Simple Tips To Create A Life You Want To Live

You will only ever live the life you create for yourself, but it’s often hard to accept that reality. In fact, I think most of us struggle to accept that the life we’re living right now is the life we’ve actually created for ourselves…warts and all, as they say.

The trouble is that most of us only see the warts. In other words, we only see what’s wrong with our lives and fail to see that in fact, a lot of our life is ok, if not great.

And that kind of creates the duality of what I want to explore in this blog post.

How can you create a life you actually want to live whilst simultaneously accepting that some (possibly a lot) of this present reality that you’ve created is actually what you want?

Can Gratitude Help You Create A Better Life?

I’ve found that asking people to actively recognise the good stuff in their lives by proclaiming what they’re grateful for just causes them to shy away. Maybe it’s because it sounds a bit twee or maybe it’s because if we’re grateful for something it’ll often be accompanied by its own little caveat, as in…

• …today I am so happy and grateful for the love in my life…but I want more; or;
• …today I am so happy and grateful for the flowers and the trees…but I wish I wasn’t in lockdown so that I could go out and explore further afield.

But what I love about both of these statements is that they lay the groundwork for seeing and accepting the good things that are already present in our lives whilst also identifying some things that we would like to improve about our lives.

Because that’s often another struggle that people have.

What Do You Really Want For Your Life?

When challenged with the question: “so what do you want (for your life)?” most people are left mumbling and hesitant.

It’s seems that we all know what we don’t want, while we struggle to articulate what we do want.

Asking For Permission

You are allowed to make changes to the way you’re living. You’re allowed to look after yourself. You’re allowed to decide what is important to you. And you’re allowed to create a life with those things at the center.
Brooke McAlary

The trouble with our little caveated gratitude statements is that we only feel “allowed” to take things so far before we’re going against the boundaries of our current reality.

In other words, maybe we’re only allowed to have so much happiness or take so many trips a year or spend so much money etc before we start to feel a bit uncomfortable.

And right there is the problem.

To have the extra things in our lives that we actually want, we have to want them enough to not just moan about their absence, but instead to actively take time to find out how to make them materialise in our lives and then not worry about what other people might think.

Can Other People Inspire Us To Action?

So do you ever wonder how some people seem to breeze through life, always coming up smelling of roses with their social media highlight reel a thing of envy?

You see people going off on great adventures, while you’re counting the pennies to make sure there’s enough money to cover the bills this month.

You watch as they walk past you, holding hands with the love-of-their-lives while you wonder where your last relationship went wrong…again.

Their home, the clothes they wear, the car on their drive are all things you want for yourself, but attaining them feels illusive.

Choosing the life you want to live versus pushing on with the life you feel you’ve been given can feel unfair. As you sit on the side-lines watching others live a life you want to live, it can create envy and resentment, or it can inspire and make you wonder how to spur yourself into action.

Creating Intentional Days

It took me years to even realise I was “allowed” to go after the life I really wanted.

Creating a bigger life, a life that was different to the one that was expected of me (what exactly that was, I’m not sure) felt alien. It also felt that I would be betraying the people around me. And in the end, who exactly was I to assume I could have more?

Intentional days create a life on purpose.
Adrienne Enns

But to make things change, we have to make changes – to our beliefs and to our actions.

We all have a long list of things that we need, want and should get done each day. We are also all bombarded with requests and demands from other people, events and circumstances as each day rolls on.

But somewhere in this melee of random and indiscriminate tasks, we somehow need to find space for the things that actually are important to us and will move the trajectory of our lives to our True North.

For this to happen we need to create days that are intentional, rather than reach the end of yet another day and wonder what, if anything of purpose we actually achieved.

Turning Theory Into Practice or How To Create A Life You Want To Live

So let’s dream a little for a moment…

How would you like your life to look a month, year or even five years from now?

If you’ve never done this kind of exercise before then five years or even a year can seem too far into the future, so let’s keep this dream (aka, plan) short-term.

Whenever you’re reading this, try to imagine it’s close to the end of the month.

What would you like to have happened by the end of next month for you to feel that your month was successful, enjoyable, productive, fun etc – you get to choose your guiding adjective(s)!

Write down a few things that come to mind.

Here’s a real-life example. Below I’ve given a list of short-term goals I wrote out earlier this year. Given that we were in comparative lockdown, the list takes this into account because there were (and still are) limits to what can be done at the moment.

Here’s the list I wrote up:

• Book a table at Tom Kerridge’s restaurant in Marlow (need to book months ahead!)
• Knit myself a new fancy cardigan
• Buy and hang the mural wallpaper for the living room
• Save an extra £160 this month (£800 by the end of the year)
• Read 3 books: Be Obsessed or Be Average; If I Never Met You; The Silva Ultramind ESP System
• Various projects for AYBL, including setting up and running the monthly Challenge
• Lose 7lbs lockdown weight
• Films to watch: Avengers: Endgame; Gemini Man; Jumanji (x 2)
• Places to visit: Bristol and/or Bath; coastal walk from/to Langland Bay

Once I got started it was fun to do and I soon realised that this was quite a big list for just one month, but that really wasn’t important.

Bringing Your List To Life

You are sovereign over your life. No one else. If your heart’s desires are not manifest, only you have the power to take action to change that.
Amy Leigh Mercree

But just writing a list won’t be enough, you will have to take action if you want to see any or all of your list materialise as experiences in your life.

So how exactly can you do that? Well here’s a few examples of the actions I planned out for my list above:

• Book a table at Tom Kerridge’s restaurant in Marlow (need to book months ahead!)
o Check out TK’s website
o Find suitable dates
o Book the table!
• Buy and hang the mural wallpaper for the living room
o Chat to my husband to make sure he was onboard with my plans for mural wallpaper
o Research suppliers, prices, delivery times etc
o Choose the actual mural and order the wallpaper
• Save an extra £160 this month (£800 by the end of the year)
o Review my budget to see where I might be able to cut costs
o Check on plans for the month and adjust anything that is no longer happening
o Look for opportunities to make extra income
• Films to watch: Avengers: Endgame; Gemini Man; Jumanji (x 2)
o Check where the films are showing (Netflix, Amazon etc)
o Decide when to watch them
o Get the treats in and enjoy!

Make It Happen!

There’s nothing magic about this, but the effects can be magical in terms of opening your eyes to your ability to move your life in the direction you want it to go, rather than just drifting through another month.

The important thing about this list is that I was creating a framework for intentional living. You can see from the list that nothing is astonishing, but at a time when, because of the pandemic, I had lost a lot of my personal drive, I needed something that would give me direction again.

And this is exactly what you can achieve when you give the exercise a try.

So, go on, write out a list of things that, if they happened by the end of the month, would mean that your month will be better than the previous month.

To make it easier for you to do that, I’ve created a workbook you can download for free to help you get started.  Download your workbook here!

What to do next…

> Read another post – Positive Thinking Techniques and Tips
> Join my free private FB Group – Click now to join my closed (private) Facebook Group
> Catch up with me on social media – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or Pinterest
> Sign up below 👇 for my weekly newsletter, keep up-to-date and get special offers!