The 5 Key Questions of Your Life
{Hello! I’m back from my “brief summer intermission” and we’re going to waste no time getting back to it… 
I have some exciting news about what’s been going on during my little vacay from blogging, and I’m planning on sharing it in this weeks Tips on Falling in Love with Life Newsletter… so if your curious/interested, sign up.
Anyhow, hope you enjoy these thoughts on the 5 Key Questions of Your Life…Note: This post begs to be read with your journal ready to take notes. }
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I learned as a philosophy major that the question is always more powerful than the answer. Questions are storehouses of possibility and learning to ask the right ones about your life can unleash potential, solidify priorities, and give you laser focus on the important next steps to take in order to create and/or accomplish meaningful goals. Here are 5 key questions to ask yourself when your life is in need of a little rut busting…
1. Who do you want to become?
Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be. -Robert Brault
You might think the first key question of your life is, who are you? But who you are now is not as important as who you want to become. As a question, who are you? can keep you spinning in psycho-bable for a life-time and you may never arrive at a satisfactory answer. Who you are is a product of the past, a product of your childhood– circumstances and influences by others that were sometimes in, but mostly out-of, your control. We can spend years in therapy and never figure ourselves out. The good news is, to live a life of romance and adventure we don’t have to. Rest in the fact that all the beautiful and complicated things about you can simply be. Celebrate the mystery of who you are and get excited about the fact that for all the things you can’t control there is one thing you can: the quality of your character.
Our character is not defined so much by the events in our life as by our response and perspective to those events. Knowing who you want to be will keep your focus on the future– a place that waits for us full of possibility, hope and optimism. The opportunity to affect positive change in our life depends not on our past, or who we have been, but rather forward momentum of who we want to become.
2. What do you really believe?
It’s impossible to consistently live inconsistently with what you really believe. -Neal Anderson
The world is full of opportunities to grow, but is also full of distractions pulling us away from who we really are. Knowing what we believe keeps us centered and grounded when life goes awry. Our beliefs are like tracks for our life. When we go on auto-pilot because our brain can’t handle any more stress, our beliefs about our self, god and the world around us, will be the grooves that effect where we go. To understand what we really believe, we need to listen to our inner dialogue. What we would like to believe and what our deep inner self really does believe can be dramatically different things. The key question of your life, is what do you really believe? Not, what have you been taught to believe?
Best case scenario our beliefs can function as the ‘the fertile ground you can return to when your inspiration, energy, or hope runs dry.’ One way we can start living from this possibility is by creating a ‘Most Powerful Beliefs List‘. More thank likely though, we are all living with some negative beliefs. Experiences and people in our lives that have wounded us for one way or another may still be effecting what you deep down feel about yourself and your worth. You may think “Yes, I know God loves me. That is one of my beliefs.” But…if every time you look in the mirror or begin a new project or walk into a room full of strangers you hear a voice that is telling you, “You are not good enough” then there is something askew in your core beliefs.
It’s what we really believe in our heart of hearts that dictates how we will experience life. Spend time asking yourself what is is you really believe. Monitor your thoughts to discover what is being affirmed in whispers day in and day out. If it’s not something you would say to your children or to a dear friend, than stop saying it to yourself. Commit to healing old wounds so you may do some reprogramming of your core beliefs. Start by doing the “Most Powerful Beliefs” exercise and remember that what you believe is not up for grabs. What you really believe will show up in all the areas of your life– the limits you set for yourself, the goals and the priorities you make, and your capacity for happiness and love.
3. What do you want?
The key to happiness is having dreams.— James Allen
There is a reason why companies create vision statements. Vision statements are all about what the company wants to be for itself and do for others, and it gives the company direction for getting there. Starting with a vision for what is wanted– be it in life, in ourselves, in our career, in our marriage, our friendships, in our passions is the prerequisite for having it. What we want, and what we can really envision, can function like a North Star in our life. We may not know how to get from here to there, from point A to point B, from living in a rut to living fulfilled, but knowing or deciding what we want will establish the direction we need to head.
Learning what we need to do to accomplish our goals and dreams is actually these easy part. Deciding what we really want to go after in life is a lot harder. Here is a simple exercise that has helped me get clear about what is I really want out of my life:
Take out a journal and at the top of each page write one of these categories: Wellness, Family, Marriage/Realtionship, Career, Legacy, Personal Passion, Spirituality, Community, Romance, and Adventure. Over the course of the next week (or an intense weekend) set the timer to 20 min and focus on one area of your life. Write a description with as much detail about what you envision that area of your life to look like. Explore what ever ideas come to mind and generate a list of possibilities of new hopes and dreams for your life. From this exercise will rise your North Star, what is is you want out of your life.
[Note this: None of this is set in stone! Don't be afraid to dream big because you think you have to stick to whatever it is you write down forever. Not at all. Just get the juices flowing and start asking yourself, what is is that I really want?]
4. Have you taken responsibility?
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. -Albert Ellis
This question is crucial. Have you taken responsibility for your life? For all the things that have lead to this moment and have created both your successes and failures? Taking responsibility for the outcome of our life is taking responsibility for our happiness. No matter what we have done or what has been done to us, we can become a victor simply by taking responsibility. Victims forever live under the control of their past. They are forever defined by the circumstance that wounded them. Victors take responsibility for how they will let others mark them. There is nothing that will keep you walking around the same circles longer than playing the blame game with your life.
Taking responsibility is a lot like forgiveness. When we forgive others and forgive ourselves for mistakes made or hurts caused, we are not condoning what has happened but declaring that these things will not longer define or limit us.
We take responsibility for our life because no one can fulfill our lives accept for ourselves. No one can make us happy, or sustain our passion or excitement. Not our kids. Not our spouses. Not our careers. Where each of us stand right now is at a crossroad of our past and our future. To put the past properly in the past we must acknowledge and take responsibility for the decision we have made good and bad that have lead us to this moment and to the circumstance we are currently living in. To embrace the future with all its possibility we must acknowledge and take responsibility for the kind of life we want to live, the person we want to be, and the legacy we want to leave our family and community.
5. What are you waiting for?
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -Anaïs Nin
Here is the question at the crux of it all: What is holding you back from doing, being and having all you dream? Don’t be afraid to discover your fears and hang-ups. We all have them. Simply commit to maturing past them, however long the journey takes. Figure out the barriers in your life and then knock them down, brick by brick, taking just one day at a time.
p.s. If you are wondering how the project to teach Lucca how to memorize my favorite limerick went, check this out. Success! (I uploaded the video to my facebook profile, so I guess we’ll need to become facebook friends, first? Well, that should have been done a long time ago, anyhow!)
