How To Live Life
Everyone Gets the Same 24 Hours
Life — it's what we do between the time we get here and when we go. We only get one, and despite what other folks might suppose, it's ours to determine what to do with it.
We don't measure life in hours and minutes. We measure life in
memories and moments.
The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it.
Here are 10 Ways to get a life and start living it.
1. Give yourself permission to claim your life. That's right — permission. You're the only one who can decide you are in charge of
your life. Even though it feels like you're not supposed to do so,
turn off the internal editors, the old tape recordings, the "shoulds,
have tos, and musts", and the rules that didn't come from you.
2. Define what living means to you. It's not as hard as it sounds.
Just picture yourself at the end of your life looking back. What words
would you want to describe how you lived your life and who you are as a person?
3. Stop living in the future. Every time you think "someday" or "when
I have time I will," stop. Ask yourself, "Why not now?" Think about
this sentence, "I always wanted to, but never did." Start doing the
things you always planned to do. Choose your life every morning. Plan one thing you will do that day to feel alive.
4. Surround yourself with people who enjoy living. They've obviously
discovered how to have a life and live it. Why not hang with the pros?
5. Lay down your pain and your anger. Carrying them around makes
living harder and less fun. It doesn't bring anything, and it steals a
lot.
6. Let the losers win. Don't argue about things that you don't care
about. Unless there's some real threat, let the folks who have
something to prove, prove what they need to. Why waste your living
time trying to fix what's wrong with them?
7. Create energy. Jump to forgiveness and love, then figure things
out. Most conclusions we jump to are not only wrong, they're negative.
Negative conclusions lead us to prepare a defense. Being on the
defensive isn't living. It's hiding from life.
8. Learn the physical symptoms of when your head and heart become
disconnected. We know when we're having a knee jerk reaction, when we're feeling sorry for ourselves, and when we're being blind to
people's feelings. We can remember how it felt physically while we
were behaving badly. Get to know those symptoms, and you can stop the behavior. Living life will feel a whole lot safer because you won't be in danger of shooting yourself in the foot.
9. Take small risks that push your boundaries in every way. The joy of
life is packed in learning that matches our skill set. When we stretch
just a bit intellectually, physically, emotionally, we grow. Living is
growing. Even your cells know that.
10. Value and protect the people and the places you care about. A job
isn't a life. It's just a part of one. Let the people you care about
come first, and let everyone know that you do. Re-read numbers 1 and 2.
We come into life with whatever we've got. It's ours to do with. It
took me a while to figure that out — that my life isn't just what
happens to me, that I could take hold of it.
