So you decide you want a white Range Rover, and all of a sudden you start seeing them everywhere: at the park, on your street, even in your Instagram feed. Those cars were always there, and your brain just wasn’t showing them to you before you decided you wanted one.
Which makes me wonder… if your brain can hide a car you pass every single day, what else is it hiding? Maybe it’s the client who’s ready to buy, the opportunity sitting in your inbox, or the shot you’re a little too scared to take, so you quietly look past it. In this post I’m walking you through what’s actually happening in your brain when you start “seeing signs,” the research that explains it, and three ChatGPT prompts (they work in Claude or your AI tool of choice too) that help you point your filter at the thing you’re manifesting.
If you’d rather watch than read, the full video is right here:
Your brain shows you what you’ve told it to look for
The part of your brain that decides what you notice is your attention, and it runs on whatever you’re looking for. Scientists call this goal-directed attention, which just means your goals decide what your brain lets through.
Say you’re meeting your friend for lunch. You walk into the restaurant and scan dozens and dozens of people until you spot her. Because your brain knew exactly who you were looking for, it quietly filtered out everyone else in the room. That’s the same thing that happens with the white Range Rover. Once you decide you want one, it becomes something your brain is looking for, so it starts letting them through.
The invisible gorilla (and the 83% of doctors who missed one)
There’s a very famous study that shows this, called the Invisible Gorilla study (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Researchers had people watch a video of a group passing a basketball, and their only job was to count the passes. Halfway through, a person in a full gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the game, and about half of the people never saw the gorilla.
They were looking directly at the screen and doing exactly what they were told, and that’s exactly why they missed it. They were so focused on counting passes that their brains filtered out everything else, including a literal gorilla.
And then there are the doctors. In 2013, researchers took a group of expert radiologists (the doctors who read lung scans for a living) and drew a tiny gorilla into the scans they were reviewing. 83% of them missed it, and the eye tracking showed that most of them looked directly at it (Drew, Vo & Wolfe, 2013). They were searching those scans for signs of cancer, so signs of cancer were what their brains showed them.
What this means for you (and your inbox)
So for you, this means your brain is showing you exactly what you’ve told it to look for. Let’s say you’re a business owner like me and you want more clients, but every single morning you open your inbox bracing for bad news: the refund request, the complaint, the prospect who ghosted you. We’ve all been there. If that’s what you’re waiting for, what do you think your brain is going to show you that day?
You know the saying “what you see is what you get”? That’s the real meaning behind the idea that your brain filters your reality. Your goals shape what you notice, so you get to set them on purpose.
How my own filter got set to “more”
I’ll tell you how this showed up for me. At one point I had a marketing agency with 20+ clients at a time. And it’s funny, because I originally started that business because I wanted time freedom and I wanted to travel and see the world.
Somewhere along the way, I felt like I had to keep proving myself, so my filter got set to more clients, more money, more success and more proof. Something inside me kept saying it wasn’t enough, so I kept chasing more and more without ever tuning into myself and asking what I actually wanted in the end. And when your filter is set to more, you find more. Every time I’ve turned on my scaling brain and said “okay, I’m going to get more clients,” I’ve had more clients within a week or two.
That part is actually helpful to know if you’re looking for clients right now, because if they haven’t been showing up, there’s a chance you need to switch your brain on to look for those opportunities. In that season of my business, though, it wasn’t ideal. I said yes to every opportunity and every client, even the ones who weren’t aligned, even the toxic ones, and even the ones who didn’t respect me.
That’s how I ended up traveling to all these beautiful places (Thailand, Spain, Costa Rica) without the time freedom to actually enjoy them. I was in gorgeous parts of Spain like the Canary Islands and Valencia, and I saw cool stuff, but there was so much more I could have done if I’d honored my desire for time freedom in my business. The irony is that location freedom was the thing I said I wanted most when I started, and once I had it, it was right in front of me and I couldn’t see it, because my brain wasn’t filtering for it. Like the people in the basketball study, I was so busy counting passes that I missed the gorilla.
If you’re reading this and realizing your own filter has been pointed at the wrong thing for a while, my free Manifest with ChatGPT workbook has a whole evidence stack built for retraining it.
Noticing is a skill you can build
Some people say manifesting is just noticing, and I agree with them. I’d also add that noticing is a skill you build over time, and it follows whatever you’ve trained it on. So the next question is how you train it, and that’s the part a lot of manifestation content skips.
Why Visualizing Alone Can Backfire
A psychologist named Gabriele Oettingen has studied dreaming about the future for decades, and what she found makes a lot of us manifestation girlies a little uncomfortable. Just visualizing your dream life can actually drain your motivation when it isn’t paired with action or a framework for taking action. In one set of her experiments, people who spent time on a positive fantasy about the future felt less energized afterward (Kappes & Oettingen, 2011). The visualization scratches that itch in your brain, so you don’t feel the same pull to go get it the next day.
It’s like planning a vacation on Pinterest, from the destinations down to the activities and the outfits. It feels so good in the moment, and then you never actually book the flights, because somewhere in your brain the planning already gave you a little bit of the experience you wanted from the trip. I think that’s kind of sad, because we’re meant to get out of our heads and experience the 3D, right?
The WOOP method: wish, outcome, obstacle, plan
What works better is pairing the dream with the obstacle. Oettingen turned this into a framework called WOOP, which stands for wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. First you picture the wish and the best outcome. Then you name the thing that’s most likely to get in your way, and then you make a plan for it. When researchers later pooled 21 WOOP studies, it gave people a small to medium boost toward their goals (Wang, Wang & Gai, 2021).
Here’s what that could sound like for the vacation (this one’s an example, so swap in your own):
- Wish: go to Costa Rica in March.
- Outcome: come home actually feeling rested.
- Obstacle: you keep putting the trip off because you feel guilty spending the money.
- Plan: when your Friday paycheck lands, you book the flights before you do anything else, before drinks with your friends, new clothes or anything else that’s lower stakes than this trip.
If-Then Plans Tell Your Brain What to Look For
That last part, the plan, has some of the strongest research behind it. It’s called an if-then plan: if this happens, then I’ll do that. A big review of 94 studies found that people who wrote their goals as if-then plans were noticeably more likely to reach them than people who just wrote the goal down the basic way (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).
And I promise I’ll stop talking about this gorilla eventually, but it ties right back in here, because the “if” tells your brain exactly what to look for. Say you want more clients, and your if-then plan is “If someone asks what I do, then I’ll tell them about my offer.” You just gave your attention something to watch for. Now you’ll notice that moment when it shows up, instead of realizing three days later that someone asked you what you do at a dinner party and you missed the perfect chance to tell them about your offer.
3 ChatGPT prompts to train your brain to notice opportunities
Here’s how to go deeper on this with AI. I always say AI is a mirror, which means the response you get comes from your own thinking, and ChatGPT is just helping you organize your thoughts. I’m a big believer in using this technology to improve our lives and careers (let’s use AI for good… LOL).
Copy and paste these into ChatGPT one at a time, in the same chat, and fill in the parts in brackets.
Prompt 1: Set your filter (do this once)
Here’s something I want to call into my life in the next 90 days: [your desire, as specific as you can]. Before you give me any advice, ask me five clarifying questions, one at a time, and wait for my answer before asking the next one. Then use my answers to make me a noticing list: five specific things I would expect to start seeing, hearing, or being offered in my everyday life if I were on track. Make them concrete, like a type of conversation, a type of message, or a type of opportunity.
The noticing list becomes your new filter. You’re telling your brain what a gorilla looks like, so you know it’s a gorilla when you see it. If you want more clients, your list might include someone asking who you’d recommend (that’s your cue to recommend yourself), or a past client engaging with you by sending an email or replying to your story, which opens the door to a conversation.
Prompt 2: WOOP it
Now walk me through the WOOP framework by Gabriele Oettingen for this desire. Help me say the wish in one sentence and the best outcome in one sentence. Then help me name the main obstacle inside me (something I do or believe). Then write three if-then plans in this format: If [situation], then I will [an action that takes under 15 minutes].
Be honest about the obstacle. For me, it was saying yes to everything, and that’s what got me into some hot water. For you, it might be undercharging, hiding when it’s time to post something, not showing up as your full self online, or overthinking a situation until the moment passes instead of doing the scary thing.
Prompt 3: The 2-minute nightly check-in
Here’s what happened today: [paste your notes or a voice transcript]. Which of these connect to my desire or my noticing list? What did I almost miss? Give me one if-then plan for tomorrow.
This is the one that turns the whole framework into a habit you can take action on, and you can use it every day or as many days as you want. It takes about two minutes, so you can do it during something mundane like your skincare, and it trains your brain to go back and look for the evidence. There’s research behind this kind of nightly reflection too. In a well-known study, people who wrote down three good things that happened each night for a week felt happier for months afterward, especially the ones who kept doing it on their own (Seligman et al., 2005). We’re borrowing that idea and pointing it at your goal.
How to set your filter this week
Here’s the simple version of the routine:
- 1) Run prompt 1 once and save your noticing list somewhere you’ll actually see it, like your notes app or a ChatGPT project.
- 2) Run prompt 2 right after it, in the same chat, so your obstacle and if-then plans are built on your real answers.
- 3) Send prompt 3 every night for two minutes, ideally before you open social media.
Check in with yourself for two minutes every night. You should be doing that anyway to stay grounded and present, and this is just your reminder to do it instead of scrolling for two hours before bed.
Get the free Manifest with ChatGPT workbook
If you love these prompts, you’re going to love my free workbook, Manifest with ChatGPT. My manifestation process has changed a lot in the last couple of years, so I updated it and made it brand new, and it picks up right where this post leaves off. The evidence stack inside is the one I’d use to train your brain filter, since it’s all about training yourself to look for the evidence.
Here’s what’s inside:
- The setup prompt that tells ChatGPT who you are and what you’re calling in, so it stops handing you generic answers.
- My 5-part prompt formula, so you can write your own prompts (like a custom noticing list prompt) that sound like you.
- 6 prompt stacks for desire, belief, evidence, identity leaks, behavior and feedback. The identity leaks stack goes even deeper on the obstacle step from prompt 2.
- A follow-up toolkit for when ChatGPT’s first answer isn’t quite it.
- Notes pages so your noticing list, if-then plans and nightly check-ins live in one place.
It’s free forever. Pop your email in below and it’s yours.
FAQ
1) How do you train your brain to notice opportunities?
Tell it exactly what to look for. Write down what you’re calling in, make a noticing list of the specific conversations, messages and opportunities you’d expect to see if you were on track, name the obstacle inside you, and write if-then plans for it. Then spend two minutes each night looking back at your day for anything that connects to that list.
2) Why do I suddenly see something everywhere once I decide I want it?
That’s goal-directed attention. Your goals decide what your brain lets through, so once you decide you want something, it becomes something your brain is looking for. The white Range Rovers were always on the road, and your brain just started showing them to you.
3) What is the invisible gorilla study?
It’s a famous attention study where people watched a video of a group passing a basketball and counted the passes. About half of them never noticed a person in a gorilla suit who walked through the middle of the game, because they were so focused on counting. In a 2013 follow-up with expert radiologists, 83% missed a tiny gorilla drawn into the lung scans they were reading.
4) What does WOOP stand for?
WOOP stands for wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. It’s a framework from psychologist Gabriele Oettingen: you picture your wish and the best outcome, name the obstacle inside you that’s most likely to get in the way, and make a plan for it, usually as an if-then plan.
5) Can visualizing your dream life make you less motivated?
It can if visualizing is the only thing you do. Oettingen’s research found that people who spent time on a positive fantasy about the future felt less energized afterward, and pairing the dream with the obstacle and a plan worked better.
6) What is an if-then plan?
An if-then plan names the exact moment you’ll take an action, like “If someone asks what I do, then I’ll tell them about my offer.” A review of 94 studies found that people who wrote goals this way were noticeably more likely to reach them than people who only set the goal.
Here’s what I want you to take away…
Your brain is always filtering, and it filters for whatever you’ve told it matters. When you’re calm, grounded, present and clear on your desires, you train it to find the right things. When you’re caught up in overthinking and anxious thoughts, or you’ve been saying you want something (the money, the life, the business) while scanning for proof that it isn’t working, you’re training it to look for the wrong thing.
The good news is that you get to train it in the other direction. Write the noticing list, name the obstacle, make your if-then plans and check in with yourself for two minutes every night. That’s how you start becoming the woman who sees the opportunity as soon as it shows up.
Tell me what you’re setting your filter to
I’d love to know the one thing you’re setting your filter to this week. DM me on Instagram at @samanthaleewarren and tell me, because I’m so excited to see what you’re calling in. 💙
And if you want to set your filter tonight, grab my free Manifest with ChatGPT workbook. It goes deeper than the filter, with lots of prompt stacks for you to try.
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