
Building a life you love isn’t easy, but it’s damn sho’ worth it. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. How do I know? Because for the first time in a long time, I can actually say I love my life. No, it’s not perfect and no, I don’t have everything I want, but life is good. In order to do it, though, I had to be deliberate about it. While I don’t have all the answers, here are a few of my observations about building a life you love:
Love Yourself
In order to build a life you love, you first have to love yourself. You can’t make the best decisions for yourself unless you love yourself. How can you have your best interest at heart when you’re not operating from a place of self-love? Building a life you love starts with a foundation of self-love.
Know What YOU Want
You have to know what you want in order to build it. How much of what you say you want is what you want versus what society has conditioned you to want? If it’s not what you want, when you get it, you won’t love it. You can’t build a life you love based off what someone else says you should want. Get to know yourself, know what you want and build from there.
Don’t be a Follower
You can’t build a life you love following someone else’s blueprint. You’re a unique individual so why would you believe copying and pasting someone else’s life is going to make you happy? Trust me, it won’t. In the past, I use to listen to experts give their advice on how to do x, y, z and would follow their advice to the letter. I’d be so frustrated when following their recipe didn’t yield the results I expected. When I stopped following what everyone else was saying and started doing me, life started to become sweeter.
Feels Good vs. Looks Good
Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it feels good. I like to refer to this as the IG effect. If your life doesn’t feel good, there’s no way you can love it. Social media has given us all a glimpse into other people’s “lives”. Everybody seems to be having such a good time, don’t they? Looks can, however, be very deceiving (hell, just look at some of these filters as evidence). A life you’ll love will feel good. Whether or not it’ll look good on the ‘gram isn’t important. When you love your life, you’ll be too busy living it to care about how it looks on social media anyway.
Becoming Who You Need to be to Get What You Want
What if I told you that you have to become whom you need to be to get the life you want? I make this statement from a place of experience. Ever since I was a child, I had a vision for my life. Being the ambitious person that I am, I pursued my vision wholeheartedly. Despite my best efforts, however, things weren’t coming together – financially, relationally, career wise, etc. I had to stop and do a deep dive into my life to find the answers. To be honest, what I found was that I had character issues, and I wasn’t making wise financial or relationship decisions. When I actively began to work on those and other areas of my life, things began to come together. My career situation improved, my financial picture got better and I attracted better relationships. If any of these things had happened before I worked on myself, I would’ve absolutely ruined everything. Sometimes the only thing standing between you and a life you’ll love is you becoming who you need to be in order to handle it.
Clt + Alt + Delete
Almost every building project is going to require some demolition. Building a life you love isn’t any different. There are going to be areas you need to take more control over and things you need to delete all together. The things you need to delete could come in the form of habits, relationships, etc. It’s impossible to build a life you love when the space is being taken up by things that don’t serve you.
It Won’t Happen Overnight
Our instant gratification society has spoiled us into expecting everything overnight. In reality, however, it doesn’t work that way. Anything that’s built to last takes time, including a life you’ll love. Going through life we’ve absorbed so many negative thoughts, bad habits and experiences. Not to mention the bad advice we’ve taken. It takes time to unpack and unlearn all those things before starting over. So, stay the course, be patient with yourself and keep building. Building a life you love won’t happen overnight, but it will happen if you don’t quit. I’m a living witness.
What advice do you have about building a life you love? Drop a comment below.