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Are you living how you want?
Here’s some truth: The only way to live how you want, is to know how you want to live.
I know I haven’t always been in the habit of, or had the headspace to reexamine everything, meaning my life. If COVID had a silver lining, it would be that I started asking myself more questions.
What about you? Have you ever interrogated your reality? When was the last time you questioned why you do what you do?
I’d like to provide you with a framework for doing exactly that.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Questions to ask yourself
- Protecting and maximizing your most important resources
- The way forward
Let’s get started.
Question to ask yourself
So, what do you want your life to look like? In a perfect world, how would you spend your time, what would you do, where would you be? Whenever I’m trying to answer big questions, I find prompts to be helpful. Take some time and answer these questions:
- What time would you like to wake up every day?
- What will you do first thing?
- What will the rest of your morning look like?
- Where will you be?
- Who will be there with you?
- What will you be thinking about, what problems will you be working to solve?
- How do you earn a living?
- How long will you work every day?
- Where do you work?
- What do you do for fun?
Don’t hold back. Be as honest with yourself as you can be. Let your imagination run wild.
Protecting and maximizing your most important resources
We all have finite resources.
Unless you’re independently wealthy, you need to pay attention to your money.
We’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day.
I can’t give my attention to everything, I need to choose what to pay attention to.
How are you currently spending your most important resources? Who are you giving them to? Because here’s the thing; if you’re not paying attention to where you put them, there’s a never-ending line of people/algorithms/bots/etc who will happily take them.
It’s essential we become good stewards of our time, attention and money. How do we do it? It’s simple, you start paying attention.
For your time, it’s been found that our minds wander up to 50% of the time. If that’s true, you really don’t have that much time to get things done. Being mindful of what you’re thinking is the first step to figuring this out for yourself.
Next, perform a time audit. Get a piece of paper and write down everything you do for a week. While this isn’t the most fun process in the world, it’ll help you to know what you’re doing (and what you’re not doing). Whenever I do this, I get better at not wasting time.
Before I go any further, I’m not trying to get you to work 24/7. Quite the opposite. I’m interested in helping you to understand where there may be opportunities to maximize the times you make available for certain activities. Becoming a better steward of your time will make you more efficient, which will give you more time to do the things you truly want to do.
For your attention, there are more and more people, and more and more causes, and more and more social media platforms competing for this than ever before. And it’s going to be way worse before it gets better.
As humans, we have limited bandwidth; we can’t focus on everything all at once. The idea here is to get super clear on what’s important to you, so you can say “no” to things that aren’t. You’ve heard the saying, “stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.” That encapsulates what I’m trying to get across.
When you’re clear on what you believe to be true and of value, you can give your attention to those things and disregard the things that aren’t. In service of helping you get clear on this, you can access our Values course for free.
For you money, this starts with knowing your cash flow. How much money do you have coming in, how much is going out, how much debt do you have, and what’s the value of your assets. This is about becoming the CEO of your financial life, and realizing that no one will ever be more concerned about your financial situation than you are.
Once you start taking charge of your financial life, and thinking of yourself as the CEO, you’ll approach your financial decisions differently. From there, it’s important to set up and maintain a household budget. When you go through the Values course, it will help you gain clarity around what you spend money on, and what you don’t.
When you become more interested in your money, you can also start paying closer attention to what you’re investing in. You can decide to invest in certain companies or strategies, and exclude others. There are many opportunities to vote with your dollars and to have a broader impact if that’s of interest.
The way forward
You ask yourself some big questions. You’ve considered how you’re spending your most important resources. Now, let’s bring everything together and think about what your future will be like. One of our superpowers as humans is our ability to think about and to create the future we desire.
In service of helping you figure yours out, dig into our Goals course, it’s also free.
Once you know where you want to go, look at where you are, then figure out how to close that gap.
You may need to put together a plan for losing weight, getting a new certification, or for getting out of debt. Whatever it takes to close the gap, figure out what actions you can start immediately taking, and get to work.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If there are changes you want to make, focus on making them incrementally. Now, I’m someone who likes to jump in with both feet and take massive action on things, but I also recognize some things take time. The last thing I want is for you to hit the ground running, only to burn out or lose faith when progress is slower than you’d like.
Commit to the changes you want, and accept that it will take time to bring them to life.
If you’d immerse yourself in this process, check out the Strive Online Bootcamp. It may be just what you’re looking for to jumpstart your evolution. And that’s really what we’re talking about- your evolution. Getting the life you want should become your life’s work.
I’m interested in helping you make it happen.
Resources
Check out the Strive Online Bootcamp.
If you’re ready to take control of your financial life, check out our DIY Financial Plan course.
We’ve got three free courses as well: Our Goals Course, Values Course, and our Get Out of Debt course.
Connect with one of our Certified Partners to get any question answered.
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Check out the LifeBlood podcast.
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