Living Your Best Life

For many, life is anything but their best, it’s about scraping by, making ends meet, trying to stay healthy, keeping the house clean, meet responsibilities of all varieties. This is how I lived my life for many years.

When I first heard the phrase live your best life, it irritated me. I was often unable to meet the basics so it felt almost as if the concept was mocking me. After years of running unhelpful patterns, I reached a point where I finally shifted enough to see through the haze. The answer is so simple, but like anything, it does take practice and consistency.

What does living your best life mean?

It means to live your truth, nothing more nothing less. The issue for many people is, they don’t quite know what their truth is. You must build self-awareness and make choices that are meaningful for you. For some, it will mean maintaining better boundaries so that you have more time for self-care. For others, it might mean to stop caring what others think and make choices based on what your needs are for once. The bottom line is, living your best life means that each day you are making choices that reflect who you truly are, and when you do that, you feel it. There is a sense of happiness, peace, and passion in your life. To follow are three steps toward living your best life. I created them to help get myself out of that stuck place and have realized many improvements from consistently practicing them.

Step 1. Discussion: What does your best life look like?

Talking about things helps define them, when you hear yourself saying things out loud it can reveal new insights. Sometimes, it takes saying it loud to fully feel, or know something. Like admitting that you aren’t currently happy. You might bring up this question to a friend and each of you talks about what your best life looks like. You can also have a conversation with yourself, ask yourself, out loud, what does my best life look like? You have to know what the goal is before you can move on to the other steps.

After discussion write down some of the main points you want to expand on. You may want to keep a notebook or journal to help with processing thoughts, feelings, and new ideas.

Step 2. Analysis: How do I change so that I can live my best life?

Once you have established what you want, the next step is to take a good look at where you are now. Maybe you are saying yes to too many requests from others. If you free up that time and energy you will have more to focus on what you really want to be doing. Or it could be that you need to train or get more education for your goal. No matter what your goal is researching it will help you know more about what changes you need to make to get there.

If you are keeping a notebook or journal brainstorm about steps you can make to change. One of the best things to do at this point is to address how you think. If you feel as if you would like to change but are stuck, chances are your mindset is the issue. Learn to observe your thoughts, catching negative ones and replacing them with something neutral or ideally positive. Sometimes you have to start with a neutral thought and build up to the positive one. If you do this consistently enough you will be retraining yourself to have a flexible mindset. This allows you to open up to your authentic self. In other words, your truth. Once you start living from this space you are taking steps toward your best life.

Step 3. Soul searching: What does your heart say about your best life?

As you start to make choices in how you think, and what you do in your life, you begin to live more and more in your truth. These choices lead to changes that create a new path ahead for you. What you are doing, in this process, is connecting with your heart, this is where your truth lies. A tip for getting engaged with your truth, or authenticity is to connect often with your heart, make it a new, healthy habit. Here’ how:

Sit quietly and let go of your busy mind, drop your awareness down into your heart, take a moment to connect. The heart is the connector to the soul or higher self, when you are focusing on it, you bring your awareness to your center or your core. Feel the shift from the mind to the heart, it is noticeable. Once in the heart try asking, is the life I am living currently aligned with my truth? You may feel rather than “hear” a yes or no answer or you may feel a wave of affirmation, or one of uncertainty. Have you ever sensed the answer someone was going to give you before they said it? It’s the same feeling. Learn how to tune into this.

As you go about your days, use the heart technique, ask yourself, is this class in alignment with my truth? Is this project, person, activity? If you get a no answer, ask what is, or think of something else and ask, when you get a yes, follow it, build on the yes answers.

Three steps, discussion, get talking (and writing) about what is true for you and what is not. Analysis, brainstorm, research and reflect on where you can make practical changes, and learn to have a flexible mindset. Soul searching, use the heart technique to further align with your truth in your day-to-day life. These three steps will help you shift from a life out of alignment to one that is your truth, or simply put, your best life.