If you want your life to be holistically successful, you must be clear on what that ideal life looks like. In it, do you work for a Fortune 500 company or are you an entrepreneur? Are you both? Are you single? Are you married? Do you have children? If so, how many? On an ideal weekend—if money is not a concern– how do you spend your time?
These kinds of questions can allow you to more clearly see the life you really want to be living.
Without conscious thinking about what it is we want, we just kinda end up where we are. I ended up a college dropout years ago because I had no plan. I had no plan because I had no idea what I was trying to accomplish. That kind of wandering around in the dark zaps us of our agency.
When we don’t know what we want, anything will do—for a while. Then, years later, we realize we’re stuck in a dead-end job, in a relationship that isn’t good for us, fifty pounds heavier, and unhappy. At least that’s what happened to me. Because I was unclear, I was at the mercy of things and people around me. I wasn’t proactively seeking “anything” because I didn’t even know what “anything” was. One day I woke up and realized that this kind of living just wasn’t what I wanted. That’s when I decided to push the reset button and to start over and obtain the life I really wanted.
I found that one of the first things I needed to do was to write down a description of my ideal life. Once had that description in hand (and I think it’s important to actually write the list), I divided it up into categories. My categories are: Health, Professional Life, Finances, Spirituality, Romantic Life, Motherhood, and Community Work. These are my current categories but they’re subject to change according to my needs. Right now, they work for me and they help me stay clear about what my ideal life looks like. Armed with my categories and my clarity, I can ensure that my daily decisions are moving me forward towards my desired end result.
Said another way, the categories provide a means for me to organize my thoughts and to generate strategies that I can put to use in resetting my life so that I can get to where I want to go. Once I had my categories, I spent time creating a map that I’m now using to get me to my desired destination.
I’ll blog about how I created my map and other tools that I’m using along the way but I thought I should share with you where my journey began: being completely clear about what I want. It wasn’t a process that could be rushed. I had to be gentle with myself; I had to forgive myself for all the mistakes I’d made and the procrastination that had robbed me of years. I faced those feelings so that I could learn from them. But ultimately, they had to be released. They were baggage slowing down the process.
Now, with the end clearly in sight, I’m moving forward and I hope that you’re doing the same.
Always true,
Dr. Tip