http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/02/deciding-what-to-do-with-your-life/
Most people never make this decision at all. But since we all end up doing something, if we don’t make this decision consciously, then a decision will still be made, but it will be an unconscious one. If you don’t decide how you’re going to live, then someone or something else will decide for you. Most likely you’ll yield your life to a combination of unconscious influences, including your genetic predispositions, your upbringing, your social conditioning, your environment, the other people in your life, and perhaps pure chance.
Allowing your fate to be decided by external influences will, historically speaking, produce absolutely pathetic results compared to what you could achieve with your life by consciously deciding what you’re going to do with it and why.
As you grow in awareness and become more fully conscious, at some point you’ll come face to face with the question, “What the heck am I going to do with my life?”
Once your awareness has reached a certain level, it becomes clear that it’s better to answer this question consciously than to allow someone else to answer it for you.
However, as you begin tackling this question, there’s a good chance you’ll find it such a daunting task that you soon yield to the temptation of returning to unconscious living. Please don’t do that. Although answering this question is indeed one of the major challenges you’ll face as a human being, it’s a problem you’re capable of solving – and well worth the effort.
Does you life make sense?
In this very moment, are you happy? I’m not referring to mere contentment. A potted plant is content. I mean… are you passionate about your life? Do you get more excited about going on vacation than you do about doing your real work? Are you in love with your existence? Are you delighted to be here on earth at this particular time? If you’re living on purpose, an intense inner excitement will be your normal modus operandi. Don’t be afraid – this passion won’t suddenly transform you into an emotional moron that bounces around like a fairy on drugs. Passion is emotional fuel. It will push you to live at full capacity. Without passion you’ll frequently stop short and let opportunities pass you by again and again for lack of will. Mere intellect can only get you so far. There’s a difference between deciding to achieve a goal and actually achieving it. Your intellect can handle the former, but it’s pathetic at achieving the latter. Wouldn’t it be nice to achieve some goals instead of just setting them again and again? Paper goals are nice to look at, but wouldn’t you rather have the real thing? Passion will help you get there, sometimes at a pace that will make people’s heads spin. In order to do your best, you must learn to harness the fuel of passion. If you were an android, you wouldn’t need passion. Use your powerful intellect to recognize that you do have emotions whether you want them or not, and accept that a Vulcan lifestyle is suboptimal for human beings. As you develop emotional intelligence, you can learn to utilize the powerful fuel of passion without running afoul of your intellect. You want to be passionate and smart, not passionate and confused. Passion + intelligence is a powerful combination.
If your decision about what to do with your life doesn’t take advantage of the daily fuel of passion, then you’ve made the wrong decision. Go back and try again.
When you experience passion, it means that at least in this present moment, your decision about how to live makes sense. It’s congruent with reality. Your body will begin burning the fuel of passion because it believes you’re heading in the right direction. It’s worth the effort to light that fuse and to keep it burning instead of conserving energy by turning you into a couch potato. But if your decision looks too dumb, your body will hold back. It won’t expend the energy – it’s saying, “Nope, not worth it.”
If you find the passion is gone from parts of your life, see the message behind its absence. Listen to the, “Nope, not worth it” signal you’re getting. Maybe it’s a dead-end job, a dead-end relationship, or a dead-end exercise program. Whatever it is, if your body hasn’t kicked into high gear with the fuel of passion, you’ve made the wrong choice. It’s time to make a different decision.
Passion is a force multiplier. With passion you become much stronger than without it. It’s truly amazing what a single passionate individual with a clear purpose can achieve. If you were to subtract perhaps the top 100 such people from history (out of billions of humans), we’d probably still be living in caves. And I’d be chipping away with my stone tools an article on how to organize your rock collection.
Many decisions seem fairly intelligent in the moment, but when you imagine how they’ll play out over the next 10, 20, or 50 years, their weaknesses become apparent. When choosing a life purpose, it should not only fuel you with passion in the present moment – it should look even better across a variety of time frames.
If you don’t feel you can be honest with the rest of the world just yet, at least begin by being honest with yourself. You needn’t experience a crash if you can learn to raise your consciousness instead of lowering it. This is the gentlest path out of falsehood and towards truth.
If your relationship is dead, at least admit that truth to yourself even if you can’t admit it to anyone else. Journal about it privately and explore your honest feelings. If your career is unfulfilling and you work just to pay the bills, admit that to yourself, and also admit that you want something better. It’s OK to be weak and helpless. It’s not OK to lie to yourself. Being weak will not lower your consciousness, but being false will.
Your decision about how to live needs to make sense from ALL time perspectives, including now, yesterday, today, tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now, and at your death. It also has to make sense from the perspective of different scenarios, including: you die tomorrow, you die a year from now, you die in 50 years, you live forever, you become disabled, you get married, you stay single, you have children, you remain childless, your country’s government collapses, all your possessions are destroyed in a fire, etc.
While there will be implementation issues that depend on the specifics of your current situation, your high-level decision about what to do with your life shouldn’t be based on elements outside your control. It should be flexible enough that you can adapt it to changing circumstances, even when the changes are massive or brutal.
Now you have a tough decision to make. Do you stay in your current situation and try to justify your decision (thereby lowering your awareness), do you move on (thereby keeping your awareness high), or do you attempt to transform the circumstances from within (thereby using your awareness to raise the awareness of others)? This isn’t an easy decision to make, but the key to living in a way that works in the long run is that you need to keep yourself from becoming stuck at a fixed level of consciousness. If you pursue the development and expansion of your consciousness, you will experience some upheaval in your life. But that doesn’t mean your purpose is poorly chosen – it just means you need to go through a process of shedding, that which is incongruent with your purpose. And if you’re like most people, that’s going to mean a lot of shedding. It will probably take years. But you’ll come out the other side much stronger and a lot happier. The tunnel is hard, but it doesn’t last forever, and it leads to a wonderful place that you’ll never want to leave once you experience it.
In truth we go through multiple tunnels as we raise our awareness. These tunnels are what has been referred to as the “dark night of the soul.” This is what happens when your awareness elevates to the point where you’re now out of sync with your current life situation, but you don’t see any viable alternatives just yet. The alternatives will eventually present themselves if you continue to focus on raising your awareness and allowing the incongruence to exist for a while.
A well-formed life purpose should be able to survive your passage through these tunnels of awareness. Each tunnel should only clarify and strengthen your purpose, not force you to throw it out. If you feel your purpose will not survive the growth of your consciousness, you’re probably right.
A life purpose that is tied to a particular level of awareness is no purpose at all. It will only keep you trapped at that level of awareness.
True purpose - adapts well to changes in your core beliefs, including spiritual beliefs, your life. If you can experience something, you can grow from that experience.
Process of Elimination: Sometimes coming up with ways that don't work helps you to find a way that does work. By eliminating choices, it is easier to find a solution.
It’s ok to have things in life that make no sense: like be measured, scheduled, budgeted, justified and have a point. There is a difference between values and tasks. Measure tasks, but open up your life to the freedom of exploring values that create a life that matters.
If the result isn’t what you want, it’s time to change the action.
A recent study shows that the heart grows weaker every time we do something opposite of what we feel. The most important thing in life is to stop saying, “I wish” and start saying, “I will.” Consider nothing impossible, and then treat possibilities as probabilities. Life is a matter of choice. If you have a dilemma - toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you, but because while the coin in the air, you suddenly realize what you are hoping for.
Appreciate irony. Irony occurs when there is a gap between our expectations of a statement, situation, or image and the actual experience of it.
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