Sending an email from the future

by Mervin Straughan
January 2020

Sending an email to our future self might seem an amusing diversion but it's also a useful life coaching tool for achieving our goals.

If we received a message from our past self, would we measure up to the self to which we'd aspired?

There are email services providing this facility. At the time of publishing this article, one reported hundreds of thousands of messages and rising.

Sending such an email chimes with Steven Covey's "start with the end in mind" – one of his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – and is a great start to the personal development coaching process.

So our personal development coaching lesson is about beginning with how we want our life to be, then working backwards, identifying goals and creating the plans to make them a reality.

• Check out Mervin's pocket-sized self-coaching book Imagine Life As Three Bus Journeys. Printed by Lightning Source, it's available for £9.99 in the UK and $11.99 in the US. Retailers include Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.