There are many lifestyle blogs out there that do great work, encouraging their readers, promoting a healthy life, and taking the time to engage with their audience. This is the vast amount of content that is curated and published. That being said, almost anyone can start a blog these days, and this can give less-than-effective advice strength it likely shouldn’t hold.
One of the biggest issues surrounding ‘new age’ or somewhat vague spiritual thinking is that they promote the idea that simply wishing something will make it so. Of course, there is a place for positive thinking, affirmations, and the willingness to visualize a new path forward. In fact, those are measures that should be considered crucial in helping you gain a new lease on life. However, gaining a new lease on life is not always a total thought exercise. Often, taking practical action is the most soul-strengthening thing you can do, even if you’re not in a position to force the world to your will (nor should you want to be).
With the following advice, you’ll see how this can take place:
Writing Down Your Goals
It’s very important to write down your goals and orient yourself. Breaking those goals down into small, minor actionable tasks to pursue can help it seem much more manageable. For example, no one on this earth will lose 40kg in a day despite their best efforts. However, that’s not the goal you should be aiming for. In fact, you shouldn’t even aim to lose that 40kg. You should aim to eat within a certain caloric deficit you have calculated, and then head to the gym to try a program such as Couch to 5k each week, measuring your progress. When you hit an ideal weight, then you will have followed each day’s goals to the letter.
All of a sudden, you’ll find yourself at the top of the mountain you had previously wished to be part of. Its measures like this can truly help you stay focused and motivated, breaking the large goals into the small. However, the first step before all of this is to write something down. Otherwise, it stays as a vague idea in your head, but never something you can apply with practical and willing action. Making the goal real is the first step, and all it takes is writing a note within an app such as Evernote or a purpose-purchased notebook.
Understanding Your Direction
Orienting yourself in the right direction is important. Like we said, it’s often the smaller goals that offer you bite-sized victories, and enough of these will give you a large victory. Of course, it’s important to note that your direction is heading in the right way, as we cannot ignore the end result.
It’s all about considering short-term and long-term effects. Perhaps you decide that you wish to become a famous content creator on YouTube, vlogging your life all the way. Do you hope to engage in getting those numbers up, asking people to follow you, or purchasing fake followers to show a more impressive audience? These measures could be worthwhile, but they will distract you from following the most important step on the road – learning how to craft reliably professional content, releasing regularly, and coming up with ideas.
Remember, there is rarely an ‘easy way out ‘ in this life. This means that applying yourself to the most constructive steps requires research, but more often than not they can come back positively.
Tackling Your Weak Points
Anyone who ever ventures forward to achieve something, or to gain a new lease on life, will first be bound by their limitations and weak points. For example, it’s hard to start running 5k on a treadmill if you haven’t exercised thoroughly in two years. Incremental progress is important, but ensure you aren’t getting ahead of yourself.
Perhaps, before you even start this venture, you realize that you are quite nervous to occupy a gym in the first place. Why not head there, spend some time looking around, and book an induction? Sure, it might not be exercise just yet, but it gets your foot in the door. You’re tackling a weak point you have of always avoiding anything to do with sports, and you’ll start to familiarize yourself with it on your own terms.
We need to tackle our weak points head-on, with decisive and careful action. Let us use another example. Think of a late-middle-aged woman, who all her life has suffered from claustrophobia. She especially has this horrible fear when presented with an elevator, and will never use them. However, because mobility is becoming an issue for her, she may have to rely on them in the upcoming future, and she finds that terrifying.
Her psychiatrist may give her medication, bring her through talking therapy, or try to find the root of the fear. However, almost nothing will be as effective as calmly holding her hand as she tries to walk towards the elevator one day. Perhaps she’ll stand next to the buttons, on safe ground, for one minute. The next day, maybe two minutes. Then, when that fear is settled, she may stand in the elevator with the doors open on the ground floor for thirty seconds. Then, more.
Before long, she will no longer have that tension that exists on the periphery, because her approach to her weak point will have been direct. However, this example also illustrates that charging in like a horned bull is not always the most worthwhile option. Sometimes, it can be destructive. And so it’s important to know how you can go about things, what value they have for you, and to try and keep things simple. When you tackle your weak points, an amazing thing happens. You will gain strength, and then the new lease on life will happen almost of its own accord.
Weighing You Down
It’s hard to fly if you’re being chained to the floor. While we have described the weak points that we may have internally or as part of our personality, it’s important to consider the full range of the spectrum here. Things are not always of your own making, or circumstances are not totally yours to define. Take student loan debt, for example. This can have a real impact on your financial future, and cause you no uncertain amount of worry. However, the arrangements in which you had set up your life, be that in taking out the loan for a great degree, working hard, and pushing forward only to find that you have limited potential for a job in your field? That can be hard-pressed.
Both unfortunately and fortunately, it’s rare that people are given free handouts when it comes to a competitive position in life. However, it can be that through debt recovery or even litigation with this in mind, you can slowly pivot or wrestle free from the wet gillnet covering your motivation. This is just one example, but it’s worth inspecting your life and seeing just where else this kind of analysis may be appropriate. You will likely surprise yourself with the results.
Lifting You Up
Find that which lifts you up. No really, this is a practical step. Motivation, interest, fascination, passion, these emotions can be leveraged to help you identify exactly that which you are interested in taking part.
It might be that you are willing to take a lower salary in your graphic design role because you know that you can build connections and your portfolio from starting small, and anything will beat that boring, often quite a tiresome job in managing stocks you once had, even if that was much more money. Also, consider your external circumstances. When you wake up each morning, what does your apartment or home look like? Is it carefully organized, with careful plans laid out at your computer desk, with a post-it note of positive encouragement?
Or, do you have to spend the first moments of your day picking up the coffee cups, plates, and roasting dishes from the previous night? All of this can have an effect on your mood, and this can be quite pernicious regarding how organized and cared for you feel. These are practical, real steps to help you feel aligned with your cause. It is perhaps most felt when curating:
A Better Social Circle
The people you are closest to are part of you. If you are friends with those who do nothing, lay around, play videogames, only work odd jobs, and think that the world owes them a living, even you, a hard worker, will start to become slightly influenced by this, and it’s bad energy to have around you.
Sometimes, the best thing we can ever do for ourselves is craft a better social circle. To this end, you will be caring for your needs in the right manner, potentially helping you avoid being dragged backward from your progress.
With this long-form advice, we hope you can gain a new lease on life, through the practical action you know will have an effect.
