Living the Best Life
Living the best life possible means different things to different people. When you think about what it means to live your best life, what immediately comes to mind? For me, all of my ideas about a good life changed twenty-five years ago. While up at college pre-season training for my Division 1-AA, University Alpine Ski Racing Team, I received major news that would change and impact my life and my future forever. For five harrowing months, I readjusted my priorities, seeing doctors & specialists, red-shirting the year off from my Varsity Team, wondering when life would ever return to normal, and realizing how much I despised pity from anyone. In those moments of life hanging on a thread, what living the best life really meant for me suddenly became crystal clear.
Do you have a strong sense of what you want out of life, but find it challenging to achieve that in the face of your day-to-day responsibilities and stresses? Recent research has revealed 12 Goals that can help us strike this balance between the big picture of what we want out of life and navigating everyday distractions. But first, it’s important to figure out what living your best life means to you. I came to the conclusion that there were 3 Questions to Ask About Living Your Best Life.
1. How Am I Experiencing Love?
2. How Authentically Am I Sharing My Unique Gift?
3. What Am I Grateful for?
Love- I became aware that love—both my ability to receive it and share it—matters more than anything else.
Gifts- We each have a unique gift—the unique energy and essence that is who we really are. Each person has a unique gift 🎁to offer that no one else can or ever will again. Living our best life means finding creative ways to share our best selves, whether in our work, our creative hobbies, or simply how we live. I knew my gift would be to pursue healing others, providing counsel & offering solace and support in times of challenge/loss/strife, while teaching resiliency & showing others the true strength they were capable of manifesting for themselves.
Practicing Gratitude- It’s easy to focus on our worries and anxieties or the distractions of everyday life. However, when we remember our own mortality, we realize that each moment is a gift. What matters most in the big picture/perspective of our lives is very personal. However, figuring it out is how we uncover our formula for living our best lives.
What’s Distracting You From Living your Best Life?
Today, my morning started before the sun came up. Emails, texts, stock alerts, coffee, exercise, and making beds followed by breakfast for my children learning remotely. All things calling my attention, including requests from my friends, family, and coworkers, as well as news alerts about the latest global crisis. And that’s not even mentioning our 2 pups, who were asking to be taken out for their morning walk.
A dilemma most of us struggle with is time. How do we manage our time so that our lives reflect what matters most? These 12 keys can help us focus, live with greater purpose, boost our happiness and well-being, and authentically connect with the unique gift we each have to share, even in the face of day-to-day distractions.
1. Identify What Matters Most to You
It shouldn’t take a medical-crisis to reconnect with what matters most. Sometimes, just a few moments of asking tough questions can help you do the same thing. What matters most to you? If you learned you only had a limited time left, what would you want to do with your time?
2. Practice Being Present
Research has revealed that a simple way to be happier and live your best life comes from developing the ability to fully experience each moment. Mindfulness is the ability to observe the present moment without judging it. Mindfulness has many impressive benefits for physical and mental health. Cardiac patients who were taught mindfulness skills experienced lower blood pressure and increased happiness. Mindfulness on the job has been proven to reduce exhaustion and increase job satisfaction. Mindfulness is not difficult to learn and is something we can do in a moment. Right now, take a deep breath, and notice how the breath feels as it is going into your lungs. How does your body feel? Are your muscles stiff or relaxed? Do you feel warm or cold? Use your five senses to describe your immediate experience. This is all it takes to be fully present.
3. Savor the Moment
An incredibly powerful technique that I’ve been coaching my clients to do and have been doing in my own life for several decades is something I call Grounding yourself in a Grateful Moment. This is very effective when it comes to living our best lives. Here’s how you can create a Grounded Grateful Moment, right now. *First, become present by looking around and noticing what is happening. *Then, find something very specific that you are grateful for—perhaps the way the sun feels on your face, feeling safe, hearing beautiful music playing in the background, etc. Combining mindfulness with savoring the moment is powerful, and the benefits are backed by research. Doing these things together can improve your psychological health and life satisfaction.
4. Listen and Have Empathy
Living the best life has a lot to do with the level of trust, empathy, and intimacy we have in our relationships with those we love. Being a good listener helps people feel as if we really care about them. It also helps us to understand what they need and want, so we can be of service and come up with positive solutions. Author of Nonviolent Communication, Marshall B.Rosenberg, PhD. says, “observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.”
5. Learn to Flow
One of the most powerful ways to connect with our true selves and experience positive emotions is through flow. Flow is like mindfulness in action. Flow is when we are so engrossed in what we are doing that we get into a zone and stop thinking about anything else. We can experience this when playing an instrument, playing a sport, creating artwork, writing an essay, reading a book, etc. Being in flow increases our happiness, helps us reach optimal performance, and boosts our creativity.
6. Hit the Reset Button, Often
Sometimes, life sends us curveballs we aren’t prepared for. It’s important to know how to get back to the center—to who we are and to reconnect with our goals and priorities. If you ever find yourself feeling off-course or negative, imagine hitting a pause button. It only takes a minute to re-focus. Some great tips for resetting include stretching, taking a deep breath, setting goals or intentions, and then beginning again. Knowing how to reset our energy is important when it comes to navigating minor distractions and major life changes for personal growth.
7. Be Self-Aware
There is a saying that awareness is the first step to healing. Sometimes we are so busy in life that we don’t take time out to hear our inner voice, which can have negative consequences for living the best life possible. We can also become blind to destructive habits that can have negative long-term effects on our well-being. When we prioritize getting to know ourselves, we gain information that can be extremely helpful in changing our lives for the better. If self-awareness is something you want to improve, consider working with a therapist or coach, journaling, meditating, or regularly sharing from a deep place of honesty with a friend who wants the very best for you.
8. Comfort Yourself
Self-awareness is great, but what we do with that awareness is even more important. Many of us have learned to be very hard on ourselves and self-critical in the face of challenges or aspects of self we would like to change. However, research shows self-criticism can have a very negative impact on our health, well-being, and the quality of our lives. The good news is, self-compassion and the ability to reassure ourselves can be learned and can lower our risk of depression, anxiety, shame, and stress. Next time you find yourself being overly self-critical, try reassuring yourself, visualizing comforting and calming images, or imagining being comforted by a deep understanding, accepting, and empathetic friend.
9. Do What You Love
The benefits of hobbies and doing what we love during our free time have been shown to improve our well-being and reduce stress. When we enjoy something, we are more apt to do it often. The more often we practice something, the better we become, and that can also act to boost our sense of well-being, confidence, and success.
Activities we love are also those that can help us experience flow, which improves our happiness and can provide a direct experience of who we really are, our unique gift, and our true self. Shortly after my medical-scare, I resumed athletics by choice, by will and by power of perseverance. I took a two-month trip that summer and traveled to the South of France, followed by the French Alpes, coaching more than 50 children at an outdoor adventure & ski racing camp on a glacier. Not only did we prioritize training slalom gates and doing dry land plyometrics, but we also discussed our hopes and dreams, including what we envisioned for our futures. The joy on all of our faces, when I look back at those pictures, showed me that even the act of thinking about what we love to do can be a game-changer. *Consider your own passions and what you love to do in order to find one of the 🗝️keys to start living your best life.
10. Develop Routines and Positive Habits
One of the reasons the small stuff gets in the way of our big picture goals and intentions is that we haven’t established routines and positive habits. Routines can help us cut through the clutter, reduce distractions, and more easily accomplish all the little things that we all must do to survive, such as pay our bills, make our meals, wash and put away our clothes and dishes and yes, empty our email inboxes. Research shows that the better we are at creating routines to take care of our personal lives and health, the better our health and well-being.
11. Move Your Body
Exercise is an important key to staying healthy and happy and reaching your full potential. Research shows exercise can prevent depression, limit long-term illness, improve our moods, and increase our longevity. We now know that it’s not only exercise that matters, but also how we hold and move our bodies when we are going through the motion of our lives, including working at our desks. Recent research shows that simply sitting up straight can make us more likely to think positive thoughts about ourselves and what is possible for our lives.
12. Spend Time in Nature
One of the best ways to live our best lives is to spend time in nature. From the benefits of vitamin D from sunlight, to simply getting outside of our own world and connecting with something greater, the benefits of nature are well-established.
Final Thoughts
Living our best life requires knowing what matters most to us and reflecting this in what we prioritize in our day-to-day. The good news is, with intention and focus, small changes can make a big difference. Which of the 12 Goals for living your best life resonates most with you? Which do you think has the greatest potential to change your life for the better? 🗝️When we feel distracted or off-course, all we have to do is remember that each moment is a gift.🎁 No matter how far the anxieties or distractions of our lives have taken us from where we want to be, it only takes a moment to reset, shift from distraction to gratitude, remember what matters most, and begin again!
