Designing your life allows you to begin to live truly aligned with your own nature, which delivers more happiness by not trying to force yourself to be someone else. When we live our lives on autopilot we are merely reacting to our external circumstances. We become duller, we become jaded, and we begin to adapt to a limited way of living. Living on autopilot causes us to lose sight of what could be the best version of our lives.
Live by design and take control of your present and your future. Identify your goals and gain clarity on the processes, habits, and steps needed to succeed.
Life Becomes a Monotonous Routine
It is too easy to fall into living our lives by routine, living on auto-pilot, or just going through the motions.
Routine is a subtle takeover of our passions and purpose. It is the day-to-day must do’s, the jobs, the obligations, the needs put upon us by others including our society, and we have no choice but to respond. We must respond. If we don’t, we lose everything we have worked so hard to get in life. So we ignore our true selves and we get used to this routine. We even come to rely on the predictability of our routine and reward ourselves for just getting by, and end up living to a standard far below our actual capacity.
We tell ourselves that we will do something for ourselves tomorrow. Always tomorrow. This becomes part of our routine to rationalize our current way of living. We convince ourselves we’ll get to it later. This makes us feel good to believe that we will follow our dreams at some point. But guess what? We NEVER do.
Then suddenly a year, two and then ten years go by and we look back and say something like “wow, I wish I had taken a chance on that career change” or “I should have capitalized on that opportunity”.
Hitting the Wall: Your Wakeup Call
To take our lives to the next level and break out of the routine we need to let go of the fear of being compared to the rest of the world.
We need to recognize that most times we are seeking status, stability and predictability. These things make us feel safe.
But they hinder real growth in the long run too often.
When we realize we have hit that wall of living just for the sake of living, we need to step back and make a decision. The decision to change our lives and begin to become an active participant, in fact, become proactive in creating our own life is the absolute first step in living your life by design.
Commit to No Regrets
Stop now and write down a list of the 5 principles in life that you feel you MUST live by. These principles will become your safety net in life. Your lifeline. Your North Star. Moral Compass. They will catch you when you start to slip or are about to step into a bad decision.
They will also guide your actions so that you do not have to continually look back and judge yourself and feel that you are being judged by your past. Because you KNOW that you have not done anything to regret based upon living according to your principles.
When you can begin to live without any regrets you truly become free and an active participant in your own life. Now, this is never the case in real life, because we are not perfect and we are human. But we begin to stop worrying less about the past and start actually living in the present.
“Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it 'The Present' – Eleanor Roosevelt.
Passions On Fire
Now we can really open up and look at what makes us tick as people. We can light our passions on fire. Because we have gained so much more balance by not having to second guess our past, we can focus on what we want, what and who we love, and where we want to go in our lives.
Our passions combined with our principles will build the jet plane that will rocket us to new places in our life and new happiness and contentment that we have never known before.
We just need to learn to fly it.