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Today I wanted to share some practical tips and ideas on what the experts say we should do to actually become successful - and what the definition of success should mean to us. If we find our lives lacking, then we lead broken lives, that will lead to broken health, relationships and - well - you name it. Tailor these ways to use in the areas of your life you feel are most lacking, especially to attract the love and relationships you desire if that is your main goal.
If you feel you've been spinning your wheels and not going anywhere for a long, long time, then these simple steps will help you get moving on your biggest project - your life. Carry out these steps with love, and you will see that it will heal your life by bringing some much needed positive changes to the way you live and work. Don't you think you deserve the feeling of success? Stop sabotaging yourself and believe that it can happen.
Love your life, no matter how challenging it can get sometimes. Believe that everything that is given to you is a blessing. Even if it's bad, feel secure in the knowledge that something good will always happen in the end. They say success comes after failure right? So we, too, can conquer every obstacle that comes and fight it head on. Ultimately we are all people with flaws, but if we try to make the best of everything to make life more beautiful, then that's the way our live will be.
The hopes and dreams that you have for your loved ones to live a long, healthy and happy life can be yours too. Maybe you've just forgotten that.
And sometimes, a few simple steps is all it takes to get the ball rolling. Here are 5 simple steps that might be the spark to ignite the fire that could be your life - and your love life.
Practical ways to actually change your life
- Find your passion and write it down. If you weren't working your current job, what would you be doing? Or more specifically, what do you want to do with your life? This might take a while, but you really have to think about it carefully because it will drive everything from this point forward.
When you discover your passion, write it down really big across the top of a piece of paper. Once you write it down, it becomes something real. Put it on your bathroom mirror, your fridge, your screensaver - so you can look at it everyday. Let it burn into your mind, so it never leaves you again.
Because once you know your passion and write it down, it will truly become part of your life. Passionate people attract passion! And once you start living your passion, you will inspire others to live their dreams.
Read how to discover your passion.
The final challenge is to figure how your passion can help others and add value to their lives. Once you do this, you will become unstoppable!
- Eliminate distractions and get focused. Because many people are working jobs that are different or in contrast to their passion, their free time is a precious commodity. You know, the time after work when they're typically just lounging around.
After all, you spend more than half your waking hours working. If you don't like work - and millions of people don't - then your days will seem to drag on almost forever. It's close to torture.
If you need to keep your current job to pay the bills, you have to live your passion on your time, i.e., the time after work. Your job allows you to live your passion during your free time, until you can live your passion all of the time. The problem is that everyone is so caught up on YouTube, Facebook, watching TV and talking on their cell phone that they can't focus on anything important during the time when they can be most productive.
Time is everything and every second counts. Find your magic time when you can focus best on your passion and use it productively. If you choose to live your free time with all of these distractions, then you'll never be able to take action on your goals.
Remember the sheet of paper with your passion on it? Underneath your passion, create a column for distractions that are in your life everyday. Your favourite TV shows? Talking on your cell phone? Surfing the web? What is probably surprising to you is how long the list becomes.
You need to start focusing on and eliminating each one of these distractions systematically - so that your free time really becomes a time where you can get a lot of stuff done. You need to understand that these time-stealing activities are sabotaging the very happiness that you long for in your life. Because once you become a focused person pursuing your passion, your life - indeed you - will become a magnet that attracts success in all areas of your life and your relationships.
If you really want success, this will be the easiest part of your transformation and it will happen quickly as soon as you realize how precious time really is.
- The 30 minute magic time. Now that we've determined our passion, we've identified and started to eliminate the things that distract us, we need to focus and get work done. And when someone starts thinking about their greatest passion and what they want to do with their life, they can become overwhelmed with a large project. They feel that it is too big of a challenge and that they'll never get there.
One tip that changed my life is to work on your action items, your strategies, your lists, your passion in 30 minute blocks of time. This is how I approach my writing.
To manage tasks at home or at the office, you can get a lot more done if you work in 30 minute intervals. Block off your time by using a simple timer on your phone or computer to track the time you spend on a particular task. When you reach 30 minutes, stop, and move on to the next thing. This approach forces you to be productive because you only have a very limited window to work on a task before moving on to the next one. You may have to come back around to the same task a few times in a day, but you'll always be making progress.
Write down and determine your list of action items for the day in order of priority. In your free time, start working on the top priority task for 30 minutes. Once that block of time is over, move to the next one. Because you only have 30 minutes to work on each one, you will be super productive and super efficient with your time.
Now the amount of time you block is just a suggestion, for others it might be a shorter or longer period of time, but I've found that working in this way helps me to focus on the job at hand.
- Getting real with yourself. Just like we wrote down all of the distractions that work against us, we now have to make a much more difficult list and make some serious sacrifices. We need to determine which factors, like extra expenses, could actually be hindering us in our life. We need to get realistic.
Read how to identify your core values.
Do you really need that new car? That new shirt? That new handbag. Those DVD rentals on Friday night? If you feel trapped in your current job because of all of your bills and expenses and you feel you're getting deeper into debt - then make this list. If you are unhappy with your financial situation, this will impact on your positive mindset, which will impact on your visualisations for a better life.
And you're going to have to make some tough decisions. To live your passion and change your current situation, it is going to take absolute commitment and discipline. Eliminate these extra expenses and save every penny, and do everything you can, because time is running out and no one is going to do this for you.
Another important point is, if you want to make money out of your passion, not to make the mistake to believe the old saying, "Pursue your passion and the money will follow". There are plenty of things people are passionate about (e.g., 18th century Peruvian poetry) that may be fun and interesting but have close to zero money-making potential. The trick is to pursue an interest of yours (e.g., restoring classic cars) that people will pay for.
Follow your passions to re-energise your life, but if you want to turn it into a money generator the you'll need to get real. Aristotle said words to the effect that wherein your passion intersects with the needs of the public, therein lies your vocation. My passion is writing, so I had to discover if I could make it work for me as a vocation.
Equal to discovering your passions, you have to figure out what success means to you (like you have to know what love means to you before you find it). Work-wise for me, success is doing what you love "when I want to do it". This is why 9-to-5 employment was not for me: I resented being told what to do and when to do it. I could not abide having my freedom taken away and being subject to someone else's whims at their beck and call. I don't like taking orders, and I don't like giving orders. And so I quit to become a freelance copywriter. But you have to keep it real.
The best thing is that, being self-employed, I can largely work on tasks and projects when I want to do them, not when someone else tells me to do them. However, one of the dangers of self-employment is the crisis-lull-crisis rhythm of so many businesses. So, to protect myself, I have multiple streams of income. In that way, I am always busy.
- Take action without hesitation. The last step is the most important. It doesn't matter how many motivational videos you watch or inspirational articles you read, if you don't take action you will never accomplish anything.
Taking action will also mean surrounding yourself and networking with people that can help you achieve your aims. For example, success in work for me is doing what I want to do, when I want to do it, with the people I want to work with.
By working diligently and consistently to build my copy-writing practice, I could soon pick and choose the clients I accepted. This way I could work only with people I like and respect - and only on projects that interest me.
If you're happy in job, living out your own definition of success, then that will spill over to all other areas of your life and your relationships. This isn't necessarily about accumulating large monetary wealth, or about showcasing what we can do. Remember, we are not human doings but human beings.
Don't confuse "doing" with "action" in this context, because being a "human doing" mean we are focusing on what we can do, not who we are. That's why focusing on our passions is so important, because we can act on who we are, and not simply on what we can do.
As society now stands, money is important, and collecting a lot of money is a valuable and laudable goal for some, but it simply isn't part of my personal success definition. But by all means, if you want it to be part of your success definition, go for it.
But I have a litmus test for your definition of success, and it's simple: Does it allow you to live comfortably? Does it make you happy? If you can say yes, then you are successful. At least in my eyes. And I hope in yours, too.
Yours in love,