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6 secrets to a well-lived life
by Barbara Moses, excerpted from Dish (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)
What does it mean to live your best life? It honours your most important values, needs, and glorious complexities. This is the distilled wisdom of what interesting midlife women have learned about creating a life they feel good about:
by Barbara Moses, excerpted from Dish (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)
What does it mean to live your best life? It honours your most important values, needs, and glorious complexities. This is the distilled wisdom of what interesting midlife women have learned about creating a life they feel good about:
- Know and act on what is really important to you. Don't put up with a bad situation in any significant area of your life. Things don't get better without conscious awareness, choice, and action. Ask yourself on a weekly basis: Am I happy? Which of my important needs are being met, and which are being neglected? What do I need to do for greater life satisfaction? Your life is not a dress rehearsal.
- Understand what you are really good at. Know and be able to articulate your core skills and the environments in which you are happiest and most productive. Express your talents by finding or designing your work to reflect your strengths and who you are. Your unique talents are gifts which you need to use.
- Be authentic. Refuse to compromise your personality or repress important parts of yourself. Be honest about expressing your feelings and values when the cost of not doing so will be a violation of your own moral code. Do what you know is the right thing. Quite simply, if the cost of doing something is that you will feel that you have sold your soul, don't do it.
- Define yourself independently of your roles -- as mother, daughter, worker, leader, friend, partner. Don't make any one role the centrepiece of your identity. Your life is rich and offers huge opportunity for meaning and satisfaction through many channels. Have diverse interests and seek fulfillment through all of them.
- Make your own decisions. Take your own counsel: throw away the people-pleasing scripts. Maintain an independent stance in regard to received wisdom. Create a life that works for you independent of others' views and expectations.
- Pay attention to the niggling voice that says, "I'm not happy." It's telling you something important. Welcome rather than repress it. Identify the issues. Understand that change takes time and courage -- there is no bromide for dealing with signifcant life issues. Get support from people who care about you. Seek professional counselling if you need it.
- Think in terms of life chapters. You can have it all, but not all at once. Devote each chapter to satisfying one need fully rather than living in a grey zone where all your needs are compromised. Think about what you are getting, not what you are giving up. Be mindful and in the moment.
- Cherish and grow your friendships. Your friends are your lifeline. Do not allow your busyness to interfere with maintaining signifcant relationships. Enrich your life by cultivating interesting new people for your network beyond your normal affiliations. Find a "big sister," and be a "big sister." Don't think of your friendships with an accountant's mentality -- I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Don't keep score of who has done more for whom. Be there for your friends in the bad times.
- Give back to individuals and the community. Be a mentor and role model to younger women. Care about people and the environment. Many women cite giving back to others as one of their chief sources of fulfillment.
- Invest in yourself and stretch yourself. Be bold and take risks knowing you can deal with uncertainty. Keep on learning. Try something new. Involve yourself in previously neglected life arenas. Finish your unfinished business. Reconnect to earlier career themes. If it doesn't feel a bit scary, chances are it's not very interesting.
- Accept others for who they are. Be respectful of individual differences whether in your children, partners, or staff. Do not try to change them. Appreciate who they are, rather than bemoaning who they are not. If you get angry with someone because they are not behaving the way you would like them to, ask yourself: What gives me the right to demand or expect them to conform to my standards? Which needs of mine am I projecting on them?
- Edit out the stuff that doesn't add value to your life. Get rid of commitments that drain you emotionally. For every commitment ask yourself: How does this make my life fuller? What would be the price of not doing this? How will I feel about that? Look at all areas of your life. For everything you own, ask yourself: Does the cost of maintaining this (whether dusting it or paying for it) enrich who I am and how I feel?
- Have a healthy relationship to money. Start saving when you are young. Make wise financial decisions. Distinguish between what you want and need. Be financially literate. Don't define yourself by your stuff, salary, or bank balance. Living within your means buys you freedom. If you downsize financial commitments which own you, you upsize your life. Don't use purchases as a way of satisfying/meeting unexpressed emotional needs, or money as a measure of self-worth.
- Be kind to yourself and others. Look after your body. Be emotionally and spiritually healthy. Be generous with your praise both in celebrating your own accomplishments and those of others. Think of the legacy you would like to leave behind. Live a life you would be proud for your children and others to emulate.
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