How to live your best life
As a human being interested in becoming a better version of yourself, you’ve likely wondered just how to live your best life.
The thing is, living your best life is simpler than you think. All it involves is taking time to think about where you’re at and where you want to be.
The following guide will help you figure out how you can live your best life, and includes some simple, actionable steps to get there.
A note: “best life” is subjective. Please read this with yourself in mind, and really think about what it means for you to live your best life.
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How to live your best life: start with one simple question
The first step toward living your best life is to start with one simple question: “What do I want my life to look like?”
This may sound too straightforward, but this is where you need to start. How can you live your best life if you don’t know what you want that best life to look like?
I’d suggest setting aside a half hour, free of any interruptions, where you can plan out what your ideal life would look like
If there was nothing standing in your way, what would your life look like? Would you work from home, or go to an office every day? Could you spend your free time learning to paint, or crochet, or sew? Or would you move across the country or stay where you are right now?
The key is to let your guard down here. If you want to get to a place where you can live your best life, you need to make room to dream without judgment.
Observe who you are now
If you want to learn how to live your best life, you need to take stock of what your life looks like now, and how that aligns (or doesn’t) with your ideal life.
This means, after determining what your best life looks like, you need to take a good, hard look at how you’re spending your time right now.
To do this, you can go all out and create an hourly chart to track what you’re doing, or you can make a list of everything you do in a week. Both strategies work, but the key is that you need to be honest with yourself. If you know you’re spending four hours on social media each week, that needs to be documented.
It’s only when we’re honest with how we’re spending our time that we can start moving toward change.
Determine what you want or need to change
Now that you’ve done an (honest) audit of how you’re spending your time, you can start to make little changes toward your ideal life.
Using the social media example, let’s say you did your time audit and discovered that you’re spending six hours a week on social media. Now let’s say that part of your ideal life is learning to paint landscapes.
The easiest solution here is to cut down on social media use, replacing it with time spent learning to and practicing painting. In simplest terms, we want to replace parts of our current life that aren’t in alignment with our ideal life with things that support who we want to become.
How do we do that? Read below to see how to live your best life!
1. Live in line with this one question
The question we introduced at the top of the blog post is really what’s going to help you learn how to live your best life.
At any moment during the day, you can ask yourself: “Does what I’m doing right now support the life I want to be living?” If yes, continue on doing it! If not, you may want to take a step back and reevaluate how you’re spending your time, and consider what you can do differently.
2. Declutter
Although this step takes a little longer than the others, it’s still incredibly important if you want to live your best life. A lot of the time, we accumulate items—both physical and digital—that only add clutter to our daily lives. But we don’t have to hold onto these things; no one is making us!
When we talk about decluttering, it’s not limited to our physical space. Think of accounts you follow on social media, email newsletters you receive, and even relationships you have. If any of these aren’t serving you, now may be the time to remove them from your life.
3. Start a gratitude practice
Part of learning how to live your best life is being thankful for what you have in your life. Every day, we’re provided with endless opportunities to be grateful: for a beautiful sunset, or for a stranger who pays for our coffee, or for the way our pets run to greet us when we get home at the end of the day.
If you’ve never started a gratitude practice before, it’s simple: just take a few minutes out of your day to write down (or speak aloud) what you’re grateful for that day. You can have a special notebook, or you can use scraps of paper, or write it in your phone. Whatever works best for you and ensures you’ll do it every day is all that matters.
4. Be present
I know by now you’ve heard from endless sources that, if you want to live a life you love, you need to practice being present.
Being present allows us to slow down and, in line with the gratitude practice above, notice the little things that happen during the day. We also start noticing how we feel in any given situation, as well as how certain people, media, and/or apps make us feel.
Through this, we can start to weed out what serves us and what doesn’t (and can then help us declutter, too!).
5. Create meaningful connections with others
Nobody is an island—if you want to learn to live your best life, you need to create meaningful connections with others.
Part of this is being mindful and taking stock of how certain relationships make us feel. If we’re still meeting up with high school friends, but don’t have anything in common with them (and don’t necessarily find any joy in seeing them), then it may be time to move on.
The key here is to cultivate relationships with like-minded people who make you feel good about yourself and support the life you’re moving toward.
6. Create meaningful connections with yourself
Though creating meaningful relationships is important—we need social interaction!—it’s also important to create a meaningful connection with yourself.
The above steps will help you do this, but you can also cultivate a relationship with yourself by spending time alone. Use this time to do things you enjoy doing, as well as meditating and journaling to get a little closer to yourself.
Moving forward
It’s not always easy to figure out how to live your best life, but by following the steps above, you’ll be well on your way.
If at any point you find yourself slipping back into who you were before, remember to ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing right now supporting the life I want to live?” And then make the changes to redirect yourself.
Above all: be patient and kind with yourself. Change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
xoxo
Catherine
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Some more posts you may like:
How to Use Social Media Intentionally: Seven Ways You Can Reevaluate and Change How You Use Social Media
What are you taking with you? What are you leaving behind?
How to Build New Habits in an Intentional Way—and Stick to Them
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