Francesca Amber started manifesting after her life fell apart during Covid. Photo / Getty Images
When her business collapsed, Francesca Amber turned to manifesting. Now she has a Penguin deal and hit podcast – so does it really work?
Manifesting, depending on your level of woo-tolerance, is either the key to unlocking life’s hidden riches, or the kind of TikTok trend best left to Californian influencers with crystal collections. The idea that you can “think your way” into a better bank balance, relationship or job can sound suspiciously like magical thinking, particularly to a British audience raised on cynicism, drizzle and overdrafts.
And yet, Francesca Amber, a 40-year-old single mother of three, chart-topping podcaster and now Penguin-published author, insists it works. “I took the tatters of my life and created something incredible using my mindset alone,” she tells me.
Four years ago, she had just bought a small village house near Lincoln, which she would stay in to Airbnb her London flat. “I was a single mum with my daughter in a one-bed flat in London. We shared a bed and a wardrobe, but life was good. I worked two days a week and Airbnb’d the flat [whenever we stayed in Lincoln].”
Then Covid happened. Her beauty business collapsed, leaving her with newborn twins Riva and Laveau, her toddler Bohemia and no money. “The salon closed. Every Airbnb booking evaporated. Within weeks, every income source had gone.” She bought a catering-size bag of pasta “so at least we could eat”. For three months, nothing.
The pivot that saved her was small and scrappy: she launched “manifestation boxes” to her nascent podcast audience, then a £10($23)-a-month self-development book club. “I wanted it to be accessible. In this industry people charge thousands; women like me can’t afford that.” Thousands joined. “That was the moment: Oh – this is my job now.”
It sounds like the stuff of self-help cliche. Yet today, Amber fronts Law of Attraction Changed My Life, runs an enormous self-development book club and tours the country with Manifest Like a Mother, a guide designed, she says, “for the chronically time-poor”. Less incense, more inbox.
Whether you believe in manifesting or not, Amber is persuasive company: matter-of-fact, Essex-funny, and frank about the less-Instagrammable bits. She does not present herself as a born optimist (“I’m not naturally positive – I’m naturally the most negative person,” she laughs), but as someone who had to learn to think differently. “My parents are the most negative people you’ll ever meet, bless them, and that rubbed off. People who love the podcast say it’s because it doesn’t come easily to me. I have to over-explain it and troubleshoot the doubts.”
Raised in Essex by divorced parents who drilled in a strong work ethic, Amber has always been, by her own admission, “addicted to work”. She bought her own horse at 12, paying £5 a week in field rent from £6 she earned collecting glasses at the pub and spending the remaining pound on chips.
After a stint as a legal secretary (she admits she was the “world’s worst employee”), she discovered her motivation by becoming self-employed – she opened a London beauty salon and became a go-to spray tanner for TV names. “I didn’t want to be a spray tanner, I wanted to be the best. Becoming self-employed, I started proving to myself, day by day, that I would show up. That changed what I believed I was worth, and what I could ask for.”
It’s that attitude that she wants to instil into others. But can she explain to the doubters what manifesting actually is?
“Consciously choosing what you want in your life,” she says. “Using your mindset to literally bring it into your reality.” For Amber, the penny dropped in the mid-2000s when she read Rhonda Byrne’s bestseller about the law of attraction, The Secret, and set about conjuring up her now ex-husband.
“I wanted to manifest a particular person, but I had no idea who he was,” she says. Pre-app online dating, she filtered for “six foot six and above” (“I have a height thing,” she grins) and got exactly one match: a very tall man in front of a yacht. “I thought, that’s my husband.” He never replied. “I even contacted Match to get his contact details but due to data protection they said absolutely not.”
So she printed his picture, hid it inside her wardrobe and got on with life. Two and a half years later, a friend set her up on a blind date. “It was him. Same photo on Facebook. Everyone told me not to say anything on the first date, but I did. Six months later we were engaged.”
They might no longer be together now, but she is frank about the part her ex-husband played. “He told me to quit the job I hated and do what I loved. That audacity to believe it could work – to buy a flat at 25, to own a salon, later to buy a second home as a single mum – that matters.”
When things fell apart – divorce, the pandemic – she learned to trust the pattern. “If something bad is happening, it’s because there’s something better coming and this needs to happen.”
Cynics might raise an eyebrow at all this, but at the root of the woo is some sensible life advice. So what are Amber’s top tips to change your life? Instead of rituals, she offers practical upgrades: dress for the day you want (even if you’re scrubbing the loo), align your diary with your goals, stop telling yourself money is inherently grubby, and work with – not against – your menstrual cycle. Her mantra is undeniably aimed at women, but there is no reason her principles can’t work for men, either.
Dress for the day you want to have (yes, even to clean)
There is a performative streak to manifesting that can look, to British eyes, a bit silly. Amber leans into it. “When you picture your most successful future self, she probably isn’t in bobbly leggings looking like a sack of… well.”
The shorthand is clothes: put on the outfit you’d wear in the life you’re working towards, even if the only person seeing it is the teenager and the dog. “It’s a way of telling the universe, and yourself, I’m ready.”
Make one symbolic upgrade
The same goes for houses. In the little Lincoln place she “hated”, she began acting as though it were her dream home. “I got the windows cleaned. Hired a gardener. Treated the space with respect.” The subtext is behave as the person you’re trying to become. None of it, she insists, was effortless. “Simple, but not easy.”
Use your phone as your cockpit
Far from encouraging us to put our phones down, Amber encourages us to use the fact we all look at our screens numerous times a day. The lock screen becomes a vision board so you can put the object of your dreams there. Using our calendar, meanwhile, becomes the method to achieve it.
“We look at our phones constantly, so if your lock screen is a vision board, your diary should reflect it,” she says. That means scheduling everything unglamorous – from admin to work deadlines – and carving out tiny pockets for yourself. You may, or may not, use this time for visualisation or breathwork, like Amber, or to meditate over a cup of tea. The trick is stealth: “No extra overwhelm. Use ten minutes you already have.”
Her most un-woo tool is music. “In the morning I ask the speaker to play songs about gratitude and we dance in the kitchen. At night we talk about the best thing that happened that day.” It’s not a journal; it’s a habit the children will tolerate. “Self-care that doesn’t require hiding from your kids.”
Work with your cycle, not against it
This, she acknowledges, is where sceptics arch an eyebrow. “Our world is built around a male circadian rhythm – steady energy, daily reset. Women don’t work like that. We have distinct phases,” she says. Pre-period (the luteal phase), energy dips and irritability spikes; around ovulation, energy and confidence peak.
“It’s about awareness. If I know I’m more outward and magnetic mid-cycle, I’ll plan the networking, the pitching and the live events then. In the luteal phase, I’ll focus on editing, admin and the home.” For women who are post-menopausal, she adds, the principle is the same: tune into your natural rhythms, whether they are monthly or simply seasonal, and work with them rather than against them. “Work with yourself. Life gets easier.”
Change your attitude to money
Ask her the least romantic thing she’s ever manifested and she points to a framed £50 note. “I had no money, but I wrote on it, ‘Thank you for all the money I’ve been given in my life’. Gratitude. I said, one day this will be framed and in the hallway of my dream house.” It is now – she moved a couple of years ago to a large detached house in Lincoln.
Is manifesting about being rich or being content? “Both can be true. But if you secretly believe money is evil, you won’t let yourself keep it. I’m a single mother in a sole-income household. If I make more, everything – travel, ease, fun – becomes possible.”
Develop the 10-minute habit
Pick one goal and one supporting action. Email the person. Book the class. Block the time. “I didn’t want to add tasks that make mums feel worse. No 5am club, no hour-long journalling. Tiny shifts that compound,” is what makes the difference, she says.
If some of this sounds suspiciously like… good old-fashioned discipline, she won’t argue. “I used to believe I wasn’t the kind of person who turns up on time. Now I am one of the most hard-working people I know. Every day I’m telling myself, through actions: I care about you; I want you to have an amazing life; I’m going to show up.” Is that manifesting or maturity? Perhaps both.
None of what Amber says proves the universe is rearranging itself on command. All of it, however, nudges you to behave as though your life is worth upgrading which, for many of us, is the bolder leap.
Amber’s central provocation is disarmingly practical: design your days as though your desires are legitimate. Dress a little better. Ask for a little more. Put the thing in the diary. And if you can’t quite bring yourself to thank the universe, thank yourself for turning up.
“Simple,” she says, “but not easy.” That, even a sceptic can concede, is the work.
Manifest Like a Mother by Francesca Amber is out now.