Create Your Best Life In 2024

Dear Friend,

Tomorrow represents the dawn of a new year. Whether you love it or hate it, 2024 will be here.

Many of us eagerly anticipate the new year for a fresh start. Out with the old, in with the new. 

If 2023 sucked, you can finally turn the page.

If 2023 was a great year for you (as it was for me), you might wonder if next year will bring as much joy or growth.

But even though a new year begins tomorrow, I’m here to share a secret with you:

You don’t need to wait for the calendar to flip to change your life.

You can change the trajectory of your life any day you want.

In fact, you can do it right now.

That’s what I want to focus on in today’s newsletter.

A few issues ago, I shared the importance of becoming “A SNACK” in order to achieve modern-day enlightenment. 

Once we see we are “A SNACK,” we can finally live our lives from a place of self-love and non-attachment to things outside of us. This lets us live as our most compassionate and kind selves. It’s my firm belief that this is what the world needs right now.

While I have a lot more to say about self-love (and even self-acceptance), I want to talk about one of the profound benefits of self-love with you today. 

This benefit of loving yourself is realizing that you can become anything you want to be. 

And you can do this now.

Change begins with your mindset

At the end of August, I made a major investment in myself.

After years of not feeling lean enough, I decided to work with a gay men’s fitness coach to build the body I’ve always wanted. I wanted to be confident in my body and stop feeling self-conscious about it.

I had a bit of a sticker shock when my coach told me how much it would cost to work with him for 10 weeks, especially since our work together would be 100% virtual.

But, after years of diligent saving and investing, I cashed in on myself to make my dreams a reality. 

Over three months later, I’m a completely different person. Not only physically, but mentally as well. 

I launched this newsletter, began my coaching journey, embraced wonderful dating connections, and even ran in a Santa Speedo Run.

But before I got my calories and macronutrients in check and started my new workout routine at the gym, I was making even more powerful changes. 

The first powerful change was with my mindset.

My coach had me write exactly how I wanted to look and feel in my body over the next few months.

This included what I was wearing, where I was, who I was with, and how I felt. 

Once I’d written this affirmation, my coach encouraged me to read it aloud every morning and evening.

At first, it seemed crazy to me. How could writing that I can see my abs actually help me make my abs visible? Saying I’d be confident wearing a Speedo was a lot different from actually feeling that confidence. 

But I trusted the process, put in the work at the gym and in getting my nutrition right, and achieved a monumental result in just 3 months. I lost about 20 pounds, over 4% body fat, and finally had visible abs. 

The affirmations I wrote became my reality. 

I’m seeing similar results in my dating life and expect to with my coaching business soon.

The reason this works is because affirmations are shown to help you change the way you think and feel about yourself. 

Affirmations can help you shift negative thoughts into positive ones and increase self-esteem and motivation. Studies have also shown that affirmations can help with behavior change, increase your sense of self, and help you perform under stress.

These affirmations should be short, powerful statements or phrases. Think, “I am enough” or “I am worthy of love just as I am” if you want to show yourself more self-love.

If you repeat these affirmations every morning when you wake up and every evening before you go to bed, you’ll start to believe that you can be these very things you are saying. 

Your unconscious will want to make the changes necessary to make sure you feel you’re enough or worthy of love, just as you are.

Pure positive thinking isn’t the only thing you need to realize you can change your life at any time. But it’s a great way to establish a positive mindset that is capable of big changes.

What if you were God?

The idea that you can create your own reality doesn’t just extend to affirmations.

Earlier this year, I read the legendary modern-day philosopher Alan Watts’ The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. 

Through his provocative storytelling, Watts introduced a myth that was illustrated in the Vedas. Watts explains how our universe came to be through God hiding himself in all beings.

Of course, God doesn’t have to be a “he.” You can think of God as a “she” or “it” or “they” or however you’d like. 

According to this Vedic myth, God likes to play hide-and-seek.

But since there is nothing but God in the universe, he plays this game alone.

He hides part of himself in every rock, animal, plant, and human on the planet. This goes on so long that God forgets who he really is.

This is the fun part, though, because it’s always more fun when you take longer to find someone in a game of hide-and-seek.

God doesn’t want to find himself too fast to ruin the game. Which is why we take so long to realize a pivotal truth:

We are God in disguise.

If you grew up following a major religion like Christianity, this thought sounds preposterous.

After all, how can we each be God? Isn’t there one God that we must bow to and seek forgiveness from?

These beliefs are how we view ourselves as “separate.”

The myth Watts shares comes from the Upanishads, a collection of teachings from ancient India.

They reveal that God isn’t some monarch who rules the world from above. Instead, God is “underneath” rather than “above” everything, and interacts with the world from the inside.

The Hindus understood no one could realize they were God in disguise without acknowledging everyone else was, too.

This foundation allows us to see through the cracks of the ego and separate self that we feel daily in the West.

Watts explains how we aren’t this separate ego that we’ve come to believe we are.

Rather, we are part of one experience, one essence.

While this thought can seem limiting, in reality, it is incredibly liberating.

Not only are we much more likely to live a more compassionate life toward others, but we can realize that if we are like God, we can create any type of life we want.

We can build the body. Form the relationships. Create the business or career we dream of.

With Alan Watts and the wisdom of the Upanishads as a guide, we see that each of us has the potential for change and to build the best version of our lives that we can.

Making change happen

Alright, so now you understand the power of your mindset around transformation. And you might be crazy enough to think of yourself as having God-like qualities. 

Armed with this knowledge, it’s time to make change happen in your life in 2024. 

Here’s how you can get started with meaningful change:

1. Pick one area of your life you want to change

Don’t pick 2 or 3 or 10. If you’ve had trouble sticking with New Year’s Resolutions in the past, pick just ONE area of your life that you want to focus on. 

Is it your health? Your relationships? Handling your emotions?

I may be biased, but I think a daily meditation habit is a great way to gain awareness of what changes you need to make first. 

Let’s pretend you want to get your health & fitness on track and go from there in this example.

2. Reflection 

Take the time to think through (and write down) answers to these questions related to health & fitness (or your goal of choice).

1. What has held you back from achieving what you want?

2. Have you felt like you were on the right track before, only to go back to bad habits?

3. What helped you achieve results in this area before? What didn’t work for you?

4. If you haven’t had any success in this area before, who or what can you turn to for help? There’s probably someone you know that has achieved what you want to achieve. What advice can they give you?

5. Why do you want these results in the first place? What’s the deeper meaning behind your desired transformation?
   

The purpose of reflection is to understand why you want to make these changes. You’ll also want to reflect on changes you’ve made before that can help you get closer to your desired result.

3. Build a rock-solid mindset

Once you know your why, it’s time to build a mindset strong enough to see your desired changes through.

If you want to lose 10 pounds, you need to think more about what someone who is 10 pounds lighter would do, and not what the current or previous version of you would do.

For me, this is why it was so important to write daily affirmations and string them together into a story of the fit and lean person I wanted to become. 

Write out several short phrases that will help get your unconscious moving in the direction of where you want to be.

Here are some phrases I wrote about health & fitness that you can use as inspiration:

• I am the leanest I’ve ever been

• I have a sexy, toned, and fit body and can finally see my abs for the first time

• I am eating healthy, delicious, and nutritious foods that serve my body

• I look forward to my workouts because they make me feel powerful 

Writing the affirmations isn’t enough if you don’t repeat them or believe you can actually build the life you want. 

Remember the Vedic idea that part of God lives within you. The human experience is truly fascinating, and is full of change. 

Remember that you can change your life for the better because you have the ability for creation within you.

4. Execute the habits daily

After building up your mindset and repeating your affirmations daily, it’s all about execution.

That means signing up for a gym membership and counting your calories and macronutrients if you want to see results in health & fitness.

It might mean hiring a coach to support your goals and keep you accountable. 

If your affirmations are well written, you’ll slowly realize what changes you need to make to achieve a different result. 

You may not get everything perfect at first. But by slowly changing your habits daily, your results will compound. Just stick with the process and measure your results along the way. 

It will be hard, but if the goal is important enough to you, it’s worth doing.

If you need some inspiration, I wrote a poem that will hopefully inspire you to keep going.

New Year, New You

If you’ve been waiting to make change happen, I hope you see you can start right now. 

With the power of positive affirmations and the belief that you are like God, you can achieve anything.

If you stumble at first and need a reminder that you can be anything you want, come back here. All the steps will be waiting.

I look forward to hearing all about the wonderful changes you make this year. Let me know if I can help!

Much love,

Spenser

P.S. I’d love to know more about you, my dear reader. Let me know what you’re struggling with in life or what you hope to get out of reading this newsletter by taking a short survey (I know, surveys suck, but I promise it won’t take more than 2 minutes; you can skip any question you want).

Or, better yet, just respond to this email and let me know :)