Living Your Best Life: The Hidden Danger In Dreaming BIG
So you've got a vision board that makes you drool. You might even have short or long-term goals to help make those big dreams come true. But in all that dreaming and all that planning, have you accidentally missed out on the one thing that matters most? That's what I want to talk to you about today.
Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.
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One of my priorities inside my coaching membership is helping my clients balance big dreams with daily living, and now it's your turn to learn some of what I teach them all the time.
So what is the most important thing that I alluded to earlier?
The most important thing isn't dreaming big, and it isn't goal setting and planning (those are important). The more important thing is designing your days so you're experiencing joy, pleasure, nourishment, accomplishment, fulfillment, and meaning every day.
Because as Annie Dillard said, "The way you live your days is the way you live your life."
When you focus on your dreams, goals, and plans to the exclusion of all else, it's incredibly easy to over-schedule, overwork, and overwhelm ourselves. This leads to burnout, which is awful in and of itself. But on the way to burn out? You're not living your life. Instead, you're treating your days as a means to an end.
And if you've achieved a big goal or dream before, you know how that proverbial "end" lasts barely a hot minute, and then it's back to the grind, to the next big dream, goal, and plan - to the next string of days, weeks, months, or even years where you're treating your days as a means to an end. Your life becomes about you chasing your dreams and burning out instead of actually living your life every day.
Comment below and tell me whether how you live your days is in alignment with the life you want to be living, or is simply a means to an end.
This is the part where a lot of self-improvement and personal growth gurus would stop talking. They drop this bomb in your lap, the aha that you're not actually living your life, and then not tell you how to fix that.
If you've been around here a while, you know I'm not that kind of person. So let's talk about the how. Let's talk about designing your days so they're in integrity with the life you want to be living. To live your life with joy, pleasure, and nourishment means doing things every day that make you happy, bring you pleasure, and care for your mental, physical, and spiritual health.
This is the kind of stuff we're told all the time, right? And the mental and physical health aspect is something I talk about a lot. So that's not what we're going to focus on right now. (And don't even get me started on the systemic oppression that unjustly keeps so many people, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQA+, and fat people from being able to get their most basic needs met.)
Instead, we're going to focus on how to design your days so that you experience accomplishment, fulfillment, and meaning every single day. Because when you combine joy, pleasure, and nourishment with accomplishment, fulfillment, and meaning on a daily basis, those are the days filled with living - filled with life.
There are two elements that make it possible to design your days like that, and they are:
Aligned Work
Self-Trust
Let's talk about aligned work first. This is the kind of work that is aligned with your values, with who you are. It's just integrity with you and the life you want to be living.
But what's an important distinction to make is you don't necessarily need to be paid for aligned work. I mean, you can. That's great. That's awesome. I am here for that. That's what I'm trying to build in my own life. But if the work that you do is aligned with you and what you want to be doing and contributing to the world, you don't need to earn money from it to actually get fulfillment from that work. It can certainly help, and it's certainly very important. If you are struggling to meet your financial needs, I highly encourage you trying to combine those two things, but it's not necessary. It can be necessary for some, but it isn't always necessary.
Another thing about aligned work is it needs to be something you like to do, and we need to get really specific on the individual tasks that make up a larger body of work.
So for example, writers need to be not only interested and comfortable in actually putting words on the page, but they need to be interested in outlining, planning, editing, working with an external editor, and a line editor, and a copy editor, and publishers. There is so much more that goes into the work of being a writer than just putting words on paper.
So when you're trying to think of aligned work for yourself, you need to be thinking about the actual tasks that you'll be spending the majority of your time doing.
For example, for me, I now do video for not only this business, but also my West Coast Swing teaching business, Nerdy West Coast Swing. And I actually really enjoy making and editing videos. Those are tasks that, while they take a lot of time and effort, I enjoy doing them. It's a kind of tedium that I enjoy and I take value from.
Other things to keep in mind when you're thinking about what would aligned work look like for you is also like, what are you good at? Because if the tasks that you like doing are also tasks that you're really good at, that's a sweet spot for you.
Other things to keep in mind are what makes you curious? I really like how Elizabeth Gilbert* trends away from the idea of following your passion, but instead the idea of following your curiosity. Because curiosity is always at hand and easy to follow, whereas passion can be fickle and rarely present. So definitely find aligned work that makes you curious, that makes you want to learn and grow.
Another thing to consider when thinking about aligned work for yourself is how it helps others. In my dance business it's really easy. I help people learn how to dance West Coast Swing. And that is so fulfilling. Getting to see people learn a dance that I have loved for criminy almost 15 years now, it means so much to me to help people improve their skillset there.
And then here in my Accountability Muse coaching business, seeing people who have been stuck for years finally start getting some traction in their life, and able to have consistent routines, and to be consistently making progress towards not only taking better care of themselves, but enjoying their life more and moving towards their goals. I cannot tell you how meaningful that work is to me.
But here's the catch. If you're someone who is like I was not all that long ago, where I didn't have most of my needs met. And that meant I had no income. I was fully dependent on my partner. At that point in time, I did not have the capacity to find fulfillment in helping other people.
You know why? Because I had to help myself first.
It's... I know it's a cliché, but the idea that when the air masks come out of the ceiling when you're on an airplane, you put your mask on first, before you help somebody else. And it's the same thing with the fulfillment game. I want you to make sure that you are getting your needs met first. You feel like you have enough money, food, shelter, safe relationships. You need to focus on those first, before you can find aligned work that truly helps others.
You can combine the two. Like me, I was building my business before I was finding fulfillment from helping my clients. But once I hit a certain tipping point where I trust beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm going to reach all of my business goals, I started being able to have the capacity to feel all of the meaning and fulfillment that comes from me doing this work. And it is incredible.
But that's a really important distinction that nobody had ever told me before, which is why I'm telling you about it today.
So that's aligned work. Now, let's talk about that second thing you need to be living your life on a daily basis. And that second thing is self trust.
In this context I define self-trust as unconditionally trusting yourself to pick up where you left off on an important and meaningful project to you, or piece of work, sooner rather than later.
I used to be the kind of person... I spent almost a decade of my life not writing, and I... I am a writer. And it hurt that I wasn't writing. And I would go through this horrible cycle of like binge writing every once in a while, and then not writing for days, weeks, months, if not years in between those writing binges.
But now I'm in a place where if my routine gets thrown off for any given reason, like let's say my computer is just having a nightmare of a windows update, and I literally cannot access my manuscript that day. I don't feel derailed. I know the next day I'm going to get back to that project. Beyond a shadow of a doubt I trust myself.
Acquiring that trust to know I will keep going and that I'll do so at my earliest possible convenience? That self-trust is priceless.
Another thing about self-trust to consider: if you are ever trying to control yourself in any way, it implies that you don't trust yourself. If you trusted yourself, you wouldn't feel the need to control yourself. So self-control and self-trust are mutually exclusive concepts.
I'm just going to leave that one there because that's a doozy to take some time to unpack on your own.
As an extension of self-trust, how you build up that muscle is by making very small changes and sticking with them over time.
Even just five minutes a day will add up and create incredible long-term fulfillment and pride, and can affect meaningful change in your life.
I started writing for one hour every weekday in, I want to say 2016-2017. And that is all I did. Like I cannot tell you. The only other thing I did was be a couch potato who was horribly depressed, couldn't do anything - just wallowing in my disabled misery because I couldn't work a normal job because of my body. And then occasionally I would go out dancing because I'm a West Coast Swing dancer. And really the only thing that was keeping me sane was that dancing. I'm not going to lie, it was great for my mental health.
But that was all I did for like a year and a half: an hour on my writing every week day. That was it.
But I eventually hit that tipping point into self-trust. And once you hit that tipping point, it begins to snowball. You know, the way a snowball works is it starts accumulating snow at a faster and faster pace because the surface area of the snowball is increasing, and therefore more snow can stick to it at every next moment. And that's what it feels like with self-trust.
Once you hit that tipping point, it's all downhill from there and you gain so much more self-trust on a daily basis, as long as you keep going and you don't give up. But what's fun is because you hit that tipping point, you trust yourself to not give up and it becomes a healthy cycle that just feeds itself.
One last I want to leave you with is another idea from Elizabeth Gilbert*, and it's the idea that you have been given stewardship over this body, and this life. I just love that language about it. The idea that I have been entrusted to care for and see this body and this soul through this life. I have been entrusted with the responsibility of care.
There's something so loving about that mindset, and also freeing. It doesn't feel constricting. It's like, "Oh! I'm just here to take care of this." And I, I love that so much. So that's why I wanted to tack it on here at the end.
Now that you know the elements that make up a day full of living and of life, I invite you to whip out your journal or open a blank word document, set a timer for 20 minutes, and journal stream of consciousness on this question:
What does your ideal day look like?
And if you have any aha moments while journaling, please come back and share them in the comments below.
Now, you know why your big dreams and plans can be leading you directly to burnout via an unfulfilling and unlived life, but more importantly, you know what to focus on instead.
If after all that you're thinking, "Well, that's well and good Cassie, but I can't because I struggle with procrastination and resistance." I've got good news for you. If you struggle with procrastination and resistance to any degree, I highly recommend checking out my free Masterclass, where I teach you three mindset shifts, one simple three-step system to help you kick procrastination to the curb.
All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.
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