Invest in your life
Do a little each day, acting as the person you desire to be (with the right mindset of your chosen personality), and you will soon be living the life you’d previously only envisioned. Well, that makes sense. If you act like something, you essentially ARE that something. A lesson by Forrest Gump.
Do what works for you
Choose thoughts and habits that easily work FOR you. Lots of people have goal-habits (like say, getting up at 5am every day and running 4 miles) that just don’t jive with others. For something to work for you, you must first have an idea of the results you want, or some direction by which to focus your thoughts and habits. If you try getting up at 5am just for something to do, odds are you aren’t going to stick with it for very long.
If you aim to arise at 5am each morning to get a jump on your work, have some quiet time to yourself, enjoy the calmness before the birds chirp greetings to the sun, and in general have specific values that you satisfy by taking such an early bird action — then by all means, there’s a habit that works for you.
Know what you value most in life
If you think you haven’t any goals worth your time and energy, a neat shortcut to determining the best goal for you is first to figure out what you value most in life. (More on discovering your values.)
Your values are the reasons for doing anything. Once you know what you value, you know what you live for, you know what is essential in life, and you know to which ends (and in which ways) you are willing and excited to devote your precious life moments.
For example, let’s say that instead of having an ultimate goal of “I attain millionaire status,” your value underlying that goal is something broad, like ‘freedom’. You therefore take note and act on opportunities that exist to increase your experience of freedom and your ability to do what you want when you want to do it.
As noted, freedom is a broad value. Its associations tie it to security, love, enjoyment, and lots of other values that you may want to factor into how you want to direct your energy. How you choose to optimize your experience of freedom is highly individual, which is a good thing. There are countless ways in which to be free; figure out what the feeling of being free means to you personally.
Taking action each day, based on what you value, opens you to seeing a field of possibilities for being what you truly want (a person who values and has freedom/money/quality relationships, etc.). Based on your constitution–your preferences and style of expression–you can design your life so that you honour your values by choosing activities that support your core values.
Do only what is worthy of your attention according to what you value. By choosing to do what you want according to what you know is most important, every step you take is an investment in the life you want.
Here’s an example: you choose to be a millionaire. Not very original, but not a bad choice either. There are numerous types of millionaire; this is where your originality comes into play. You choose to be one who has multiple sources of income and who invests time in doing what you love so that working hard is like an intense play session. Another sort of millionaire is the person who works tirelessly, hating every minute of it, but amassing lots of money s/he hasn’t the time to enjoy. This latter lifestyle is not in accordance with the way in which you choose to express your value of freedom and quality of life, so therefore you show zero incentive to becoming that sort of millionaire. You simply won’t have the drive to get up in the morning to make money for the sake of making money, because your heart is not in it. (Of course, if you associate making money with making your family happy and living up to your own standards, then that is one way to do something you’d rather not, as your action is tied to an outcome (being a good provider for family) that you do value highly.
Inner conflicts appear to be conflicts of values and beliefs, and incongruence between your actions and your beliefs. The trick is to figure out what your values are, and then to realize a way to live so that you’re honouring your highest values.
So, know yourself and know what you need to feel resourceful and secure
Example: Perhaps you want to make lots of money, and at the same time you want to spend lots of time with your family. Making money is part of taking care of your family, so if you devote more time with your family at the expense of your career, you’ll feel badly about your bank balance and you won’t be the most lovingly compassionate company for your family, either. In this example, for some reason you think that you can’t do both at the same time satisfactorily. Well, one option is to figure out a way to do both anyway, so that your values complement each other instead of causing friction and heat and sparks (or take advantage of those sparks and use the energies to overcome a seeming opposition of intent.) Here’s an illustration taken out of context, but I’m sure you can figure out that the point is to examine the assumptions and limits surrounding your current situation and see clearly what you want as a result. Who says you can’t be both rich in material and quality relationships? The assumptions here are that you must spend time away from your family while you’re making money. Is this true for you? Get rid of your former way of thinking; it’s not working for you. Make something that works for you by thinking from another perspective:
Clearly, as Einstein said, the level of thinking required to solve a problem is greater than the level of thinking that was required to create the problem. That is, humanity has created a bunch of crisis points, including the nuclear weapons Einstein had to be implying. To create these crisis points required a specific mode of thinking and behavior, i.e. with nuclear weapons it was to take human aggression and dominance to extreme ends of technological might. But to solve the problem, i.e. of what to do with the nuclear technology that was bent to creating the weapons, means one must transcend the thinking that created the problem.
While I’m thinking of it, here’s an excellent article on figuring out what your beliefs really are, so that you DO believe what you want to achieve: How to Believe You Can Do Anything.
Acting in accord with your highest values is the easiest and most secure way to a wealthy lifestyle, as ‘the getting there’ is just as fun as the actually being there!
Recent Comments