Designing your life means you are opting to look at your life not just as a goal but as an adventure, as a process and not a destination.The life you design and create should present you with an array of choices, allow you to explore multiple avenues and evaluate what truly ignites your spirit and brings you happiness. It’s about making your dreams a reality and then setting new ones.
Start the creation of your new life by assessing your current circumstances and determining if you’re genuinely content. If there’s any dissatisfaction in key areas of your life, it’s time to start crafting something new. Devise a plan that will induce happiness and assist you in becoming the best version of yourself.
There’s nothing more disheartening than achieving success in something that doesn’t bring you joy. It’s a waste of your time and energy to strive for years towards a goal that leaves you feeling unfulfilled and unhappy.
Designing Your Life …
Deciding to create a life that truly reflects your interests, passions, and needs is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Design principles can guide you, on when and where to focus your efforts. It’s perfectly fine to desire something new. The first step in creating your life, however, is to understand that you need to take charge of your life rather than letting it control you.
Understanding What It Means To Take Control Of Your Life
Taking charge of your life and intentionally designing it is starkly different from merely living it. When you’re just living, you often let others’ priorities and life’s obstacles dictate how you spend your time. Rather than being a passive participant in life, grasp the reins and start living a life that truly makes you happy.
Taking Charge Of Your Life Entails Several Things
Firstly, it means acknowledging that you are responsible for what happens in your life. You understand that your choices have led you to your current situation. Your actions, or lack thereof, have resulted in your present circumstances. You’re ready to accept full responsibility for all future decisions.
Secondly, taking charge means you’re prepared to create a life that provides you with genuine fulfillment. This enables you to become the best person you can be. Don’t settle for anything less, consciously structure your life to be the best possible version of yourself and choose a course that allows you to chase your dreams.
Lastly, taking charge involves identifying and conquering your fears. Fears can inhibit you and prevent you from achieving your goals. When you craft a life for yourself, you have a meaningful and significant goal to strive for. This can provide the motivation needed to overcome the fears that have impeded your progress and confront your anxieties directly.
Gaining Clarity – Be Clear About What You Want
The initial step in taking charge of your life is to clearly understand what you truly desire. Who do you believe the best version of yourself really is? Take time to introspect and reflect on your dreams, ambitions, current frustrations, and fears.
Do your utmost to cut out the noise of daily life and focus on your true identity. During this time of reflection, it’s beneficial to jot down your thoughts and queries. The rest of this guide will provide you with activities and specific steps to navigate this process.
Embracing Proactivity Can Transform Your Life
Being proactive in your life puts you squarely in control of your own destiny. Being proactive is antithetical to being reactive. If you merely let life unravel before you and spend all your time reacting to whatever comes your way, you’re living reactively. By reframing your mindset to be more proactive, you’ll reap numerous benefits in your life.
Reacting to events, people, and circumstances in your life can give you the impression that life is just happening to you, rather than you being in control of your future. Learning how to be proactive empowers you to take decisive actions. These actions will set you on the path to where you want to be, enabling you to take charge of all life’s circumstances and regain control over your destiny.
When you’re prepared to take charge of your life and learn to be proactive, you’ll experience a plethora of personal and professional benefits. Here are a few of the most significant advantages of leading a proactive life.
Change Becomes Less Daunting While Designing Your Life
Living reactively often leads to a fear of change and the unknown. When you’re continually reacting to life, failure becomes a constant threat. However, when you learn to be proactive, you’re less likely to fear change, as you have something meaningful to work towards.
Learning to have a proactive mindset means you have a plan for the future. You are now prepared to cope with the setbacks and changes that will come your way. You can use your energy to focus on making progress toward attaining your goals instead of dealing with events and circumstances that force you to be reactionary.
Your Decisions are Better Informed
When you wait for life to hand you problems, then react to them, you are forced to make quick decisions and with few options. Making better choices means thinking ahead and planning for possible contingencies. Being proactive gives you better information, provides you with more to consider, and ensures you have the resources you need to put your plan into action. When you are reactive, you spend too much time being unorganized and unprepared for what life has in store. This means you are not making the best possible decisions about how to design the life you really want.
You Handle Problems More Effectively
Leading a proactive lifestyle implies that you anticipate potential problems and devise a strategy to tackle them. It also means that you are more adroit at managing these issues and setbacks because you perceive them as part of the process, rather insurmountable hurdles.
Drawing up a blueprint for your life and adopting a proactive approach aids in understanding that life is a journey. Each experience serves as a lesson, contributing to your growth.
The most proactive move you can make is to design and construct the best version of yourself and your life. By doing this, you’re taking ownership of your future. You’re embracing the options life presents to you and making the most beneficial decisions for your current situation.
It isn’t always a smooth road. Being prepared by recognizing potential challenges can enhance your chances of success.
Designing Your Life Comes With Challenges For Women
Women often face numerous hurdles when they set out to design the life they desire. If your goal is to become the best possible version of yourself, it’s crucial to be cognizant of potential obstacles. This awareness can help you better prepare to confront and surmount them. Let’s discuss some of the common hurdles women face when trying to shape their best lives.
Comparison
When your attention shifts from your own life, with its unique blessings and gifts, to those of others, you’re paving the way for disappointment.
In this era of social media, comparing yourself to others has become incredibly easy. You’re constantly bombarded with updates about others’ achievements, happiness, or accomplishments.
Comparisons often lead to resentment as you’re likely to find someone who seems to have what you want or is doing what you aspire to do. This not only fosters a false belief that success is limited but also breeds fear of not attaining your goals. Comparison only serves to generate negative emotions.
Women often find themselves comparing their professional, maternal, marital, or friendly roles to other women’s perceived success in those areas. However, this is an unhealthy practice.
The only comparison you need to make is with your vision of your best self. This vision is your goal. It’s immaterial what others are doing, as they’re not part of your plan. Remain loyal to what matters to you, and you won’t be sidetracked by comparisons.
The Need for Approval
Many women have been conditioned from a young age to seek validation from others and conform to societal norms. The concept of being “people pleasers” who aspire for harmonious relationships is instilled in girls. This mindset often influences our adult lives, affecting our self-perception and relationships with others.
When you yearn for others’ approval, you’re overlooking the most crucial validation – your own. By prioritizing someone else’s happiness over your own, you’re moving away from your dreams. Abandoning the urge to please others is a significant step towards liberation.
Rejection from others simply implies a difference in perception. It gives you insight into their beliefs and values.
Keep in mind that people’s thoughts and opinions should not influence your life choices. The only validation you need is your own, as you are the one dealing with the repercussions of your actions and decisions.
Being rejected by someone else just means they have a different opinion of you than you have of yourself, and that is okay. When someone judges you, you then have new information about their beliefs and values.
Remember that their thoughts and opinions have absolutely no impact on how you choose to live your life. Remember that the only approval you need in life is your own, since you are the one that must live with the consequences of your actions and decisions.
Fear of Failure
The fear of failure is not exclusive to women, but women often feel an amplified pressure to excel in all life aspects without showing weakness through failure. This fear can severely limit your progress, inhibit risk-taking, undermine your confidence in your decisions, and discourage you from seeking help to reach your goals.
When fear strikes, it’s best to face it directly and assess your fears objectively. How probable is your worst-case scenario? What would recovery entail?
What resources, skills, and knowledge do you have to mitigate the risk? How much of your fear is rational, and how much is unfounded?
By understanding your fear, you’ll soon realize there’s less to be scared of than you initially thought.
The Struggle with Perfectionism
Whether it is in your personal or professional life (or both!), most of us feel like we should have it all together. We should be able to handle everything, and we strive to be perfect versions of ourselves.
Perfectionism can be a debilitating mindset, as it places you in a frozen state, waiting until the perfect opportunity to make a move or try something new. It forces you to work hard at things that are not that important when “good enough” would suffice.
Perfection is totally unattainable, so striving to achieve anything resembling it is a fool’s errand. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you will see that nearly everything you decide can be un-decided. Progress is generally a better alternative than stagnation, but it’s challenging to move forward when your happiness is contingent on everything being perfect.
Coping with Disappointment
Women, in particular, face numerous disappointments in life. These disappointments are sometimes fueled by
- gender bias,
- unequal opportunities, and
- the stereotypical roles women are expected to play in society.
- Women continue to earn less than men,
and many opt to exit their professions after starting a family due to unfulfilling career trajectories.
Women often juggle their professional duties with the responsibilities of caregiving, a balance that men are rarely expected to maintain. This balance can lead to dissatisfaction with how well you’re performing in either role.
It’s necessary to learn how to handle such disappointments and other unfavorable circumstances. This is a key part of life design. By creating a life that brings you joy, you identify what invigorates and motivates you. Set your goals around these areas to maintain focus on your dreams, even when faced with disappointment.
The Freedom to Change Your Path
Your aspirations will naturally evolve as you grow older and circumstances change. Your priorities in your youth may differ significantly from those in your middle age, and later in life. This uncertainty can be daunting for some. Adapting to new possibilities can be a hurdle.
By adhering to life design principles throughout your life, you allow yourself the freedom to change your mind. You can envision multiple futures and decide which one best suits your current and future needs. As your dreams and priorities change, you can adjust your path and modify your objectives accordingly.
The Absence of Support
Women working in male-dominated fields often feel a sense of isolation. Fitting in and gaining acceptance in such environments can be challenging. Even in fields with a larger female presence, support can be lacking. The competitive nature of women in these fields can sometimes hinder mutual support and cooperation.
A lack of support for women in professional settings can diminish ambition and lead to dissatisfaction with career decisions over time. The absence of mentors and role models who have encountered similar challenges can make it harder to persist in certain situations.
Understanding these challenges and the advantages of actively designing your life should prepare you to embark on this significant journey of self-reinvention. In the next section, we’ll explore the steps involved in designing your life and how this process can help you become the best version of yourself.
➡ 7 Steps To Designing Your Life
➡ 10 Habits That Foster A Growth Mindset
➡ The Effects Of Positive Mindset On Cognitive Health
➡ How Changing Your Mindset Can Lead to Unlimited Success
➡ Modify Your Mental Habits and You Alter Your Life
➡ What is Inner Peace and Why Do We Need It?
➡ What are Positive Affirmations
➡ How Can You Change Your Way Of Thinking?
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