You’ve heard me talk about intentional living and living life by design many times. But how exactly does one do that? If you’ve wondered that too, this episode will give you 6 steps and a bonus step on how you can create your life by design.
Hello and welcome back to a brand new episode on the Own Your Everyday series. I’m your host and self-awareness coach Shwetha Sivaraman, and today we continue our exploration of living life by design. We are on the third chapter to living life by design. In the first 2, we explored 5 signs to check if you’re living life on autopilot, and then we discussed the bigger question of where we start living this life by design. In today’s episode, we will put in all the self-knowledge we’ve gained through the first two episodes, put them into action, and create that life by design through the 6 steps.
Step 1: Get Clear on the end goal.
Many a time, we live on autopilot because we have no better destination to drive towards. Before heading off in a different direction, pause to ask the larger questions in life and spend time answering them – At the end of your days, what would you like your life to have stood for? What is the most meaningful way to spend this time on earth? Why are you here? What makes you come alive? These questions are a good place to consciously recalibrate your life and create it.
Step 2: Add meaning to everything
Humans are connected to meaning and reason quite strongly. Don’t just set goals and habits in your life – add meaning to them. By being clear on why you’re doing what you’re doing, you can add a whole other dimension to your goals, routines, words, and actions. When you’re consciously setting goals that add meaning to your life, designing routines that fulfil what you desire, choosing your words intentionally, you start to consciously create a life by design where you are fully involved in everything you do.
Step 3: We are all going to die eventually.
Since time immemorial, philosophers and spiritual teachers have talked about remembering our mortality to bring urgency to our lives and actions. When you realise how short life truly is and live with that reminder, you’ll stop living for others, for that nameless society. When you learn how little the time you have left in this world is, you’ll stop trading it in for achieving someone else goals and focus on what matters most to you. Find a way to remember your mortality in whatever way works for you. It could be a brief reminder every morning that you’re lucky to be alive and breathing yet another day or a sticky note at the workplace that reminds you to make the time you have count. Whatever works.
Step 4: Take your foot off the gas pedal
As long as we live life with one foot on the gas pedal, there’s no slowing down or pausing to reflect whether we are on the right track. So if we really want to be intentional with life and make every moment count, we need to carve out time to reflect and make conscious choices. The pace at which the world is moving will only go one way – faster and faster. So it’s up to us to realise when we need to slow down and take corrective measures.
So, make more time for conscious reflection and decision making periodically. Maybe once a month, if once a week is too much to fit in your busy schedule.
Step 5: Focus on one activity at a time
A lot has already been said about multi-tasking, so I’m not going to go into it here, but I want to reiterate a simple human limitation – we cannot multi-focus. Our focus can only be on one thing at a time. Think about it when we are scrolling our phones and listening to our husbands talk, your focus is on the phone – the husband is simply background noise. Similarly, when you’re attending a zoom meeting and answering emails – the focus is only one of the two, never both. So to live life intentionally, you need to give your complete attention and focus to the activity you’re doing at that point.
Step 6: Make time for silence.
This is a bonus step for those who want to take it up a notch. In today’s technology-first world, we are all overstimulated. There’s a lot more information coming our way than we have time to process, and living intentionally becomes more challenging because there’s always much to do and barely enough time to get them done. Remember, you can never do it all. Every now and then, instead of having FOMO and feeling rushed all the time, make time for silence. Stillness is one of the most potent ways to get clarity – our subconscious is always watching, and there is an inner knowing that we can tap into, but we can gain access only if we make time for silence. Not otherwise.
So there’s no own your everyday tip this week. Experiment with these steps; make it your own. Remember, you cannot unconsciously live life by design; it requires constant conscious effort. You have to be in the present moment, involve yourself completely, and create that life over time. And the beauty is that we already know how to do it; we just need to stop ourselves from being so distracted and allow space and time for our inner knowing to spell it out for us and give us directions.
Until we meet next, this is Shwetha Sivaraman signing off, hoping you have a phenomenal