Fall in Love with Your Life

I have the daunting task of speaking on this subject next Tuesday night. I have over 30 people registered for a free workshop on this very topic and while I am working on that presentation I have paused to organize my thoughts.

90 minutes to reveal the main themes of a better, happier, more meaningful life.

When I speak it is important to me that I give information that fulfills the promise of the topic, it must be useful, practical and easy to understand. I hope to inspire people to look at something in a new way and to take some new action towards their own objectives. If I can do that with just a handful of people, I think it is well worth the effort.

In creating this season’s topic: Fall in Love with Your Life my inspiration came from the same source that made me chose to work with people in the first place, rampant unhappiness, boredom and dissatisfaction. It is troubling how many of us are just not that thrilled with our lives. How common it is to center our conversations around a litany of complaints or declarations of boredom and frustration.

I think the reasons for this are complex and many, but In large part it is how we are raised. Growing up well behaved can dampen our passionate nature and encourage us to focus too much on the business of life.We are told to save the good stuff for when we have time, have finished all the important stuff or as a reward for being good. Since our upbringing typically also leaves us feeling not good enough we can get in the habit of severely limiting the things we most enjoy since we don’t really deserve them. 

If that is not enough, our culture bombards us with ideas and items that promise happiness but hold fleeting pleasure at best. With messages of beauty and youth, money and material goods being the route to the good life it is easy to see how we get off track.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes life good and a lack of encouragement to make it a priority to figure it out. It is as if we have all agreed to wait to be happy till we are done with the business of living. We can become convinced in fact, that ideas like meaning, purpose and happiness are esoteric and flaky. 

For these reasons and others by the time we hit midlife we may have forgotten what it is we enjoy. I cannot tell you how many times I begin to work with a client over 40 that cannot answer the question of what they really want. Some of us have learned to give up, having been beaten down with disappointment and rejection we chose to play it safe. Unfortunately, safe is not a defining feature of the passionate life. We tune out due to fear and a lack of direction and inspiration making matters even worse.

But underneath it all our soul yearns for more. As much as we want to deny it it will needle away at us to seek a passionate life. Just listen to the discontent, complaints, longings and dreams and you will hear your own soul calling to you. 

So what do we need to love our life?

 I think we need to pay more attention to how we feel rather than what we think. The brain loves logic, it’s focus is on safety and tasks that must be done. The soul is emotion, experiences and connection. While both are important it is our soul that will lead us to a life that we love. To discover a life that you love is to learn to listen to yourself, to trust what you feel as your guide. To spend more of your time on the business of the soul than the preoccupations of the mind and to embrace it. To love your life you must live it. Live is a verb by the way just like love.

Live a Life You Love

Reset. Stop. Remember. Reconnect to what you love and value. What makes you happy, what you enjoy, what you once dreamed of, what you are really good at.

Awareness Who you are & what you crave

Acceptance All that you are and the reality around you. Be a good friend to you.

Appreciate Everything. There is so much beauty in the world around us. Through our experiences we learn joy, strength or compassion. 

Act Do more of what you love and less of the stuff you don’t. Things will be different once you start doing different things.