What do you want from life?

This tool, known as the Nirvana Letter, is designed to provide you with clarity to two key questions that we all ask ourselves:

• What do I want from life?
• What’s it all about?

We all seem to have a vague notion of what we want in life yet many of us find it hard to break it down into a succinct description. This tool is designed to help with that problem.

How to write the Nirvana Letter

The idea is to write a letter to someone you totally trust from the vantage point of a number of years in the future: 10, 15 or 20 years – or even longer.

Imagine that you are looking back to the present and that in the interim you have lived a perfect life. You are to recount all that you achieved, the sort of life that you have led and to describe the professional and personal goals you have attained. Keep this within the bounds of reality. For example, if you have made £10 million 15 years from now, you have done so through work and not by winning the lottery!

Start by describing where you are while writing the letter and the date in the future on which you are writing it. Then, as if you were counting backwards to the present, describe the events that led you to where you are. As you look back over your life to the present date, outline the major milestones you see.

Why is it a useful tool?

This is a very powerful exercise. Once you have finished the letter you will realise that it has taken the form of a road map from the present to the future – but, of course, in reverse.

We are naturally accustomed to contemplating the future from the present. But this makes our dreams and desires appear distant, sometimes a little vague and unrealistic, and by consequence unattainable.

However, when you ask someone to imagine that their dreams have already become a reality by doing the dreaming in reverse, by imagining that future has already arrived, the wish list begins to have substance. This encourages us to regard them as achievable, engendering the belief of I can = I will.

Since the Nirvana Letter requires the steps along the way to be identified, it becomes a genuine road map to the ideal future. It will help to clearly define what is important to you and what core values you hold. It helps delineate the differences between what we have and what we seek. It thus helps us define what we want and what we need to do in order to get it.

What revelations will be in yours? Let your imagination open you up to the possibilities of all your potential, of all you are capable of being.

Nirvana Letter Example

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