Ask a founder how they made their biggest call this year, and most will walk you through the numbers — the market size, the runway, the term sheet. Ask what they did the morning of, and you’ll sometimes get a different answer: a candle lit before the call, a walk around the block to clear the head, a specific playlist, a folder of images taped inside a desk drawer that no investor has ever seen. Manifestation and ritual have quietly become part of how a lot of Filipino business leaders prepare for the moments that matter — not instead of strategy, but underneath it.
Ritual Isn’t Superstition — It’s Measurable
Harvard Business School researcher Francesca Gino has spent years studying what a ritual actually does to performance under pressure. In a set of experiments she ran with Michael Norton, people who performed a simple ritual before a high-stakes task — a karaoke performance, a timed math test, a negotiation — consistently performed better and reported less anxiety than people who skipped it, even when the ritual had no logical connection to the task itself. The ritual wasn’t luck. It was doing real psychological work: giving the brain a sense of control in a moment that otherwise has none.
In follow-up studies, Gino found the effect held even when people knew, consciously, that the ritual had no causal link to the outcome — the ritual worked on the anxiety, not on the universe. For a founder, that’s permission: it doesn’t matter whether the ritual is provably connected to the result. What matters is that it lowers the noise enough to let good judgment through.
That’s the part worth sitting with. A founder walking into a fundraising pitch, a product launch, or a make-or-break negotiation is stepping into exactly the kind of uncertainty Gino’s research points to. The ritual — whatever form it takes — is what steadies the system before the system gets tested.
Manifestation Isn’t Wishing When It’s Built Like a Plan
Manifestation gets dismissed by people who’ve only seen the version that stops at a vision board and a hope. But psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, who has spent decades studying what she calls mental contrasting, found something more specific: people who vividly picture a desired outcome and then name the real obstacle standing between them and it — building a plan around that obstacle — follow through at meaningfully higher rates than people who only picture the win.
That’s the same shape a well-built founder ritual takes, whether the person running it calls it manifestation or calls it prep. You hold a clear picture of the outcome. You name what’s actually in the way. You do something physical and repeatable that marks the moment you’re committing to closing that gap. The ritual isn’t the whole plan — it’s the part that gets your nervous system to agree with your spreadsheet.
A Practice Filipino Business Has Never Really Left
None of this is new to Filipino business culture — it’s just being renamed. Walk into an older Manila store on its opening day and you’ll likely find a specific auspicious date chosen for the launch, feng shui placement considered for the cash register and the door, red envelopes exchanged with the first customers, a small money tree by the register for prosperity. Chinese-Filipino business families have run this playbook for generations, long before “manifestation” became a word on an office whiteboard.
What’s changed is who’s doing it. Younger founders, tech operators, and executives with MBAs are adopting the same instinct their lolas had — just with different language, and a lot less embarrassment about naming it out loud in a pitch deck or a podcast.
Building a Ritual That Actually Holds Up
A ritual works better when it has a physical anchor — something you hold, place, or return to, rather than something you only think. That’s a big part of why orgonite and resonators have found their way onto so many founders’ desks: a small, tangible object that marks the start of a focused block, or sits in view during a high-stakes call, gives a ritual a consistency that a mental habit alone struggles to hold onto.
A resonator on the desk during a morning planning session. A small piece of orgonite in the bag before walking into a negotiation. A five-minute ritual before opening the laptop on launch day. None of it needs to be elaborate to work — Gino’s research used candles and karaoke, not incense and hour-long ceremonies. What matters is that it’s repeatable, physical, and yours.
At Resonance PH, this is also where the work goes beyond a product. Founders and business leaders who want a guided version of this — a manifestation practice built around a real decision, or spiritual protection before a season that actually needs it — work directly with the spiritual healers in our network, the same way they’d bring in an advisor for anything else load-bearing in the business.
None of this replaces the plan. It sits underneath it — the part that gets a founder into the room steady enough to run the plan well.