TIP 51
DESIGN YOUR IDEAL LIFE
Is life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves?
Before you even begin to design your ideal career, you need to design your ideal life. And before you design your ideal life, it is a good idea to play the billionaire game (Tip 22) to help you expand your thinking. Most people set goals that are much too small because they don’t believe that something bigger and better is possible. Now is the time to go beyond what you believe your current limitations are and find out what you really want to do in life. The biggest mistake people make is trying to design their lives around their careers. It really works much better the other way around. Start by designing your ideal life and then figure out what sort of career would support it.
I should probably warn you that most of my clients find that it isn’t easy to design an ideal life. I’m giving you a blank slate, and you can invent absolutely anything you want. Your ideal life is ideal. It doesn’t have to look anything like your current life. Consider these questions:
• Where do you want to live?
• Who do you want to be?
• Whom would you like to be spending your time with?
• What sort of home would you like?
• What sort of work would you like to be doing?
• What would you do for fun?
• What would a normal day look like?
Review what you wrote in the instant billionaire exercise (Tip 22), but also think more deeply about what you really want in life. Perhaps there is someone you envy? Great. Take a look at his or her life and see what specifically you envy about it. Is it a great and fulfilling career? Maybe it’s a lovely summer house on the beach? Perhaps it’s having a wonderful, loving relationships? Envy can be very useful in helping you determine what you want your own life to look like because what we envy is what we secretly want, but for some reason, don’t think we can have. It is very different from admiration. You might admire Tiger Woods’s ability with the golf club but have no interest in becoming a golfer yourself. If you don’t envy anyone, then just answer the bulleted questions above.
Now describe your ideal life in glowing and vivid detail. You can write it down in your journal or a special notebook. You can sketch, draw, or paint pictures of it. You can type it into a computer. If you aren’t much of an artist or writer, you can cut and paste.
You can even create a scrapbook depicting your ideal life and writing about it as if it were the present—a very powerful exercise. One client decided she didn’t like the looks of her own drawings—they were less than ideal, in her mind—so she cut out magazine pictures that represented various aspects of her ideal life and made a scrapbook. Next to each picture, she wrote a description in the present tense of what each picture meant. For example, one of her goals was to get married and have children, so one of the pictures was of a man sleeping in a hammock and sound asleep, cradled in his arm, was a cute little boy. There was a white picket fence, a golden retriever lolling on the grass—the very picture of domestic tranquility and happiness. She felt that this “snapshot” was a perfect representation of her ideal life. Below the photo, she jotted down some descriptive notes such as, “My wonderful husband, our son, and the family dog taking a break on a beautiful Sunday afternoon” just as if she were actually married. Two months later, she met her ideal man, and it looks like they are on the road to marriage. Have fun with this exercise. Remember that it is your ideal life—this doesn’t mean that the pictures you put in the book will be exactly the life you attain. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have this picturesque family one day either.
You get the idea. Make a scrapbook if you like or invent some other creative way to design your ideal life. It doesn’t even have to be elaborate. I took a single piece of white paper, wrote “My Ideal Life” at the top of it, and then sketched out stick figures that represented my ideal life with little notes on the side to explain what the pictures were, given my sketches weren’t very good. I had a rough sketch of a podium and lots of circles representing people in the audience, and I was holding a book in one of my stick figure hands. This represented my speaking to live audiences as a bestselling author. I had a stick figure drawing of my husband and me in bed reading books together with a little note on the side how we enjoy reading books in bed and discussing them. I had a little cottage with a fireplace and a palm tree and some waves in the background to represent a beach house where I could write. I even had a horse with a note that this was my horse and that we had stables on a ranch. I had two little children sketched in as well. There was an airplane for international travel, and I had written that I’d had $7 million (I imagined this was how much I’d need to live this amazing life). Now mind you, at the time, my book wasn’t even published, I was still working full time at the bank doing a job I didn’t like. I wasn’t even in a relationship, I didn’t have an international speaking career, and I was crammed into a one bedroom apartment in New York City that I was sharing with my cousin while I was paying off credit card debts. My ideal life didn’t look one bit like my current life, so don’t be concerned if yours doesn’t either!
About 10 years later, I was cleaning out boxes of old files I had been storing in my grandmother’s attic, and I found this single sheet of paper. I took a look at it and was astounded that I had achieved my ideal life! I was now married, had two beautiful children, was living in England, had not one, but three books published, was an international motivational speaker, had a big beautiful house by the sea with three fireplaces. I had almost everything I had sketched out with the exception of a horse ranch and the $7 million, which I wasn’t even in the ballpark of attaining. I realized that the last thing I wanted right now was horse stalls to muck out and was happy that this didn’t come to pass (you don’t always get what you wish for, thankfully!). I also realized that I didn’t need nearly as much money as I had thought to attain my ideal life, which is the good news because you probably don’t need nearly as much money as you think either. Then I wondered how I hadn’t realized that I was living my ideal life. You would think I’d have noticed somewhere along the way. Partly it is because my ideal life evolved over time. I didn’t wake up one morning with everything in place but gradually created it over time. Then it occurred to me that life rarely feels ideal even when it is. Yes, I had the two kids, but kids get sick, break their arms, and often keep you awake. Yes, I had the dream house, but the gutters needed repairing, and the lawn needed mowing. Something will always need to be done, and life doesn’t often feel ideal. But it does feel very real. An epiphany! This is another reason why it is so important to write down your ideal life, because if you don’t, you may well be living it now and not even know it. And wouldn’t that would be a real shame?
Many clients find this assignment difficult. If you are still stuck, try describing just one ideal day in your ideal life. This is an excellent exercise to help you figure out what you really enjoy doing. Start in the morning when you wake up. Where do you wake up? Is someone bringing you breakfast in bed, or are you going out for a run along the beach? Imagine that you can have anything you want; money is not an issue. Keep on writing until you have described the entire day until you fall asleep at night.
For some reason, it always astounds people that they can actually live one of their ideal days. Usually, once you experience one ideal day, you realize that you probably wouldn’t want that day all the time. Go on to the next assignment and design an ideal week. Include both play and work time. I had one client whose ideal day was to loll around on the beach sipping margaritas. She was worried that her whole life would become a waste if she started to indulge in her ideal. I asked her when she had last been to the beach, and she said it had been a few years. I recommended that she book a trip to an exotic island and get it out of her system. She did this, and after one week of beach bumming, she was bored and ready to do something else. Don’t worry, as lazy as you think you might be, most people get restless by week two and are itching to do something. We are meant to make a contribution. We need a challenge to really feel fulfilled.
Start incorporating as many aspects of your ideal life as possible into your life right now. Okay, you may not have the man and child in the photo right now, but you might be able to get the golden retriever. You may not have a maid to bring you a croissant and coffee in the morning, but you could make them for yourself. You may not be doing any traveling on the job, but you could book your next vacation to Paris and let your boss know that if the opportunity for travel arises, you’d like to be the one to go. Start making the smallest steps in the direction you want to head, and you’ll soon be there.