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Your life isn't a series of accidents. Everything you've done and everything you've experienced up until now has gotten you to exactly this place, this moment in time. And it's from here that you look forward. The question is, forward to what?
The answer hinges on you. Your choices, your intentions, and your actions create your destiny. Will the rest of your life be one replay after the next of what came before? Or will you act to create a life of value and purpose with the days you have left? Nobody can make this choice for you. You'll have to decide.
If you want to get something new, you need to do something new. It's that simple. You need to make a commitment to doing what matters before the final curtain call. This is how you take charge of your life. Only you can live your life on purpose. The time is now.
Below, I'd like to share a few ideas on how to go about creating a life worthy of your time. It's just a small piece, and mostly taken from a new book I helped put together called "Your Life on Purpose." See if any of this resonates with you.
Getting Yourself Moving
There's no big secret to how you create a values-driven life. You can't think your way into a life of purpose, and you can't feel your way into it either. Beliefs won't get you there, and neither will intentions or strong motivations. You need to take action. You need to get yourself moving. You need to do something with your mouth, your hands, and your feet. That's it.
What you do is what you'll be remembered for, like it or not. And what you do is a reflection of what you value, like it or not.
If you're willing to set your course in a valued direction, start with a commitment. The commitment isn't that you'll always be perfect. Nobody can live up to that. And the commitment isn't that you'll always achieve every goal or get what you want. That's an impossible dream. The commitment isn't even that you'll never break your commitments! We all fall short once in a while. The commitment is simply to go forward in new, potentially more vital ways as best as you know how.
Are you willing to make that commitment? Are you willing to risk doing something new in order to create something new in your life? This is a yes or no deal; you really can't do it halfway. You may have to start each day with a reminder about your commitments. And as you do, watch your mind trying to get you to play it safe. Minds love the familiar, even if it's bad for us.
Sure, making a commitment to do something new is risky. You don't know what may happen. But think about the risk of doing more of the same. If something hasn't been getting you closer to what matters in your life, then doing more of that seems like a huge risk-and a fairly predictable one, at that. You pretty much know what you'll get, and it isn't more of what you want.
So, right now, ask yourself if you're willing to do something new. Say it out loud. Write it down. Tell someone about it. Ask others to support you on your new path as you take one bold step after another.
You may have to meet each second of the day with your commitment, taking thousands of tiny persistent steps throughout the day, or you might take a giant leap here and there. Either way, it starts with that first step. If you made a commitment just now, then you just took a step in the service of your life. That's profound.
Honoring Your Commitments
You're the only one who can stand up for your life. When you honor your commitments to following through on valued intentions, you're taking a stand. You're making your values a priority, first with intentions, and then by following through. When you fail to honor these commitments, you won't be living your life.
The commitment I'm asking you to consider is saying "yes" to your values and "yes" to the inevitable pain. It means taking responsibility for your life. That's big, and it's important. And I mean "responsibility" in all senses of the word. After all, responsibility means that you always have the ability to respond, wherever you find yourself in the pond of life.
You have a great deal of response-ability in how you use your hands, feet, and mouth-what you create, where you go, and what you say. You have response-ability in the choices you make, the intentions you craft, and the commitments you keep. You also have response-ability in how you respond to the barriers you face on your journey. Will you meet them with willingness and acceptance, or with white-knuckled resistance?
A life on purpose isn't something you discover and then that's the end of it. It's something you create by turning your response-ability into purposeful actions that matter, and then doing that again and again. Let's take a look at some simple ideas that can help you do just that.
Set Goals That a Living Person Can Do
If you were going to climb a mountain, or just walk down a gentle path to the ocean, you'd have to take one step after another to get there. You'd have to move. You'd have to take action and do something. This is exactly what you should do when setting goals that support your values: Say, "I will," and then take a step. These are goals of the best kind.
The analogy of climbing a mountain reveals something about what makes a good goal: It needs to be something that a living person could do. And it needs to move you in space and time and in a direction toward one or more of your values.
Think verbs, like studying, reading, walking, loving, caring, working, playing, or praying. A living person can do these things. A living person can lend a helping hand, share a gift, go to a place of worship and pray. A living person can eat a salad, go for a run, meditate, read to his or her children, dance, perform musical theater, and so much more.
Also think adverbs: compassionately, skillfully, thoughtfully, respectfully, lovingly, confidently, diplomatically, dazzlingly, vitally, zealously, wisely, willingly. How do you want to be as you take action in service of your values? We can face adversity openly or combatively. We can persist with challenges resolutely or not at all.
When you focus on the verbs and adverbs, what you'll notice is that you can't buy any of them. They can't be lost, depleted, or stolen. They're choices. The capacity to do these things lies within all of us. They can be used or ignored, embraced or forgotten. It's up to you. Just remember that there are certain things that any living person can do, no matter what the circumstances. We all have an infinite capacity to show kindness and love toward others and ourselves, rather than adopting reactive anger and bitterness as our guiding credo.
The goals you set can be baby steps or giant leaps. If you take a leap, or even a small step, and it doesn't seem to work out, you can always break it down into smaller, more specific steps that are easier to do. Like learning a complex dance routine or a new skill, you may have to break larger goals down into bite-size chunks. They're more easily digested that way, and less overwhelming. We describe strategies to face behavioral barriers in Your Life on Purpose.
You can also use imagery to check to see whether you're setting goals that you can do. Imagine that you're performing your life on stage. You have a value in mind, and you have several goals or steps you'd like to take in that direction. You're committed, ready, and willing. Your task here is quite simple. You just need to show the audience that you've acted on one of your goals, that you've taken a step in a valued direction.
What would you do to show them? And as you take a step, would the audience know you're doing what you set out to do? If the answer is no, you've probably set a dead person's goal.
Avoid Dead Person Goals
Let's set a different stage. It's opening night at the Life Theater. The Dead Players, a four-person theater group known for their creative monologues and stand-up routines, are about to go on. It's the first night of the tour, and media pundits are saying it's a must-see. The show is sold-out, and you can sense the wild anticipation in the crowd. You find your seat. It's curtain time.
David is the first act. He struts out on the life stage with a goal clearly in sight. He'll show the audience how he stopped smoking. The audience falls silent, gripped in anticipation. Minutes pass with no movement or action. And when David takes his bow, all he gets is boos and hisses.
Evelyn is next, hoping to reveal a nuanced performance of her goal: being less anxious. Standing motionless, as if fixed in space and time, Evelyn practices her art. The audience stares blankly, waiting for something to signal the start or end of it all. When Evelyn finishes, a heckler shouts, "I paid good money for this?"
Adrianne follows right after, and she's thinking she can turn the audience's mood around. Her routine is complex: worry less and be more confident. She adopts the pose of a mannequin. The silence in the audience is deafening. As she bows, she notices that folks are getting up to leave.
Dustin is the last to go on-the closing act, the grand finale. His routine is a neat number on understanding himself better and waiting for the right time to change. He's silent and peaceful throughout his routine, and so is the theater. By this time, everyone has left. The rest of the tour was cancelled after opening night.
The moral of this story is simple. Each performer set goals that a dead person could do just as well as a living person. Nobody in the audience could tell they were doing what they set out to do. That's the trouble with dead person's goals. They involve no movement, no action. You won't be able to tell that you've achieved them, and neither will anyone else. For that reason, they won't benefit you or your life.
If that seems a little abstract, here are some signals that can alert you that you're setting dead person goals:
• Your goal focuses on achieving something that is completely inside you, like feeling happy, less depressed, less empty, more confident, more self-worth, or greater peace of mind.
• Your goal involves stopping a behavior (talking, hitting, yelling, thinking, drinking...) without adding something in to fill the gap, preferably an alternative, more constructive "will do" behavior based in your values.
• Your goal is delayed; you're procrastinating or putting it off until you're older, until the "right" time, or until things change.
• You're turning your life over to metaphorical ideas and symbolism, thinking you just need to somehow absorb, transcend, digest, understand, figure out, or fix something about yourself. The problem with applying these sorts of goals to yourself and your life is that there's no way to know you've achieved them.
Avoid setting goals that fall into the categories on this list. Think like an actor (but not a Dead Player!). Acting is all about movement, expression, and engagement-and a valued life is just the same. Living person goals get you going, and if they're rooted in your values, they will take you forward. Going forward means some kind of change: doing less of one thing and more of another, or stopping one behavior and doing something else instead. The key word here is "and."
Even if your values around health lead you to decide to quit smoking, you need to build in activities you will do instead, something healthy or vital to replace smoking and keep you moving in the direction of better health. Or if you choose to cut back on your work hours, you need to find another purpose for that extra time. If working less is in the service of a value, how can you fill those hours with activities that lead you in the direction of that value? The point is that you are doing, not behaving like one of the Dead Players.
That's how to create a life worthy of a standing ovation.
With a Kind Heart,
John P. Forsyth
Author of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, ACT on Life, Not on Anger, and a professional book called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Anxiety Disorders: A Practitioner's Guide. His latest book, Your Life on Purpose, was just released and walks readers through finding what matters and how to move forward when faced with life's inevitable barriers, hardships, and pains.
