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Living Life: The Problem Isn’t Not Knowing What You Want to Do …

January 30, 2012 by Liz 12 Comments

(Updated in 2020)

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

Do You Have It Backwards?

Every day we wake up to the time of our lives.

When life is going well, it’s easy to take the day with a flying start. But that second that the ground starts to freeze over. The bed starts to seem warmer and our feet can get a little cold. That’s when we need to be invested. We need a meaningful reason to get up and make progress.

It takes a strategy to live a life that isn’t just passing time.

  • Don’t try to rule the climate, but use the opportunities it holds. Enjoy when the sun is warm. Fill your sails when the wind is going your way.
  • Study the terrain to choose the most efficient, least dangerous roads. Highways weren’t made for bikes. Cars don’t belong on train tracks.
  • Enlist help and advice from those who have gone before us. Ask the people who’ve been where you’re going.
  • Employ systems that keep things going without reinventing what works. Maintain what supports you.
  • Have a mission to reach a vision on the horizon. Decide where you’re going before you go.

The last one is critical to a life strategy.

We live as if at the end of our life, we’ll know …

    • who we are.
    • what we’ll do.
    where we will end up.

Somehow we have it backwards. We’re supposed to decide those things first. Then we can start down our path.

What’s Most Critical to Living Life?

Strategy is a realistic plan to advance by leveraging opportunity over time. In order to advance you have to know who you are where you’re advancing to.
Like any business, a life with a strategy has a better chance to succeed.

What Other People Don’t Know

If you ask opinions about what you should do, other people will have plenty of them. Don’t wait for other people to tell you. They don’t have to live your life. They won’t lose if you waste time chasing down a future that isn’t yours, and they won’t mind if you give up your life living it for them. Even the most well-meaning people run the risk of giving you advice better suited to them than to you.

Who knows more about you than you? Who ever will? You know what you think, dream, desire, and need. You know what you fear. You know what it would take to move you from here to there. Listen to that inner guidance system that tells you when you’re doing well, you’re learning, you’re doing something well. The one person who has a vested interest in how your life turns out is you.

Vision and mission are critical to living life. They are identity, intention, and direction. Without them, how will you wisely invest your time? It’s a shame to waste a whole life.

How do you know? How do you decide?

Rarely is the problem not knowing where we want to be. It’s admitting that we’ll have to make a commitment to get there.

Decide and Commit

Decide. It matters less what you decide than that YOU decide and that you make a commitment to that decision. Listen to the truth you know about yourself, decide what the purpose of your life will be, and know why that’s meaningful to you. Pick a vision the future that would be the best use of what’s been given you — your talents, your skills, your personality. What should you be doing more of to use them well? What life that would use your skills, the problems you can solve, and the value you have always brought to the world? Decide on a future – a vision — and make it your quest — your mission — to get there. In other words, choose to be your best self and make a commitment to that.

You can always decide to adjust your decision.

Vision is who we’ll be and where we want to go. Vision is the context that gives each life decision intention, direction, and identity. Mission is the compelling reason that will get us there. Mission makes every minute and every decision worth getting up and investing in. Vision and mission turn living into a meaningful cause worth a life’s campaign.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere you never intended to be.
If you don’t know why you’re going, you’ll give up when the smallest obstacle appears.
Set your intention on a vision that describes your best identity — down to your DNA.
Put your head, heart, and feet into your mission. Make it a quest. Nothing will stop you.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Every day, every hour, every minute will keep passing whether you know where you’re going or not. Wouldn’t you rather own the hourglass than sit on the sand as it drops through? You have to live your life. Shouldn’t you be the one who decides what it will be about?

Have you got a strategy to live a life a that isn’t just passing time?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I was researching in my archives when I came across this post. I thought I’d update it. But it was hours later and I’d almost rewritten it totally. So on that note. I offer you this new, old post — published once, in another form, January 30, 2010.

Filed Under: Business Life, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: life., LinkedIn, living life, Strategy/Analysis

5 Ways to Take the Work Out of Work and Connect with Life

September 6, 2010 by Liz 17 Comments

Some Folks Have All Fun

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Ever notice that some of us live, some of work to live, some of us live to work … and one or two of us seem to BE a piece of work?

Other living species don’t think their way into this problem. Why should we?

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Once upon a time there was a moment when the idea of work didn’t exist. Life was life and we lived it. Some of us only experience that in early childhood. Some of keep that secret with us and carry it through every moment we’re here.

5 Ways to Take the Work Out of Work and Connect with Life

It’s no secret that we’ve added negative connotations that bend the word work to define only some energy we invest or that work is often described as the opposite of play. And it’s fairly obvious to most of us that we often invest as much or more of our energy in things that we call something other than work … love, passion, sports, games, hobbies … life.

We’ve managed to disconnect what we call “work” from our life.

We frame it inside the idea of work-life balance — as if we could separate the working part from the living part and put each on the other side of a scale. Even if we could segment our lives so dicretely, each of us seems have a different definition of which exertion belongs in which category on which day.

The “who” of “Who puts the work in work?” is us. It follows that we’re the ones who, in the same way, can take the “work” out of work and get on to being fully connected to every breath that we take.

Here are five ways that I connect with life.

  • Connect to the passionate you who likes being alive. Many people say that difference between working for a living and a labor of love is passion. Find your passion for life, your joy at humor, your original curiosity and the thrill at knowing that not all is in what we see. Keep positive knowing that the only time and behavior that you can master or change is your own. Whatever happens is life. We can we see it as work or some fabulous puzzle that will improve our skills, bring new ideas, and unlock possibilities.
  • Connect with the passion of people who add positive energy to your life. When we’re passionate about what we’re doing, what we do seems worth every bit of energy it takes. We attract people who see the upside of what they’re doing too, even when what we’re all trudging through the mud in the rain. Notice the positive people. Connect with them in ways that bring more positivity into whatever you’re doing.
  • Connect to the “want to” of everything. If what you see is work, change the way you’re seeing it. Create a new view. Look to the outcome that is the payoff for what you’re about to do. It may not be fun to mow the lawn or pay the bills, but the feeling of accomplishment when it’s done is one worth savoring. Go for the gold and enjoy what that it takes to find it.
  • Connect to your ability to move when enough is enough. If the situation or is more work than it’s worth, move it out of your life. What we’re doing right now is what we want to be doing or we wouldn’t be doing it. Just as nature abhors a a vacuum — we don’t stay in situations that don’t payoff in some way. When the work gets to be higher than whatever used to be the payoff, we stop talking and move on. If you’re bored, uncomfortable, or feeling like it’s work to be you, move. Do something, one thing every day to move a little closer on where you’re going.
  • Connect with the power to experience and respond to humanity with humanity and life with life. Be a beginner constantly improving your “life in progress.” Joy, peace, anger, sadness, illness, and disastrous events — none of these are work — but the way we respond to them and hold on to them sure can be. Humans are hard-wired to be deeply inspired. It will draw people to you who want to do the the same. Make it your quest to be on a mission to improve things and to leave people who’d rather complain talking to themselves.

It’s the way we connect to our life that determines what we value, who we give ourselves and our time to, and what we consider work or fun. Connect to your life. Aspire (breathe toward) with intention to get closer to the people and ideas that invigorate and energize you.

As we live for the people and the moments that fuel us, life becomes simpler, easier, more fun — even when it’s not. We connect more deeply to the people we value, to the world, to ourselves and to our dreams.

Suddenly we find it’s never been a problem of finding a balance between work and life, but simply a problem of connecting and savoring the time of our lives.

How do you take the work out of work and connect with life?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Related:
The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life
How to Be Alive and 10 Ways to Celebrate It!

Have you read the Liz Strauss Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation?

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Filed Under: Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, connecting, LinkedIn, living life, relationships

Do You Talk Yourself Out of Living Life?

January 8, 2008 by Liz 24 Comments

(Updated in 2020.)
Photo by Uljana Maljutina on Unsplash
I’ve been thinking  about subprime living.

At times in my life, in yours too I’d bet, a brighter future sits on the horizon. We look. We imagine ourselves in that future partaking of the what ifs and the could bes. We see the how to happiness, but don’t believe in it.

Then we talk ourselves out of living, using worn words like greener grass and harder they fall. We reign in our egos and close our eyes. Birds and airplanes spend time in clouds. Satellites and comets spend time with stars. We are people. We walk on sidewalks and wood floors.

We say we want. We say we will, and we’re invested. Yet we stop short of determination. We listen when others say, “No, don’t go.” We tell ourselves the reasons we’re wrong to try. While underneath, our fear is that we’ll fail and lose everything, that the brighter future won’t be so bright.

Thinking What we have is better than nothing. is subprime living. Not losing is no where near the same as a win.

Do you talk yourself out of living life?

Be determined. Bet on yourself. Live life. Live the prime of your life.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Filed Under: Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: how to be happy in life, how to happiness, Ive-been-thinking, living life, Liz, prime-of-our-lives, tart living

The How to Happiness – Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

January 26, 2007 by Liz 173 Comments

(Updated in 2020)

Photo Credit: Liz Strauss

Everyone Gets the Same 24 Hours

“I need to get a life.”
I want to start a new life.”
“Tell me the how to happiness.”

You don’t need to get a life, you’ve already got one.

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.

What do you think of when you read this sentence?

 

It was the time of my life.

We don’t say that often enough.
What would it take for you to live life saying that?
Isn’t that idea the how to happiness?

The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Life

Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it.
Here are the top 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 to start a new life every morning. Plan one thing you will do today 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. Choosing what fuels you is how you start over in life.

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.

These are the top 10 ways to start living life.
It’s not starting your life over. It’s claiming the life you have and living it.
It’s claiming the how to happiness.

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. I choose to live life saying that …

I have the time of my life.

You’ve already got a life too. Are you living it?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Filed Under: Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: bestof, get a life, happiness, how to happiness, live life, living life, Liz, Liz-Strauss, start living, start over, starting over, time of my life

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