If you’ve already introduced yourself, I’ve probably fallen in love with you. If you haven’t written in, please tell me about you; let me fall in love with you too ([email protected]).

I’m gearing up for a BIG week next week and I’ll be honest I’ve got a bit of pre-big things happening anxiety kicking in.

I leave for a secret retreat at Esalen on Sunday and get back on Thursday so I can immediately dive in to our first Money Map Masters in-person retreat here in Boulder. I’m super excited for all of it and a little anxious about being off the computer and away from my kids for pretty much the whole week before the in-person retreat.

Gratefully, I do believe both the businesses and the kids are ready for this kind of independence.

In some ways my kids and businesses are at the same stages, on the verge of adulthood and I’m being invited to let go more and more as they individuate from me, which has me on my edge, in the best way possible.

Learning to let go is one of the most valuable lessons we can receive in this lifetime, I think.

There’s a time to micro-manage and infuse yourself into your kids and businesses and a time to let it all go and trust you’ve baked enough of you into the system that they will continue to operate at a high level even without you there.

Let go of trying to control the kids, but only after you know you’ve given them a solid foundation of learning to trust themselves and be trustworthy. Let them make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, grow and evolve.

Let go of control of the businesses, but only after you’ve established the systems and got a team in place that you know trusts itself to carry out the vision you’ve established.

One of my teams had an intervention with me last week and said “go, Ali. we’ve got this. You can be all of yourself out there in the world and know we’re holding down the fort while you do. We love you, we accept you, now get the “F” out of here.”   Well, it wasn’t word for word like that, but that’s how it felt.

And, I believed them. I felt so loved. We are creating a plan for them to buy the business so we can be partners and truly share the wealth that’s being created here.

My kids’ dad is in Thailand until Thursday and this is the first time ever I’m leaving the kids’ for 4 nights without me or their dad here. We do have a house guest here to stay with them and they are 12 (almost 13) and 16, but this feels like a huge rite of passage. They’ve assured me they will work together to get Noah off to school each morning, go to bed at a decent time and eat healthfully throughout the week.

Trusting my children to become independent is the weirdest process in the world. It requires me to face all of my own insecurities and I look forward to sharing more of my process with you as I see the outcomes of a few experiments I’m running in the background while parenting radically differently than most.

I’ll let you know how this 4-days away experiment went in the next Love Letter.

In the meantime …

I’ve been looking back over the many leaps I’ve made in my life to see if I can identify what most supported me during these times of great progress, so I can offer it back to you.

The leaps have been many …

From the security of the 6-figure paycheck into my own law practice. From the law practice into online business. From the online business to the farm and unwilling to do anything for money I wouldn’t do for free. To the willingness to let it all go and file bankruptcy. To rebuilding everything from scratch using “share the wealth” business models in which everyone wins. To coming out publicly and living with two names and distinct personalities in the world.

And here’s what I realize … I never would have even made the first leap if I had not seen someone else do it first. Just about every leap I’ve made has happened after I’ve seen someone else do it and said to myself “if she can do it, I can do it.”

When I first launched my own law practice, I had the courage to do it because I saw my friend Diedre successfully doing it. Then, when I decided to move it online, I had the courage to do it because I saw other women successfully creating lives of freedom and flexibility while sharing their work in the world.

Today, I am going beyond what I’ve seen anyone else do and I’m charting my own course. But, there’s no way I would have even gotten to this point if I had not allowed myself to be inspired and guided by other women (and a couple of men) who had done what I wanted to do and supported those early leaps with their courageous jumps first.

I hope that watching me go first is inspiring you to more of what you truly desire in life. I hope that I’m giving you permission to live all of yourself and integrate your work with your life fully so that it’s hard to tell the difference between work and play. I hope I’m the guiding light you need to know you can do this — you can make the leap and trust that the safety net you seek will be there to support you in the form of all the resources you need to experience the outcome you desire.

It does help to have a guide. It does help to have the support of someone who has already been there and done that. I’ve had a coach every step of the way. Each one perfectly keyed to guide me because they had already done what I wanted to do.

If you’d love inspiration to make the leap into an online business from a current bricks and mortar, on location reality, you may enjoy this post about how I made $117,000 in 67 minutes and transformed my business reality overnight (after a lot of not succeeding because I didn’t have the right guidance and support). The links at the bottom of the post are no longer active, but the post itself will guide you to the 4 biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make when making this leap to the online world + the 4 best tips I have for smoothing the process out and doing it well.

If you’d love inspiration and support for something you know I’ve experienced, please write in and let me know so I can speak to it in a future video or one of these love letters here.

It’s my absolute joy to share my experiences so you can learn, grow and evolve too because that brings us closer than ever to being able to play together.

With so much love,

Ali

PS — this is the last week for the Money Map Life Planning Series and the New Year’s Clarity workshop. If you have not gotten into them yet, do it now because we’ll be shutting it all down this coming week.

Money Map Life Planning Series is here.

Recording of New Year’s Clarity Workshop is here.

Recording of Live Q&A Call With Me From Yesterday is here.

PPS — if you are ready to have my support on your vision and the build-out of your business over the next year, join us in the year-long Eyes Wide Open membership: use code BOGO500OFF athttp://www.eyeswideopenlife.com/membership and take $500 off your enrollment + fund a scholarship for someone else in serious need.

Here’s some of what our new members are saying: