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Do you feel like you’re getting nowhere in life? How can you make a change that will improve your life forever?
You may know what you want out of life, but it can be hard executing it. Luckily, we have different ways to start living in alignment with your values and make changes to your life.
Below we’ll look at three rules for learning how to make changes to your life.
1) Set Life Rules
Want to know how to make changes to your life? Brianna Wiest (The Mountain Is You) says you must create life rules that will help you live in alignment with your values. These rules should represent personal commitments that you believe in and that will shape your life in the long term. For example, if you have a life rule to cut ties with people who regularly make you feel bad, you’ll live a life surrounded by positive people who encourage you to be your best self.
Life rules will encourage you to continually live in alignment with your values, and help you overcome barriers that may cause you to stray from your intended path. Living by your rules will ensure that you’re happy and always progressing toward the best version of yourself.
Making rules around all your values might be overwhelming, and having too many values may restrict your ability to commit to the things that are most important. Try choosing the two most important values on your list and prioritizing them, as Brené Brown recommends in Dare to Lead.
2) Align Your Goals With Your True Self
One way to commit to living your values is to choose goals that are important to you, and therefore feel more meaningful than the goals other people expect from you. Focus on the following three areas to set appropriate goals.
Focus Area 1: Enjoyable Activities
Neil Pasricha (The Happiness Equation) suggests that one way to choose meaningful goals is to consider what activities you do purely for enjoyment. From there, increase your happiness by brainstorming additional ways to pursue these activities in different contexts or with different people. For example, if you enjoy writing, start a blog or join a writing group to create more opportunities to experience happiness.
Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project) builds on Pasricha’s advice: Once you’ve pinpointed your most enjoyable activities, set an ambitious goal that requires you to actively engage in these activities to succeed. Having goals that tie directly to what you feel passionate about will help you prioritize time spent on your interests and create more opportunities for similar uplifting experiences. For example, Rubin’s love of writing inspired her to set the ambitious goal of completing a 50,000-word novel in one month. Her work on this goal led to a number of opportunities that now allow her to pursue her love of writing as a full-time career.
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- Over a dozen experts' advice on living your best life
- How to understand what's making you feel unhappy
- Actionable steps for living a more meaningful and happy life
