rinsing and repeating this process every few months, you can tap into your highest self every single day—and isn’t that exactly the point of manifestation, after all?
