Are you living your dream life?
If not, it’s time to start. Here’s how to build the life of your dreams.
How To Create Your Dream Life
Creating your dream life is far easier than it appears. It takes a little introspection, a lot of planning, and a commitment to doing.
Building a life you want to live involves:
- Identifying your Dream Life
- Recognizing Limitations
- Making an Action Plan
- The Building Phase
- Living the Dream
What is Your Dream Life?
The first step to creating your dream life is defining it.
Everyone has different hopes, dreams, and goals. Take the time to reflect on what you want and why you want it.
Write down every aspect of your dream life, from where you want to live to how you will spend your time. Envision it with all your senses.
Once you have identified your dream life, you can craft your plan to achieve it.
I Don’t Know What I Want from Life
We sometimes get so wrapped up in society’s expectations that we don’t know what we want from life.
Did you go to medical school because you genuinely wanted to be a doctor or because your parents wanted you to be?
It’s time to stop living for everyone else and start living for yourself.
Here are some tips for deciding what you want.
Journal
Journaling can help us uncover our innermost desires. When we journal, we let our thoughts flow freely from the depths of our minds and onto the paper, helping us identify the things that matter most.
Use journal prompts for self-discovery if you don’t know what to write about. The questions will get you thinking about topics you never considered.
Try Things
You must identify what you like and don’t like to learn what you want. Try things on for size and see how they fit. Discover what you like about specific activities and what you hate.
Try new foods and hobbies, travel to new places, and dabble in different subjects.
Life is about discovery; trying things is a fantastic way to see what you like best.
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Hire a Life Coach
Sometimes, you need specific guidance to discover what you want out of life. A life coach can help.
Life coaches offer one-on-one mentorship focused on happiness, wellness, and living your best life. They listen to your needs and guide you toward discovering what you want.
Hire a life coach for personal, one-on-one advice on how to live your dream life.
Recognizing Limitations
Some dreams won’t come true, and it’s vital to recognize that. Your dream to play in the NBA probably won’t come true if you’re only five foot two inches tall. Most of us won’t make it in Hollywood or as famous musicians.
Though we typically understand that those lofty dreams of stardom are out of reach, we fail to recognize the limitations we place upon ourselves.
It’s possible to overcome them when we can identify them.
What’s Stopping You From Living Your Dream Life?
The world has many sneaky ways of keeping us trapped in lives we don’t want to live. We need to identify the things that are holding us back.
Some potential obstacles to living your dream life include:
- Financial Concerns
- Societal expectations
- Obligations
- Fear
- Comfort
- Accountability
Financial Concerns
Money is a top stressor in everyone’s lives. Many think their lives would be perfect if they increased their income or won the lottery.
Money isn’t the key to happiness. While lack of money certainly hinders it, having money doesn’t automatically mean you’ll live your dream life.
Financial security is only one piece of the puzzle.
However, money can be a massive obstacle, especially if your dream life includes less time working. You must consider the financial implications of your dream life and build funding into your action plan.
Societal Expectations
“Is this the life that you lead, or the life that’s led for you?”
-Rise Against
Society often places us on a path, and it’s tough for us to go a different way. It wants women to embrace motherhood, men to go to war, and everyone to happily become a cog in capitalism’s giant wheel.
You don’t have to do what society expects you to do. No rule says you must get married or have children. You don’t have to find a career working 9-5 Monday through Friday.
It’s your life; design it how you want to.
Obligations
Children are the one obligation you can’t turn your back on. Your children (if you have them) should be a part of your dream life, not a barrier to it. However, real life doesn’t always work out as it should. Parental regret is common, though it’s still such a taboo topic that people rarely discuss it.
Whether you regret parenthood or not, you likely still love your kids. Incorporate them into your dream life. You may find it’s not parenthood you don’t like; it’s your current circumstances. When you change your circumstances, you may discover that parenthood is a huge part of your dream life.
Fear
Fear keeps us trapped, living lives we don’t want. It holds us back and prevents us from making positive life changes.
Trepidation takes many forms, and sometimes, it’s tough to recognize it for what it really is.
Perfectionism comes from fear. We don’t try things because we’re afraid of ridicule if they aren’t perfect. Stagnation comes from fear. We don’t move forward because we’re so scared we will fail.
Our fears often come from a fixed mindset. We believe we can’t, so we don’t even try.
Push back on your mind’s insistence that you can’t do something by cultivating a growth mindset. When you truly believe anything is possible, you’re more likely to achieve it.
Comfort
Many of us get complacent and decide our current comfort is more important than living our dream lives. Change is hard, but staying the course is easy.
If you value comfort and security above all else, you may be already living your dream life. Take a hard look at where you are now, and decide whether you genuinely want things to be different.
You might have to sacrifice your short-term comfort to achieve your long-term goals – is that a tradeoff you’re willing to make?
Accountability
Many people don’t live their dream lives because they refuse to take accountability for their current circumstances. Life never hands us what we want. We must go out there and earn it.
Stop blaming your parents or society for everything that’s going wrong in your life. Yes, injustices exist, and yes, the world isn’t perfect. You’ve probably experienced several things that made living the life of your dreams harder.
But harder doesn’t mean impossible. It’s up to you to make something of yourself despite the cards you were given. You will never achieve your dreams if you keep making excuses about why you can’t.
How To Build Your Dream Life?
Once you’ve decided what you want out of life, it’s time to make it happen.
Start by making an action plan.
Dream Life Action Plan
An action plan helps you turn dreams into goals and goals into reality. You know what you want out of life, and now you need to make a plan to achieve it.
Start by writing where you are now and where you want to be. Next, identify what you must do to get from point A to point Z.
For example, let’s say your dream life has you traveling the world as a digital nomad. Currently, you work a low-paid job in the service industry. How do you go from the service industry to being a digital nomad?
You may need to get degrees or certificates in a specific field, or you may need to start an online business.
You’ll have to consider the financial cost of life on the road, where you will live, whether you want to raise a family, and what to do with pets.
Your action plan must account for every aspect of your life.
Create SMART Goals
While creating your plan, you must make SMART goals to guide your path. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based.
These goals will be the primary tasks you accomplish en route to your dream life.
Using the digital nomad example, let’s say you decided to start a travel blog to fund your life. Your action plan would include SMART goals like purchasing a domain name by X date, writing three blog posts per week, and setting up social media accounts for the blog.
Your specific goals will be different, depending on your dream life, but they should all follow the SMART framework so you can achieve them.
The Building Phase
Once you have your plan laid out, it’s time for action. Creating a dream life is hard work, and it takes time.
Expect to put 5-10 years into the building phase.
During this time, you’ll work toward the goals you laid out in your action plan. Every action you take will bring you one step closer to the life of your dreams.
The building phase takes sacrifice and commitment. It won’t be easy, and there’ll be lots of curveballs thrown your way. However, if you stick to the plan, you will eventually achieve your dreams.
Tips for the Building the Life of Your Dreams
Building your dream life is far more challenging than imagining it. Dreams come true, but they take a lot of effort.
Here are tips for making it through the building phase of creating your dream life.
Create a Vision Board
Vision boards help us visualize our dreams. Get crafty and create a board highlighting your dream life. Use magazine clippings of power words and inspirational photos. Put them all together in a giant collage that serves as a daily reminder of what you’re striving to accomplish.
Live Intentionally
While pursuing your dream life, you must live intentionally. Every action you take should align with your ultimate life goals.
Consider your ultimate goal when shopping, house-hunting, and applying for jobs. Evaluate it when entering new relationships, and ensure any future partner has similar goals.
To achieve your dreams, you must stop letting life happen to you and start making life happen.
Practice Gratitude
A gratitude practice helps you appreciate all the good things you have in your life. It enables you to achieve your dream life by forcing you to see the bounty you already have.
Practicing gratitude will help refine your dream life while in the building phase and motivate you to keep moving forward.
Set Intentions and Affirmations
Intentions and affirmations give your subconscious mind the confidence boost it needs to get stuff done. Affirmations reframe your thinking to help you realize you’re capable, while intentions motivate you to live a certain way.
Set a daily affirmation to remind yourself you can achieve your dreams and a daily intention to guide your path towards accomplishment.
Reflect on Priorities
“Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money, and I’ll tell you what they are.”
-James. W. Frick
While building your dream life, take time each quarter to reflect on your priorities. Is your spending aligning with your goals?
If not, you may need to get introspective and decide what’s really important to you.
Review Your Progress
While reflecting on your priorities, take time to review your progress.
What have you achieved?
Looking at your progress helps in two ways: motivation and course correction. Seeing your progress makes you thirsty for more, but it also highlights areas for improvement.
Take Action
Taking action sounds easy enough, but many people get so caught up in planning and learning something that they forget to do it.
Examine your action plan for things that seem like actions but actually hinder your growth. Are you spending much time reading books and learning things but not a lot of time implementing what you’ve learned?
If you’re spinning your wheels and don’t feel like you’re making any progress, review your action plan and ensure you’re doing things rather than thinking about doing things.
Living the Dream
Once you’ve finished the building phase, living your dream life should be smooth sailing. But what if you’ve done all that and should be happy but still aren’t?
What if your dream life isn’t what you thought it would be?
We often achieve what we want and then wonder why we aren’t happy. If you’re building your dream life because you think it’s the end goal for a happy life, you’re already doing it wrong.
Happiness isn’t something you achieve once. It’s far more complex. Your dream life can contribute to your happiness, but it isn’t the only factor. Often, happiness comes from the journey rather than the end goal.
Once you’ve achieved your dream life, you should keep striving for self-improvement to keep the journey going.
How Can I Live My Dream Life Starting Today?
A secret about dream lives that no one tells you is that it’s not only about achieving a lofty goal. You may be living your dream life already, but you’re so caught up in consumerism and societal expectations that you don’t see it.
Most people can live life to the fullest now – without striving for unobtainable dreams.
Letting go of those expectations empowers you to live your dream life today. Here are some ideas for getting started.
- Practice Gratitude
- Cherish Friendships
- Enjoy Simple Pleasures
- Embrace Mindfulness
- Meditate
- Take Care of Your Body
- Make Time for Hobbies
When you start enjoying all the small things you already have, you may realize you’re closer to your dream life than you thought.