Start living life on your terms every day

A great strategy used by coaches to create the life they want every day is to use their imagination in a specific and purposeful way. Here's how you can do it.

One of the greatest goals you can have is to start living life on your terms every day.

We think of freedom from bosses or mortgages, the power to live where we want, working the hours we want and spending time with the people who matter most. Sound too hard? Let's talk.

A lot of us get sold the idea that to live our dream is to have the external things that our community, our media platforms and culture tell us are going to make us happy.

But the lie we get sold is that the external is what makes the internal happy. We've all heard stories of people who slog away for decades and finally get the mansions and cars and holidays and money but looked around and thought, 'Is this it?'

They still felt empty inside.

Don't get me wrong. To go out and achieve is amazing, and it's a wonderful gift (and something to be grateful for) to generate wealth from the choices we make in life.

It’s just that we need to understand those external things are now what will bring us internal happiness and fulfilment.

I'm guessing Richard Branson's happiness doesn't just come from great wealth and influence and owning an island—he has a close family and has pushed his limits in business and following his sense of adventure. Same with Bill and Melinda Gates, or Oprah, or the Beckhams. They have the intangibles, not just the luxuries.

A simple and powerful way of working out how to start living life on your terms every day is the concept of your ideal average day.

It's about goal setting. But instead of goal setting for the beach house or the car, it's about goal setting for the day. The reason it's important is you can implement it right now, today.

Here's how to do it: think about how it would look if you were to live your perfect day without changing any of the resources and where you are now. I'm not talking about dreaming you'll open your eyes and be in Hawaii or have rivers of gold, but what the ideal day within your current reality is.

Choose the simple things, like how you want to feel and what you want to spend time thinking about. Think about the experiences you want to have and how you get to spend your time and the energy you bring.

Add those together and see what you create for your ideal average day.

A lot of people never think about this, and go along in life wishing and waiting and hoping for something to change outside of themselves. Even worse, a lot of people are going with whatever shows up, so sometimes they have a good day, sometimes a bad one.

When it comes to living life on your terms every day, the truth is we can choose to have a good day. And an important part of that is being more deliberate about how you wake up.

What's the first thing you think about? How do you spend the first 30 minutes of your day? Most people don't plan that vital part and they bombard their consciousness first thing by grabbing their phone.

As time management Kate Christie of Time Stylers told Sharon Pearson during an August Perspectives podcast 'Your Time Starts ... Now', “You’re living a completely reactive life because your messages, emails, everything on your phone is someone else’s to do list. It’s not yours.

"That’s people saying, ‘I want, I need, can you’ and you just lost control of the agenda within ten minutes of waking up.”

Kate is exactly right. And people start their day with stress and adrenaline, and finish with the same thing.

Maybe try writing down what kind of ideal average day you'd like to experience, then make it happen. You may realise there's a little bit of work to be done to be able to get you to the point where you consistently have the experiences you want, and it's worth doing.

It's a wonderful thing because now you have the awareness of the work that needs to be done to create the moments, the day, the life that is going to fulfil you most.

MATT LAVARS

One of Australia's leading coaches, trainers and speakers, and head facilitator at The Coaching Institute. In between mentoring thousands of coaches and leaders all around Australasia and helping others build incredible culture, Matt is passionate about fitness and music. His healthy office lunches whipped up in five minutes are the stuff of legend

Matt Lavars life coaching
Matt LavarsThe Coaching Institute