It’s Time To Do Life Your Way

11 May It’s Time To Do Life Your Way

Not too long ago, there was a generally accepted idea of what life should look like. 

It was something like: Get a good education, find a stable job you could stay at your entire career, get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, and have some kids.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s the so-called “American Dream.” It’s not only been featured in advertising campaigns since time immemorial, but describes to a T the lives of the past few generations. 

I think we can all agree, though, such a picture-perfect ideal only exists in the movies these days. 

And yet many people continue trying to achieve it in their own lives, only to find that, when they do, it doesn’t bring them the happiness and fulfillment they thought it would. 

Why is that? I think the primary factor is that the American Dream doesn’t allow for individuality. It doesn’t allow people the freedom to choose how they want to live their lives, or to express their unique needs and desires. 

And trying to fit into a mould such as this just isn’t cutting it for people anymore. They’re exhausted from holding up the scaffolding on a life that doesn’t feel true to them. Maybe you can relate?

But there doesn’t seem to be another way, does there?

After all, society doesn’t exactly give us an alternate option in case the white picket fence life isn’t our scene. 

So how do you go about breaking out of that mould?

You create a new one. One that is uniquely yours.

There’s actually a name for this process, it’s called life design. 

Although it’s a relatively new concept, it’s catching on quickly.

And it’s no surprise as to why. People are tired of being told how they should live, what they should want, what they should achieve. 

They want to decide those things for themselves. And that’s exactly what life design is all about. 

It’s about getting out of the passenger seat of your life and taking the wheel. 

It’s about assessing what’s not working about your life, and saying sayonara. It’s about noticing what has been working, and doing more of it. And realizing what’s been missing and making space to welcome it in. 

It involves a lot of deep digging into who you are and what you want from every aspect of your life—from relationships, to health, to career. 

It requires setting up boundaries and being firm about upholding them, even if it upsets or disappoints others. 

It’s about discarding all of the “shoulds” you’ve accumulated from parents, teachers, and society, and excavating your own dreams and desires from where you’d buried them along the way. 

The process of designing your life may not always be a cakewalk, but I can tell you that it’s worth it. 

It’s worth it to wake up every morning and look around at your life and know that it’s exactly the way it is because you chose for it to be. 

It’s worth it because this life is yours to live for YOU. And that’s about the best reason of any. 

Published at Joy & Co.