Remember this time last year when we were all super excited about 2020 and the whole “new decade” thing? Like most of you, I was full of enthusiasm for the year to come. In January I launched a new coaching program with a fresh vision about how coaching should work for salespeople. I had a solid outline for my first book and after a five year break from life as a traveling speaker, I felt compelled to get in front of a live audience again. Wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans, right? Or her. Has God posted pronouns on an Instagram profile yet?

Anyway, I have always had big dreams and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge limitations; call it the Capricorn way. But for a few months at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 it felt like everyone was thinking equally as big. Then life came along and handed us a big crap sandwich.

I suppose this shouldn’t have been a surprise. My astrologer had been discussing the energy of 2020 for quite a while, but astrology isn’t a crystal ball, so any guidance realized comes from going inside and quietly reflecting on your personal interpretation of the energy present in the skies. Astrology is a wonderful tool to show us where energy is flowing easily in our lives and where we may encounter some resistance. To be sure, energy is highly important for anyone in sales or who is self-employed. Awareness of what’s going on in your energy field is enormously helpful when managing your mindset and designing your own version of a top producer life. And this time last year we were collectively thinking very big.

How can I be so sure? Because long before I began studying astrology, mentors like Dr Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tole and Abraham-Hicks taught me about the law of attraction. Specifically, when we desire an improved experience in life, we think about that improvement. Life hears us asking and responds equally by presenting a problem. If we desire a small improvement, life will give us a small problem to handle. Clearly, given the year we just had, we want massive improvements in our world. You can also call “problems” adversity and adversities are the tools that life uses to help us create what we want. All improvement exists on the other side of a well handled adversity. The tricky part is remembering that while we get to choose what we want from life, life gets to decide how it’s delivered. Often, we can only connect the dots from adversity to an improved life in hindsight.

So I would understand if you’ve been hesitant to express anything big or bold for 2021. We did that last year and look what happened! It may be that getting back to “normal” would feel like a success to many. Yet to me, that would be a compromise with life. Think about 2020 again. Did life really hand us a crap sandwich or did we attract a huge amount of adversity by way of our collective desire for an improved world? The attitude of the latter is how we reclaim any power we’ve given away, find common ground and help each other fly high in 2021. If you’re following my thinking here, the task in front of us this week is to fearlessly think even bigger than we did last year. Only this time, with a clear understanding of what we’re asking for - more adversity. As scary as more adversity might sound, you can make the decision to view it as life’s attempt to help you manifest your vision.

This is the week to think big. Maybe you’ve already done your goal setting and planning for 2021. Kudos if you have because, as you know, December is really the start of the production year. Your activities this month will pay off starting in January. But as organized as you may be, it doesn’t mean you can’t use the energy of this magical week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to think as expansively as you can. Over the years, there’s one thing that has consistently stimulated my creative mind with big thoughts and dreams: reading. When I was six and my friends were playing video games, I was reading my dad’s copy of See You At The Top by Zig Ziglar. And this year, I have a rather ambitious list of physical, digital and audio books to get through.

If I’m being fully transparent, I wrote this post as a reminder for myself as well as you. Being prevented from public speaking right after I finally admitted that I’ve never lost my love for it screwed with my mindset. While Zoom calls became the norm for everyone else, they were already common for me in my coaching practice. I became angry at the hypocrisy of a world avoiding public gatherings in business only to post on social media about weddings, birthday parties and other group activities. So I channeled that energy into writing and discovered that I love writing as much as speaking. That outline became a completed book called The Top Producer Life; Build The Real Estate Career of Your Dreams In any economy.

So my version of thinking bigger in 2021 is combining a new professional identity as an author with a familiar (albeit dusty) identity as a motivational speaker. Turns out, Southwest Airlines is on board with the vision...they just announced they’ll begin flying out of Santa Barbara’s airport next year. In which month should I fly to see you?