7 Steps to get yourself back on track!
It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out, or if life has thrown you a few curve balls. These 7 practical steps will help you to build a life filled with abundance and amazing experiences. Nobody can fix your problems for you, but if you follow these, you will be able to do it yourself!
To fix your life, you need to:
- 1. Take stock of what you’ve got.
- 2. Figure out what is important to you
- 3. Build an image of your future self
- 4. Split things into 5 boxes
- 5. Some serious goal setting
- 6. Creating challenges for yourself
- 7. Filling your well of motivation
There is a great quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune:
“Hope clouds observation.”
And when it comes to fixing our shit, we need a lot more observation than hope! This is why this article is written in a practical way that will give you knowledgeable advice and help you help yourself by providing you with everything you need to fix your life and get yourself back on track or build a great one if you’re just starting out!
Time for stock control
With unique circumstances in mind, there is nobody better qualified than yourself for the job. To do this, we are gonna fall back on tried and tested method of creating a few simple lists.
This is a practical exercise that forces you to reflect on what you have, which in exchange builds the foundation you need to start the process of fixing your life. Either grab a pen and paper, and make your own, or download our fix your life checklist which contains sections for all the exercises you’ll need to get yourself back on track!
Assets
Are you a pretty girl or a hot guy? Young, beautiful, and successful? Own a car, have a house, and come from a good family with reliable friends? Maybe you are the type that is simply blessed by the universe with good luck and the ability to avoid most of life’s pitfalls. Are you creative, intelligent, or hard-working? All of these are legitimate assets that need to be taken into account and while we may not have what everyone else has, in this ever-changing world we all have something that can be used to our advantage.
This also happens to be an excellent opportunity to practice a little gratitude, which is one of the Seven secrets to mastering life that nobody teaches you, and will reward you many, many times over and help you to not only fix your life but master it!
Problems
Now that we have our assets and the things we have been blessed with out of the way, it’s time to list the opposite side of the coin and highlight our problems. You know exactly what it is in your life that is making you miserable or holding you back. Could be emotional, physical, social, financial, or habitual, but if it exists.
To succeed at this you need to have a realistic understanding of the challenges you are facing
Reasons why
If you were expecting to list why you have these problems, you’re in for a bit of a surprise. What you need to jot down today are any reasons why you haven’t been able to solve them yet.
It’s easy to have problems, as everyone does, and easier still to shift blame to circumstance or a third party. What’s hard is ignoring the excuses we make for our problems and actually taking some accountability to reflect on why we remain unable to work through or fix them. Here we cut straight through the usual bullshit we feed ourselves and find the root of our evil, which is embedded in ourselves. Be honest with yourself, it makes a difference.
The solution
Now that we have taken the effort to list out what we have, know what our challenges are, and also faced our excuses on what’s holding us back, the only thing left to do is to determine what the next step to take is. Irrespective of what your problems may be, I want you to use what you have just written down as tools that you can apply to get what you want from this world.
This exercise helps us know where we are coming from while providing us with some insight on where we need to go and is the first step to getting your life heading in the direction you want it to again.
Figuring out what is important to you
When you think about it, we are all kind of spoilt. To survive you basically only need five things water, food, clothes, shelter, and something to stop you from going insane! If you look at the problems you listed in the previous exercise, it’s very likely that there are only one or two serious ones, and that most of the others would fall away if we could fix the basics. We can link this exercise up to a set of principles like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and use the information we gathered in the previous exercise to determine 3 very specific things:
What you need
These are non-negotiable and can be as basic as food, shelter, employment, health care, finances, relationships, and even personal time and space. The stuff you really cannot compromise on and that you need in order to be able to get yourself in a position to be functional and work towards those goals.
What you want
Over here we are going to make a list of the thing that you really want. There is no cap on how big or how small it will be, try to picture your ideal world, the environment you would find yourself in, the people that surround you as well as the cool activities and projects you will be occupying yourself with.
The price
Taking a modern application from the anime Full metal alchemist, everything is about equivalent exchange. If you have been using our template, you will now see what you need and what you want, listing next to the price that needs to be paid. This is not a price that you pay only in money, though it does help. It’s also your time, effort, and your habits that will play a role. Ask yourself what you will need to sacrifice in order to make the other two parts of this list into reality and then write it down!
If you want to fix your life, there is no skipping these steps.
Fix your life now to build your future self
Now that we have taken inventory, prioritized our wants and needs, and started to look into the price that needs to be paid to achieve these, it’s time to combine list-making with a little visualization exercise.
We will be looking at four very specific categories that represent most of the human experience or at the very least have a great influence on the outcome you will get from it. We will first be looking at where we stand with them in the now, then remaking the list as if we were describing the best possible version of ourselves, the one that has accomplished everything they set their mind to and the dreams they hold.
We will create two identical columns, one for our current self and one for the future, with each containing four categories:
Habits – The cornerstones
Positive or negative, list them all – Also check out Charles Duhiggs – The Power of Habit if you are looking at fixing your routine and habits.
Skills – The tools
Graphic design, video editing, programming, sales & communication, music, art, mindfulness, anything that takes practice and increases your value in the world.
Dreams – The future
The stuff you would really like to accomplish. In an ideal world, what purpose would you assign yourself if you could accomplish anything? Once you’ve finished the exercise, it is also interesting to look at the difference between your current dreams and to see how they would change if you had already resolved the current difficulties and challenges.
Relationships – The glue
This may seem simple. but when you get down to it, relationships are one of the first things to break down when life turns south. If you want to fix your life then you need to acknowledge that we simply aren’t Islands and our connection to those around us plays a big role in our future success or failure. Look at your current partner (or lack of one), the friends you keep, your work colleagues, and any other groups that have an impact on your life. It is very true that we become the summary of the people we spend the most time with!
Five boxes to fix your life
What gets measured, gets managed! Yet just like with the Metric and Imperial systems, people have different standards of measuring successes and failures and their own ways to classify them. This section takes us to a place of accountability and puts the focus on how we spend our time, by taking our daily activities and splitting them into four simple boxes and the void, which is aimed at making us more aware of what we are spending our time on and which activities waste it.
When it comes to fixing habits and getting life back on track there is nothing better than the auto-correcting nature of self-reflection and awareness. What are you actually spending your time on? What results does it bring into your life? Do you see any destructive patterns or habits stealing away chunks of your time? All important questions that we will be able to better answer once you’ve sorted your life into these 5 categories:
Health
Eating healthy, exercising, sleep, sunlight, screen time
Wealth
Day jobs, side hustles, investments, trading, personal projects
Skills
Studying, communication, trade, music, art, or anything else that takes dedicated practice to master
Mindset
Meditation, yoga, gratitude, visualization, cold showers, and anything else that you need to keep your sanity and keep yourself focused on your goals
The rest
Everything else you do on a daily basis doesn’t fall into one of the boxes. This is the place where you find the activities you’re occupying your time with that do not serve you.
Our time is our most precious resource, and we all have the same amount of hours in a day. What you spend it on is what you will end up becoming! By breaking it down into these 5 categories, you will be able to clearly see which activities are beneficial and allowing you to move forward and which are holding you back!
Fix your life by sorting out all the drama!
Some serious goal setting
Now that we have a little more self-awareness and are better poised to know what our strengths and weaknesses are, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of things and set some actual goals. This is the measuring tool by which we will manage our results, and by taking into account the previous information that we have gathered – Your assets, problems, what you value, who you wish to become, how you spend your time and what you need to pay to realize it, you will be well on your way to a successful life. We are going to split our goals into three simple categories, short, medium, and long:
5.1 – 30 days – These are your immediate short-term goals and this is where you should put the focus on cleaning up habits and fixing whatever can be easily fixed. Don’t underestimate how much can be done in 30 days with dedicated effort.
5.2 – Six months – Enough time to gain some competency in a skill. This could be studying, building a business, learning an instrument, or developing a new career path. Dedicated practice acts the same way compound interest does and by this point if you’ve been doing it continuously, you will struggle to recognize the person you’ve become after investing your time wisely.
5.3 – Three years – Where do you want to be? Who do you want to be with? How do you want to be spending your time? What type of car would you like to be driving? Three years is enough time to completely change the person you are and the life you’ve been living!
Many people make the mistake of dreaming up the most amazing dreams, however, when you ask them how they are going to achieve them, they are left unable to answer. Once you’ve completed these goals, I want you to look back and check your 30-day and 6-month goals to see if they line up with the bigger picture you’re painting for yourself in three years and if they don’t… Modify them to get you where you want to be!
Be sure to check out our article on how to master achievable goal-setting and learn about the best goal-setting models around. We also teach you the very best tools to use for Personal and Corporate goal setting
Create a challenge for yourself!
If we were to compare your life to a puzzle and you wanted to build yours as efficiently as possible, you would clean the table, flip the pieces, do the corners, and organize everything by color. All that’s left to do is to start matching up the pieces and putting them in their right place. This lays the foundation and makes it a lot easier to fix your life!
Now that you have your goals lined up to fit on a realistic timeline, we need to find figure out how we are going to build this puzzle and that is done by setting yourself some challenges. It could be as simple as designating one constructive activity to make progress in each of the four boxes you’ve created or a plan to systematically incorporate a healthy habit or two that will get you closer to your goals. You are taking the same principles used throughout our previous goal-setting section and simplifying them even further into the daily tasks you need to be doing to complete the bigger picture.
Start off by writing down 5 things you can do on a daily basis that will bring you closer to your dreams. Keep them relevant and don’t make them too hard, moving in the right direction matters and small steps are the best way to achieve that!
The second part of the challenge section helps with motivation and works on our procrastination habits by helping us stay accountable. Reach deep and select 5 consequences for not completing your daily goals. Try and keep it subtractive in nature, in other words, don’t go adding an extra workout routine because you missed your daily yoga, rather find an indulgence and mindfully abstain from it, like cutting out your favorite treat or entertainment from the day to make up for your transgression.
Find or draw up a calendar to keep track of this for 30 days, applying tools like a reward system or the two-minute rule to stop procrastination.
Find your motivation!
The final secret to fixing your life is a tool I stumbled across a few years back, called the well of motivation. Basically, it’s a memory palace for positive motivators! There are two parts to this practice and if you are able to apply them correctly, you will find yourself filled with limitless motivation!
The first part is related to the past:
Think about the times you’ve felt exceptionally loved or accomplished something amazing. You want to be able to revisit the emotions and feelings you experienced during those times as a motivator for the future. It could be the smile on a loved one’s face of or the satisfaction you experienced after achieving something difficult.
The second part is the future
Having created this library of positive motivation from your past to remind you what it feels like to feel good, we now tie it up to your future accomplishments. Once you have found the meaning behind your actions, you can now envision yourself in the future achieving even greater successes.
Self-Development can be considered a lonely journey, simply because nobody is as invested in your success as you are! Staying motivated as you cultivate yourself and move forward on your journey is inevitably your own responsibility.
As they say in the gym:
Nobody can do your pushups for you!
We started with taking stock, figuring out what is important, defining our problems, determining who we wish to become and how we will get there, and why it’s worth it. You’ve officially got everything you need to fix your life. The rest is up to your continued efforts.
Be sure to check out our sections on growing your wealth and building your business. We share some great investment-related content, such as our investing fundamentals or how to NOT lose all your money by investing in Crypto, but you will also find practical tutorials on topics like starting a successful blog or building a great online store.
Don’t give up. You’ve got this!
And we are here to help!
And remember
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
– Mark Twain
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