One Unconventional Letter You Can’t Afford NOT To Write
Forget the vision board. The single tool that changed everything for me was a manifestation letter, and I still write one every single year.
I don’t believe in Goal Setting…
I’m not saying SMART goals aren’t smart, but they are kind of ho-hum, don’t you think?
Plus I think they are part of the reason that many of us abandon those New Years resolutions or long-term to-do lists or even year long targets and fall off the results focussed bandwagon.
Well, maybe not for everyone, but for many of us…
I think the real secret is ‘emotive buy-in‘ and I learnt this on 24/3/2010.
After all, in most circumstances we are actually selling ourselves on outcomes that impact our identity and just like any sale, we buy those outcomes on emotion and back it up with logic. Yeah?
So when you think about the process of goal setting – do you view it through the lens of emotion or logic – activity or identity?
The reason why I’m not a big fan of goal setting, per se, is because it is typically logical and leftbrain… it’s process-driven, systematic and it takes you from where you are now into the future – easily abandonable!
So what if you went right brain instead – played a game, started with emotion and worked your way back to logic from the future – easily sustainable!
When I engaged my very first coach, she asked me to do a project for homework. She asked me to write a ‘manifestion letter’ and I’m like, ‘what the heck is a manifestation letter? Am I going down some woo-woo path?‘ and she laughed.
‘Take a trip into the future – 12 months – and write a letter to someone you haven’t seen for the past 12 months (which is really the next 12 months) and tell them what you have done, what you have achieved, who you have met, who you’ve become – and in every area of your life‘ she encouraged.
So being the good student that I am – I promptly sat down and did my homework.
The next morning at 8.45am I’m getting my son’s lunch ready for school and the phone rings. My husband, Tim, answers the phone and brings it into the kitchen, whispering ‘It’s a guy with an American accent‘.
So, I take the phone, say ‘hello‘ and realise it was Steve Becker – the sales consultant from Tony Robbins who signed me up to coaching. I was confused as to why he would be ringing and he explained to me that Tony was looking for 20 coaches globally.
My coach, Cynthia had put my name forward because of my coachability and the momentum I was creating in my own life coming off the back of illness and bankruptcy and figured I would be a perfect fit for a high performance coaching role.
Not believing the synchonicity, I suggested Steve ‘walk with me’ as I virtually led him and my phone into the office where my ‘manifestation letter’ was pinned to the wall.
The last two lines just happened to read….
And so a sliding doors moment was created and after jumping through a few hoops I was bought on as one of only 16 coaches globally to represent the APAC region for Anthony Robbins – leading me to many more opportunities and where I am today!
The power in manifesting your outcomes can only come about when the decisions you make are from the person you most want to become – the future you!
But most of us make decisions from who we were in the past with all our baggage and beliefs that don’t serve us and therefore limit those opportunities.
And so tapping into your child-like imagination and writing a story kicks off the part of your brain that looks for patterns and you begin to find those opportunities. (How that happens is a story for another time).
So my encouragement to you is that you do the same homework – take a trip into the future and write a letter to yourself about ANY area of your life as though it has already happened. Let science, your brain and biology do the rest by pulling those opportunities to you instead of feeling you have to push and work harder to get those opportunities.
And on that note, go get ’em!
Stay Bold, Brave and Brilliant!
What Makes a Manifestation Letter Work
A manifestation letter works because it tricks your brain into feeling the outcome before you’ve earned it. Unlike a goal, a manifestation letter is written in the past tense, as if the year has already happened – and that small shift in language is what makes a manifestation letter so much stickier than a bullet-pointed list of targets.
I still pull out my old manifestation letters every January before writing a new one, just to see how much of each manifestation letter actually came true. It’s usually more than I expect.
Writing Your Own Manifestation Letter
If you’d like to try writing your own manifestation letter, or bring this exercise into your team’s goal-setting process, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations cover exactly this kind of emotive, identity-driven approach to setting a course for the year ahead.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
