A Deep Dive on Our Most Impactful Coaching Tool

So what is a Someday Letter and why is it important? The short form is we teach people to write a letter to themselves in the future, at least 10 years in the future.

The whole point of it is to go way beyond where our current imagination extends.

Most of us are really good at setting annual goals.

We wanna go way beyond where our logic is engaged, and we wanna use calculators and numbers to look at our future and really cast a vision.

It's about giving ourselves permission to actually dream.

And that dream, when we do it properly, gives us tons and tons of clarity, and that clarity is what we harness in the present.

There's lots of research about how this works and why it works.

A lot of psychologists will call it temporal distancing.

It's our ability to get perspective by stepping out of ourselves.

It's kind of like if we gave advice to a young person in our life.

"Hey, imagine you're giving advice to your child or that favorite nephew." We get perspective on our own lives by stepping out of our bodies.

That's the magic of this.

It also gives us clarity, and it helps us organize our goals.

Now, in the One Thing concept, we latched onto it because we wanna work backwards from a vision instead of looking forwards.

If you look at your life going forwards, there is an infinite number of options for how you could choose to spend the next day.

The question we wanna answer is, how can I invest my time in alignment with the future I want? When we work backwards from a future goal, it's crazy how many fewer choices we have.

We're setting an annual goal that has to be in alignment with our five-year goals that should be in alignment with this future.

It takes a lot of options off the table, and that's the second benefit.

It keeps us from running in circles.

You've heard me talk in this podcast about one of the chapters we explored, but cut, The Low-Hanging Fruit Is A Lie.

If we're always chasing the next big gain, you can literally run in circles year after year and get no closer to the future you ultimately want.

Short-term gains are short-term gains.

We're trying to invest our times to get to the future we truly wanna create.

And those are not small gains.

When we have a Someday Letter with our core values as a compass, we can make great decisions day to day, and we will know, we'll have real evidence that we're investing our time appropriately to make that vision happen.