Welp, another year has gone by and I am another year older, and another year wiser?! This past year has been one for the books. I feel as if I have grown tremendously and really grown into who I am.
While I am far from having everything figured out, I do want to share with you the 7 most important things I had to learn in my life. I wish I would have learned these things earlier, but I’ve learned them now (or are at least working on all of them now)!
1. No One Is Coming To Save You
This one is harsh but it is the absolute truth. No one is going to come and save you. Your life is your own and it is your responsibility to create the life you want. It’s not your parents job, it’s not your friends jobs, it’s not your partners job, it’s yours! No one is going to make your dreams come true except you.
I think the biggest problem in our life is that we think our life is due to external forces. We think it’s our partners job to make us happy or our friends job to include us in everything. We blame our bosses for not giving us an adequate raise or our parents for not raises us a certain way.
In reality, it is up to you to make yourself happy. It’s up to you to ask to join in with friends or include people you want to be around. If you want a raise at your job it’s up to you to put in the work and then ask when you feel you’ve proven yourself. And one of the biggest one, at some point you have to stop blaming your parents and realize that you are a grown ass adult. If your parents did thing that you do not agree with, break the generational trauma and move on with your life.
The fact that no one is coming to save you can either be an exciting thought or a negative one. It all depends on how you want to look at it. I personally like to see this as a good thing. It means that my life is my own and I get to play by the rules that I want to play by. I get to create an amazing life. And if I don’t like something, I can change it!
2. Stop Caring About What Others Think
What other people think about you is none of your damn business. Quit fixating on what other people think about you and start worrying about what you think about yourself. People do not think about you as often as you think they do. People are too busy thinking about what other people are thinking about them to worry about you.
Now it can be really easy to brush off a nasty comment a stranger leaves you on social media (by the way you should follow my Instagram!), but what about what close family and friends think? It can be harder to brush off what they think about you. This can be especially hard when you have dreams and goals that they might not understand. Which leads me to my next point…
3. No One Will Understand Your Dreams the Way You Do
Your dreams are your dreams and not everyone will understand them. And that’s okay. People don’t understand a lot of things so don’t get hung up when someone tells you your dreams won’t work. Also, never ever take advice or criticism from someone who doesn’t have the courage to follow their own dreams. Someone who won’t follow their own dreams, will never understand someone who is chasing after their’s.
4. Gratitude Will Change Your Life
I will never stop talking about gratitude because is it that important. I practice gratitude every single day and it is the thing that changed my mindset the most. If you want to read my post on gratitude, check it out here! Gratitude is so important for so many reasons. It rewires your brain to look for the positives in life, makes you appreciate what you have and what you want, and it forces you to live in the moment. Gratitude literally takes five minutes a day. Everyone has five minutes a day! Just do it and I guarantee it’ll change your life!
5. Romanticize Your Life
This is the only life you get. You might as well romanticize it. That cup of coffee you drink in the morning, the traffic you sit in on your way to work, the house you get to take care of, the endless nights of putting kids back in their beds, look at all of that with rose colored glasses. Because good, bad, happy, sad, this is your life. Every single moment doesn’t have to be spectacularly wonderful, but there is some good in every moment. It’s easy to get caught up in stress and things going wrong, but it’s no way to live.
6. Stop Looking for Motivations, Create Discipline
This was a very hard pill for me to swallow. I would see other people showing up every single day and I wondered how they had so much motivation and why I didn’t. I wondered if maybe I just didn’t want my dreams as much as other people did. And then I realized that those people don’t have motivation all the time, they have discipline. Discipline allows you to show up even on the days you don’t want to. It’s easy to have a hard day and want to do nothing but numb out once you get home from work, but having discipline is the difference between letting your dreams pass you by and achieving your goals.
7. Live For Yourself
Do the things that make you happy. Period. That’s it. Stop doing things that make you miserable. You hate your job, change it. You want to climb mountains, go climb mountains. It’s all very simple, we just overcomplicate things. Do the things that set your soul on fire. Like I said before, this is the only life you get. Quit living for other people and do what makes you happy.
These are the rules I now follow for my life and when I do, I am happy. I hope this list helps someone find their happiness!