Redefining the Ideal Life

    Are you ready to think about how to redefine your hopes, dreams and actions to achieve the ideal life?  In this year’s first issue, I asked you to consider four questions as you read each issue:  (1) What is your ideal life?  (2) What are you willing to do to live that life? (3) What are you willing to give up? (4) How might you see your ideal life differently?  If you thought about these questions, you might have made a list of things that you could do differently.  That’s a helpful exercise, because you force your mind to contemplate all the different ways you interact with your working world.  But there is actually a simple, but difficult way to address these questions.  If you’ve done some pre-work based on previous issues of this ezine, you’re ripe to take the next step.

Desire for the Ideal Life

    If you’ve decided to strive for the ideal life, you may realize how complicated and difficult it is to achieve; it has countless factors in your work alone:  the kinds of people you want to work with, the job you really want to do, and the recognition that you want to receive.  You may also realize these working circumstances are constantly changing, and the “ideal” keeps shifting and moving, just out of reach.  There’s nothing bad or wrong about dreaming about the ideal life, but in these circumstances you might try a shift in perspective.  Rather than think it’s possible to have a permanent vision for your ideal life, allow the vision to be more like a flower, that peeks out as a bud, blossoms, dies, and falls, and then another flower will take shape and go through the same transitions.  There’s nothing wrong with the life span of a flower—it is what it is.  And if you could allow your life to flower in the same way, fully engaged, trusting that some aspects of your life will grow and mature, and others will pass away, you’ll be able to move with the flow of your life in a synergistic and nurturing way.

What are You Willing to Do?

You may think that you have to take action to lead the ideal life.  Your life, however, involves more of a self-reflective process rather than taking action in the world.  First, you can open to your life as it unfolds with curiosity, even while you are disgruntled with a new task or policy or person.  Next, you can stop fighting the unavoidable; this means stop struggling with the things that happen that you can’t change.  It’s not that struggling with others’ decisions is bad, but it sure takes a lot of energy.  When you notice you’re disappointed with a decision, just notice what you are doing, and go on to the next task or thought process, and do this as often as you need to.  After all, your fighting any of these things will not change them.  And finally, notice how often you simply want what you want!  I’ve actually developed a sense of humor about how I frequently want things a certain way, and wish for them even though I have no power to change or achieve them!  Rather than spend a lot of time being frustrated, I’ve gotten better at noticing and acknowledging my frustration and, again, moving on to something else.  I understand that obsessing about something negative can be strangely satisfying (usually because I spend time in my imagination thinking about how I’m smarter or more competent than someone else), but I’ve decided to spend my time on more productive and rewarding tasks.

What Do You Need to Give up?

The hardest thing you have to relinquish is the illusion that you can control everyone and everything around you.  This reality doesn’t mean that you are helpless, either.  There are just times when it’s beneficial to realize that you can’t control everything.  But that also means that you have to admit to yourself how vulnerable that makes you.  I’ve found that the more I acknowledge my vulnerability to myself and recognize my fear and anxiety in these situations, the more I’m able to be genuinely engaged with others, build better relationships, make better decisions, and feel more satisfied with all three.  To be able to give up control and allow one’s self to be open and vulnerable is a challenge.  But one well worth exploring.

Leading the Ideal Life

So just what can you do to lead the ideal life?  In one sense, you can do all the things I talked about in earlier issues.  But from another perspective, there’s nothing to do.  You only need to be willing to greet each day of your life as a mystery novel or fairy tale (whichever genre speaks to you!)  As you open to each “chapter,” moment after moment of your life is revealed.  You will like some of them.  You will hate some of them.  But they are all your precious life.  The key is to embrace all of it, your resistance, as well as your joy about what occurs, the difficult and disappointing times, and the fun and rewarding times.  So your life gives you the opportunity to fully investigate, participate in and embrace all of it.  I hope you will