What Do You Want Your Life To Look Like?
What do you want your life to look like?
Often instead of focusing on what we would like our life to look like, we focus on what is wrong with our lives.
We say things like:
My house is a mess.
I really need to lose this weight.
I should do some laundry.
I need to have a quiet time in the morning before the kids get up.
Even if all of those things are true, thinking of them in the negative only stresses us more. Instead of thinking “I am more than a conqueror” or “I am self-sufficient in Christ’s sufficiency” we begin to think “I can’t” or “I’ll never have the life I want.” No one wants to live there.
Change your Mindset
Although I can’t promise the exercise I’m going to prescribe will make all of your obstacles go away, I do know it can help you change your mindset. With a more positive mindset, it’s easier to pursue your purpose. Remember yesterday, we spilled our dreams onto paper? Today’s exercise will help you visualize what that looks like in real everyday life so you can start working towards that vision. I’m not talking about some hokey pokey incantations and incense burning. I’m talking about imagining your perfect day and writing it down. The first time I tried this exercise, I was still homeschooling and trying to make the days as efficient, effortless, and educational as possible. That’s saying a lot, I know. But if we aim for nothing except surviving, that’s all we will do.
Nobody wants to just survive.
It had been my God-sized dream to homeschool. I was doing it! The only problem was – my vision and my reality weren’t synonymous. They were opposites. I decided to give writing down what I wanted my life to look like a try.
My perfect day looked pretty simple.
I wake early, make coffee, have Bible study time before the kids get up. I make breakfast for the kids and we eat at the table. We have fifteen minutes of chore time before we start school. We do Bible study and other group subjects together first. We have a snack together at 10 am. Then we divide into individual subjects.
I won’t share the whole day. You get the picture. The point is writing down what my perfect day looked like gave me something to aim for. Many times we just get up and hope that things will happen on their own and we beat ourselves up when they don’t. Then we feel powerless and as if we have failed. How can we say we failed when we don’t even know what we are aiming for?
“Do what you love, and you’ll stop being your own worst enemy.”
– Tommy Newberry, Success is Not an Accident
Don’t confuse what you love with entertainment. What you love is living your purpose today and doing it in the best way possible. Living your purpose starts with writing down what it looks like on a day to day basis.
Take the intersection of what you wrote yesterday with what you imagine your perfect day looks like (realistically) and write it down.
Don’t stress about goals and objectives just yet!