How to start living an intentional life. Back to the basics.

Dreams

Think about what do you want your life to look like in 10 years. Think about different areas of your life.

For example; work, friends, hobbies, projects, home. For each area you visualise the perfect future as vivid as possible; What do you wish, what will be different?

How would it feel like, look like, how would you feel, what would you experience? How do you see yourself?

Try to let go of all thoughts that will make you think it is not possible. Pretend that anything is possible. Even if you had to be a different person to reach it.

Choose your values

Your values will probably only change slightly over the years. You can come back to them at any time to check if you are still on track. Are you still spending your life in the way you think you should. Are you being true to yourself? If you stick to your values you will feel fulfilled, you won’t waste your life, you won’t die thinking “ I wish I had….’.

How to find your personal values

If you search for ‘list values for life’ or something similar you will find plenty of ideas, or click this link. If you want to dig deeper to find your values, this is a good place: civilizationemerging.com.

Set Priorities

Choose which dream is the most important to you. Your values should help you deciding. The goal you choose is the one you should spend the most time of your current life on. (Work or leisure -home/friends/family/hobby/…)

For example; your dream is that you are living in a tropical country writing a book.

You might not be able to realise that for next year, but you could start writing this week, and research what tropical country would be the most interesting. And you might be able to go to that country for a holiday, and enjoy the time fantasising living your life there while you are on a holiday.

Develop this priority goal

Break up the goal in smaller steps. You probably will find it overwhelming to even think of this visualised reality in ten years. This big dream consists of many smaller parts. You might find parts of it less scary or of-putting. Write down all things you would have to do to get to that big dream. It might help if you think from the far away dream to a closer by, smaller dream: about how it could look like in 5 years, 4 years, 3 years, 2 years and 1 year.

Write down the parts of the bigger goal.

For example, your big dream is:

You are making money by selling your home made soaps. You have checked whether that goes with one or more of your values, e.g. naturopathy ( using natural products that can help healing), sustainability ( compostable packaging), creating (making soap), independence ( make money). If so , it is worth spending time on as you find this a good way to spend your life time on earth.

Brainstorm what kind of stuff you have to do before you will be able to get your big goal ‘making money by selling home-made soaps’:

• Learn about essential oils and other ingredients
• follow a course
• learn about selling
• create a website
• get a Facebook business page
• develop a brand
• practise making soap
• create a system for making lots of soap
• etc

Put the steps in order

There is no point in having a working website if you have nothing to sell. So you would not launch a website and tell everybody about it before you have enough experience to make enough products, and good qualitity products etc. Go through your brainstormed ideas and decide what needs to be done first.

Start with the first goal

Start with only the top priority, and finish it. Of course it might be useful to work on another goal at the same time if you have time for that. For example, you make different type of soaps for testing and trialing, and you also learn about how to create a website.

You will have to break this smaller goal up in even smaller goals again.

For example; Learn about how to create a website:

• Research what kind of websites are the best for a shop.
• Research what websites are easy to maintain.
• Look at other websites of small online shop owners.
• Make a decision of which website or selling platform, if any, you are going to use.