Written by: Lucy Griffin-Stiff, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As we begin to see the light appearing at the end of the Covid tunnel, has this period made you re-think your life?
For some, it’s been a matter of survival. For others, a period of reflection. People, businesses, and families have needed to change and adapt to new ways of life, new rules. And most of all, we’ve all had a bit of a shake-up.
It’s very easy to get used to life being a certain way and keep journeying on the merry hamster wheel of life going round and round, but if Covid has done one thing, it’s disrupted us all.
We’ve realized that things can change, and things do change. Which begs the question – is there a change you want to see in your life moving forward that’s different from what life used to be like before the Corona Crisis?
It’s very common to have that niggling feeling that something needs to change in life but to not know where to start. Or how to make the change without getting stuck. So here are 5 things you can do to get more clarity on what you want.
1. Purpose
Have you asked yourself how you want life to be and feel? If you haven’t, take some time to brainstorm how you want to live your life and how you’d like to feel each day.
Then ask yourself why.
Why do I want this?
Why is this important to me?
Is there a contribution you want to make to the world? Is there a legacy you’d like to leave behind? Is there something that you’re passionate about that would drive you to get up each day? Do you want to live a life where you can balance work and family life more easily?
If you were living your life with purpose, what would be different?
Now consider how life is right now. Can you find the purpose in what you do and how you live right now? Is there a gap between life now and the vision of purpose you brainstormed?
2. Ideal Day Exercise
Building on the brainstorm above regarding your purpose and how you want your life to be and feel, can you envisage an ideal day in the future where you’re living that purpose?
Take a piece of paper and write down if you were to have an ideal day, what would it be like? How would that day go from the minute you got up to the moment you went to sleep? What would you be doing? Who would you be with? How would you be spending your time? How would you be feeling? What activities would happen during the day?
What’s interesting about this exercise is that it helps you question your thoughts and what you really want. You may find you start writing out what an ideal day would look like based on your current habits, but when you see it written down, you might re-think it and realize you only wrote that because it’s what you’re used to. Challenge yourself – in an ideal day, what would really happen?
3. Values
Values help us decipher what’s really important to us. They help us make decisions and guide our choices.
In my book, The Create a Life you Love Journal ™ The Ultimate Life and Mindset Makeover – you’ll find an exercise that helps you discover your core values.
Unless you’ve worked with a coach or done a decent amount of personal development, you don’t often spend time doing a values exercise for yourself. We just let our values develop. And often, we don’t pay much conscious attention to them.
We pick up other people’s values as we grow up, and it’s only as we get older that we begin to challenge them or question if they are still true for us.
To do a really quick values audit, you can ask yourself:
How do I spend my time?
What do I spend money on?
Who do I spend my time with?
These questions help reveal what you’re actually paying attention to – how you’re currently living your life. The question is – are these activities aligned with the values you truly want to live by?
Do your values fit with your ideal day? Do they align with your purpose?
4. What’s working?
Another great exercise to help bring you more clarity and make the shift from where you are now to where you want to be is to ask yourself these three questions:
What’s working well that I want to keep in my life?
What’s not working well that I’d be wise to let go of?
What needs to change?
Deep inside, we know the answers to these questions. We know what’s working and what isn’t. We often know what needs to change. It’s just that fear gets in the way. It can feel so overwhelming that we don’t know where to start.
Stepping out of our comfort zone can stretch us. It can make us feel uncomfortable. That’s normal. The thing is, if we do what we’ve always done, we get what we’ve always got. So somewhere between now and your ideal day, we need to figure out what we keep, what we lose, and what we change.
5. Do the (Mindset) Work
Usually, the biggest thing stopping us from getting clear, living a life we love, and reaching our full potential is ourselves! We are masters at getting in our own way. Whether this is down to fear or our deep-rooted limiting beliefs about ourselves, we have become habitually conditioned over our lives to behave in certain ways and believe things (that aren’t necessarily true). Unless we “do the work” to free ourselves from the limits and conditioning of the past and let go of our old baggage, we’ll find ourselves going round in familiar circles and never really getting to our ideal destination.
In my book The Create a Life you Love Journal ™ - The Ultimate Life and Mindset Makeover – you’ll discover how to “do the work.” The book is a unique hybrid – part book, part coaching exercises, and part journal.
It’s time to break the rules on not writing in books because this is the book you actually “do the work” in. It’s been described as “a manual for a new life.” With 23 different exercises to complete, alongside knowledge, insight, and tools, you’ll be able to create a life you love from the inside out – if you do the work.
If you’re re-thinking your life post-Covid and would like some support, you can get your copy here.
Lucy Griffin-Stiff, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Lucy Griffin-Stiff is a global messenger of Enoughness, on a mission to help as many people as possible understand they are worthy and enough. Lucy spreads the message that the unhelpful conditioning of the past isn’t how the future needs to be.
As a life and mindset coach, Lucy works mostly with women in and around their forties to help them understand or re-find themselves, let go of what’s been holding them back, reach their potential, and design a life they love from the inside, out.
Lucy is a certified mindset coach, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) coach practitioner, Timeline Therapy™ practitioner, certified hypnotherapist, neuroscience geek, and author of The Create a Life you Love Journal ™ The Ultimate Life and Mindset Makeover.
