4 Steps to Help Create a Happier 2023.
Happy 2023 to you all. I hope you had a lovely Christmas and welcomed the new year in style. I love this time of year, as it's the time I reflect the most - normally on the previous year but sometimes I use it as an opportunity to look back and remember how far I have come in life. We have all had remarkable journey's that have got us to where we are today, and its important to reflect on that and remind ourselves just how strong we are, but it's even more important not to linger in the past for too long.
It's also I time of year where i get excited and come up with my crazy ideas and goals for the next year. I always think the more crazy the goals and dreams are the better!! Life is certainly what you make of it. I'm going to share with you my process of creating and manifesting these goals. It's okay if you don't know what your dreams are or what your goals can be, this process will also help you find that.
Journal
Grab yourself a journal (ideally a fresh new one), and find somewhere comfortable or quiet in your home or my personal favourite is a coffeeshop. Spend 5 - 10 minutes answering the following questions:
What are my values?
What do I admire?
What made me excited in 2022?
What was challenging in 2022?
What does my ideal life look like?
The key is not to think about the question to much and jot down the first few things that come to mind - this is you intuition talking, the more you think about it, the more complicated things become. Your writing doesn't have to be neat and doesn't have to make sense to the outside world. Sometimes, I write in full sentences, sometimes its the odd one or two words.
Meditate Your Dream Life
In other words, daydreaming or a practice of visualisation. This is a concept which I learnt when studying Sports Psychology at university and one which I applied when playing football at international level. While the situation may be different, the principles are still the same.
Visualisation helps us to manifest ideas and behaviours. When we regularly practice visualising the things we want, our brains responds by altering our behaviour patterns and our interpretations of our surroundings in line with our imagined goal (Manifest, 2022).
Create some time during your day to practice this concept. Turn of devices and ensure you wont be distracted. Get comfortable either laying down or seated. Take a few deep breaths in through your nose before closing your eyes. Picture yourself walking along a path, allowing colours, sounds, images, smells and touch to appear in your mind. Ask your unconscious mind to create your ideal life and walk around in it for a while. What do you hear, see, touch, feel, smell or taste? It may make no logical sense, but just go with it.
Once you have a clear picture of the place you have created, bring yourself out of your daydream into the real world, wiggling your toes and open your eyes. Afterwards, write or draw what came up, or talk it through with someone – this is the point when the things you imagined begin to make some kind of sense.
Create a Vision Board
Otherwise known as a dream/action board. This process ties in nicely with the above step, and help with the visualisation of new goals, behaviours and ideas. It is essentially a collage of images relating to your idea/goals/dreams. I use Pinterest to bring together my vision board, but you can make a physical copy, by printing out pictures or cutting images from magazines and sticking on to big piece of card, a scrapbook or a place in your home that you visit daily.
Sometimes it often takes weeks, or months to complete, so don't feel you have to find a load of images in one go. Pictures can be of anything that draws your attention, take note of particular colours in the images, places, people, and what's happening.
Draw the Wheel of Life
A wheel of life looks like the cheese counter in Trivial Pursuit – which may be saying something. It’s a way of working out what might be missing in your life, but also balancing that with what you have already achieved. The following topics is ones I used, however you can change anything that may suit you:
Health (including body image)
Work and career
Relationships and sex
Friendships
Family
Finances
Spirituality
Environment (where you live, work/life balance, travel opportunities etc)
These are all in-depth topics, but the idea of the wheel of life is to think about each segment as a scale of 0-10. Relationships a five? Fill in that segment half-way with a colour. Once you have thought about and scored each segment, you can think about which areas you are happy with, and which need more work. Then you can get down to the details and set small, achievable goals. Here is a free PDF copy for you to complete.
This process mustn't feel like a chore, it's should inspire, motivate and excite you with the possibilities of a more exciting life. It's important to remember that life can be funny sometimes and things crop up or change the way with live or our dreams and ideal life simply changes and that's okay. This collective process of exploring and visualising should be a ongoing, with daily or weekly journalling, meditation practices, and finding ones self in life.
Give yourself permission to achieve what you want to achieve and live the way you want to live. You deserve it!
Happy dreaming and Happy 2023!
