I’ve been really inspired to share this Blog with you today. Recently one of my Coaching clients asked me this question, “Should I have a life purpose, or should I just try to enjoy myself in life?”. My answer to her was that we should have both, but the ‘enjoying life’ part should always be the MOST important.
So let me start off today by asking you, what is your life’s work? Do you have a life purpose? It has been said that life is what happens while we’re making other plans. Sadly, for many people, that is all too true. While we’re busy living life, we must remember to actually LIVE life. While I am a strong believer in having a life purpose, the absolute highest purpose that we can ever have in life is to be happy.
Some people add the proviso that we should do whatever makes us happy “as long as, it doesn’t violate the happiness of someone else”. I DON’T! What I mean by that is “TRUE” happiness is unconditional. “TRUE” happiness is abundant. If we place ANY kind of condition or restriction on our happiness, then it is not by definition “TRUE” happiness. So we cannot say that we must do that which makes us happy, as long as…. (fill in the blank), because that is a contradiction in terms.
So does that mean that it’s OK to do something which violates the happiness of another if it makes US happy? Again, the answer to that is NO, because that would be a contradiction in terms. We cannot, for example, steal from someone in order to make ourselves happy, because stealing comes from a mindset of “Lack”. If we steal to be happy, we are really saying that we cannot be happy without the thing that we steal. That is NOT unconditional and it is certainly NOT coming from a place of abundance. Therefore, we cannot say that we are stealing something in order to be truly happy because again, that would be a contradiction in terms.
So we must consciously make it a priority to cultivate true happiness in our lives. And we must do it on a daily basis. It’s all too easy to get caught up in life trying to get a title or to accumulate “things” but none of that will make us truly happy. None of it will give meaning to our lives. I know that we all know this and we’ve probably heard it said a million times before so I don’t want this to be just another Blog about something you already know to be true. Rather, I want to do for you what I did for my Client. I want to give you some practical guidance to help you make sure that you are really making your life’s work, your life!
So Here Are My 4 Practical Steps That You Can Start Taking TODAY…
1.) Your Daily Purpose.
It’s great to have purpose in your life, people often refer to it as being the reason you get out of bed in the morning. But you should also have a DAILY purpose when you get out of bed of a morning. This is not a lifelong accomplishment, but rather something simply that you want to do that day that will bring joy into your life. So before you get out of bed each morning, pick 1 thing that you’re going to be looking forward to doing that day. It could be something like, today I’m going to make someone smile, or today I’m going to spend 5 minutes just sitting in the sunshine and soaking up the suns’ love.
2.) Meditate.
There are very few things that you can do in life that will have as dramatic an effect on your overall happiness as meditation. For me, meditation is a non-negotiable thing that HAS to be done every day. No matter what is going on around you, you can always find 15-20 minutes for meditation. A regular practice of meditation will give you clarity and peace in what you do. I could do a whole Blog on the benefits of meditation but let me just say instead that if you haven’t tried it, you can access a FREE meditation video on my website.
3.) Cultivate Joy and Happiness Daily.
The daily experience of happiness is something which must be deliberately cultivated. Too often we find it easy to dwell for a short period of time on some minor thing which has happened that we get agitated about. It may only last for a minute or so, but if we spend out entire day going from 1 negative to another, even though each one has only been for a short time, we end up spending the best part of a day living through these constantly negative experiences. For example, someone cuts you off in traffic, we’re mad about it for a minute or so and then we forget about it. But as soon as you’ve forgotten about it, you can rest assured that some other negative will come up, we’ll spend another minute or so dwelling on that. The more we dwell on negatives, the more we program our mind to expect negative things to happen, so the more negative experiences we find. Before we know it, we’ve spent our whole day switching our focus from one negative thing to the next.
What if instead, we trained our brains to look for the good experiences in the everyday. If our natural tendency is to look for negatives then this won’t be easy. But with constant practice we WILL change the programming of our brains. We will find moments of beauty in the everyday to inspire us. The problem is that when we see something beautiful or wonderful we may only consciously focus on it for matter of seconds, which is not long enough for it to really take root in our minds. If we could just extend that moment to 20-30 seconds where we just stop and consciously focus on allowing ourselves to be in that moment, it will begin to take root in our minds. The more we do this, the more our minds expect good things to happen. Guess what, when you do this, more good things will happen!
4.) Start a Bucket List.
A lot of people these days have at least started to work on a Bucket List. However, most people put “One-Day” kind of goals on their Bucket List. And whilst there is power in writing something down and putting on your Bucket List, I believe that you really need 2 kinds of Bucket List. The first is your life-long Bucket List. But you also need to have what I call an “Active” Bucket List. The Active List is not just things like one day I want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. When you put something on your Active Bucket List, you commit yourself to taking steps towards it’s accomplishment. It may not happen strait away, and you may even have goals on your Active Bucket List that will take you years to accomplish, that’s OK. The essential thing is that once you put it on your Active Bucket List, you commit yourself to taking steps towards its’ accomplishment. Every single thing that you have on your Active Bucket List you should be able to look at and instantly tell someone the steps that you have already taken, and the steps that you are still taking towards accomplishing that goal.
John Maxwell says some people are already dead, they just haven’t made it official yet! If you will commit to following these steps, then you will not merely be alive, you will be LIVING! Make your life’s work your life and you will have an extraordinary life in which you can truly say that I love my life!
Now, don’t just read this, TAKE ACTION. Leave a comment in the comments section to let me know what actions you are taking to make your life’s work your life.