Picture yourself wearing a huge pair of sweatpants in Walmart with a hand full of groceries and then your pants come untied and fall down to your ankles without you wearing underwear! That’s the level of embarrassment I felt for not knowing this powerful concept that would soon change my life forever…
In 2016, I got hired as the Digital Marketing Manager for the largest wholesale real estate company in Arizona.
My role was to help the company grow by using my marketing expertise and skills by increasing conversions.
The job was very demanding, but I was doing what I loved.
Over time though, things drastically started to change…more on that in a bit.
It was 2016 I was introduced to a concept that would, later on, change my my life forever.
I remember sitting in a Monday morning meeting and my boss asked my coworkers and me if we had written our “January Letters”.
“Wait…what?”, I said.
“Your January Letter. Have you written it yet?”, he asked.
I gave a “deer in the headlights” look, then he began to explain: “Imagine you are a year in the future and you are looking back on all of the things in your life that you wanted to accomplish…and you accomplished them.
How To Start Your January Letter
“Write them all out in a letter addressed to yourself in great detail of what and how you accomplished them,” he said.
“So you can write about things like your relationship, health, spiritual, business, and money goals. Just make sure you are very detailed in how you accomplished each goal”, he said.
To give you an idea of how to start your letter, you can write something like,
“Wow, I can’t believe its 2021 already. I accomplished so much in 2020”.
Then you start to describe what you accomplished in each area of your life.
That evening I went home and wrote my first January letter. To be honest, I don’t remember much about that first letter I wrote because I didn’t follow through on one of the most important aspects of the whole concept…more on that later.
After I wrote my first letter, it would be more than two years later before I wrote another one.
The Struggle Of The Rat Race
Even though the job I had paid over six figures annually, there was still an issue….
I didn’t own it. I didn’t own my time or own the amount of money I could make. I had to get “permission” to take lunch breaks, vacations, etc. I had a daily 84-mile commute to the office. Traffic in Arizona sucks! I was miserable because I knew there was more of my knowledge and expertise to share with the world. I was trapped in a 9-5.
My boss would Slack me at 11 pm expecting me to respond right back. He would Slack me at 6 am sometimes to do work from home before I came into the office. Then there were the times that I had to do personal stuff for him like create cd covers for his daughter who is a singer.
I was doing all of this while I watched my coworkers get raises…even ones that had been there for less time than me. I had reached my breaking point. I couldn’t walk away just yet because I was still building my business. So what did I do? I did the next best thing…
The Moment Everything Changed
My wife had been grinding for years at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and I wanted to do something nice for her.
I decided that I was going to take her on a vacation to St. Lucia.
I pulled out all the stops. We had a roundtrip first-class flight and we stayed in a 3 story private villa overlooking the Caribbean Sea.
One day as we sat by our pool looking into the ocean, we both said, “We should live like this all the time”. As we meditated on that for a while, I told her about the January letter.
Two days later at the airport headed to Oklahoma for a family camping trip, we wrote our January letters.
Our lives would never be the same after that because I shared with her the second most important component that makes the January letter so effective.
The Most Critical Component Of The January Letter
You see, in order for the power of the January Letter to manifest, you need to read it at least three times a week. Why? Because your thoughts become action.
We started to notice the effects of continually reading our January letters within a few weeks. I had dropped a few pounds and she had finally started her Youtube channel. I had been getting higher ticket clients and she had people from all over the world wanting her medical knowledge.
The goals that you write in your January letter may not happen exactly like you described them, but they will happen the way they were meant to manifest.
What will you write in your January letter?