I thought manifesting was "woo-woo" - but it can realise your dreams'

Focusing on your goals can make them happen, celebrated hypnotherapist Paul McKenna tells Hannah Stephenson

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Self-help guru Paul McKenna was in the red when he first started manifesting in the early Eighties, while trying to get his hypnotic London theatre show off the ground. He cut out the red 'overdrawn' figure on his bank statement and glued in its place a new number, which said £77,000 in credit.

As he tried to manifest financial freedom, he also imagined walking out to perform to a full house, hearing the applause and feeling success.

A few weeks later he got the London theatre show which would kickstart his self-help career. Within months he was in credit beyond the £77,000, but only after he'd taken a photo of himself next to the 'House Full' sign at the theatre before a new run, pinning it on his fridge and repeatedly imagining what it would be like to play to a full house.

The self-help whizz, who has worked with stars including James Corden, Ellen DeGeneres and Simon Cowell, and has trained thousands of hypnotherapists, asserts that if you can visualise success and focus your energy on your goals, you can make them happen.

He has made a fortune promising to make people sleep, happy, rich, thin, positive or confident, selling more than 10 million books, with his work translated into 32 languages. He's keen that his latest book, Power Manifesting, dispels any myths surrounding the practice and aims to actively encourage people to visualise, focus on and realise their dreams. He's embarking on a UK and Ireland tour in March to spread the word.

He understands that the idea of manifesting, which he defines as 'imagining something and making it a reality', might seem what he calls 'woo-woo'. He's been manifesting longer than most: he discovered the idea when he was a DJ at Capital Radio in the Nineties, but felt he wasn't realising his potential. A colleague suggested he try manifesting, and he recalls one friend who was able to manifest parking spaces in central London time after time.