Tell me, in your dream of dreams – what would your perfectly designed life look like? What kind of car would you drive? Where would your house be? How many kids would you have? Would you have a dog? How many vacations would you take and where would you go? How much money would you make? Who would you be walking through life with holding your hand and what would your ultimate chosen work be? Imagine how your life would look in great detail ….
Tell me, in your dream of dreams – what would your perfectly designed life feel like? How would you feel as you moved about your days doing your life’s work? How would your friendships and intimate relationships feel? How would you feel in the day-to-day of your home, your family and your sense of self? How would the pace of life feel for you? Imagine how your life would feel in great detail ….
I know by experience that designing one’s life is a day-by-day endeavour of a million small choices that ultimately frame and construct the context of your life. It’s not ONE choice, but the sum of many and how you arrive at your current state happens either by unconscious default or as a result of many carefully curated decisions. Either way we end up creating it whether we know it or not.
I also know that the conscious creation of our life can happen as a result of one of two focusses. You can create your life based on a set of goals that you believe by attainment of these goals will leave you feeling the way you desire OR you can get crystal clear on how you want your life to feel and through this focus, choose only goals that you believe will lead you to how you want to feel (credit: Danielle Laporte)
Confusing?
I know.
Read it again because the distinction is incredibly important. Most of us set goals because we believe that the attainment of the goal will create a feeling we desire (usually it’s “happy”). And yet, have you ever reached a goal and it left you feeling anything but? You may have erroneously believed that the car or the job or the 10 lb weightloss or the 2.5 kids was the way to achieve your happiness … and then it didn’t.
So we take out the whiteboard one more time and tweaked our goal setting with the hope that we hit the desired outcome (& feeling). Maybe it worked – maybe it didn’t.
But what if you first spent the time curating a deep sense of EXACTLY how you want your life to feel – in all aspects of your life: your job/career, relationships, physical body, abundance/finance or self. Upon doing so you would have incredible clarity on how you want your life to feel across the spectrum of your life and THEN you got down to the task of creating goals. Each time you contemplated a goal in any area of your life you would then ask yourself, “If I attained this goal, do I truly believe I would feel ____, _____ or _____ (your desired feelings)?
If so, b-i-n-g-o —–> go to it. If not, tweak the goal and keep focussing on the connection of how you ultimately want to feel as you move about your life – in all areas.
That kind of specificity will likely result in a slightly (or massively) different set of goals and more importantly, a much greater chance that your life will end up feeling the way you so deeply want your life to feel. How it looks becomes irrelevant because it fits you like a custom designed glove.
#truthtelling
I know this well.
There was a point in my life where I was the woman who rather unconsciously strung together a pile of high flying goals that I assumed would make me feel “complete, content & joyful” with just the right amount of “excitement and passion”. With a lot of hard work I had attained many of my intended goals (and boy was I good at that process). Truthfully, my life became more than I could’ve ever dreamt for myself.
With one giant problem —-> I didn’t feel the way I so deeply needed and wanted to feel. My life was fast paced and high energy (not a big problem in and of itself) except that I was leaking energy all over the place trying to live out the attainment of all the things I thought would create the perfectly designed life for me.
It didn’t and as a result I felt:
*shame
*disappointment
*grief
And a huge sense of having to redesign my life from the bottom up. It’s not that all was lost or out of alignment but in the places that it was, I had a significant amount of soul searching ahead of me. And I did. One shaky decision at a time I slowly and deliberately started redesigning the landscape of my life – saying no to things that were once a yes and inching myself forward using my feelings as my compass. It taught me a lot about what I truly desire and realistically, it’s a lot less big and complicated but feels so much richer and rewarding.
Here’s the thing – no one starts out their life with a crystal clear roadmap. Somewhere along the way we all need to pause and clarify – step back, redesign and move forward. It happens and when you do so with a clear sense of what feels truly aligned with your soul, the process becomes very life affirming.
The questions can feel scary to ask – but the answers feel so good to discover.
I promise – xo
Soul Inspired Gurl
<<I highly recommend Danielle Laporte’s Desire Map. Her work has greatly inspired me & this work>>
** Clarity is a gift and a big part of my work. For an up-to-date list of my upcoming 2-day and week long Soul Inspired Retreats, please visit http://drlaurafoster.com/retreats **
