If you’re always thinking that someday you’ll be happy or live the life of your dreams, you’re actually wasting your life right now. Here’s how to stop that way of thinking and go out there and get what you want TODAY.
- Get passionate about things you have. It’s easy to think about what you want to have in the future but you should focus on what you have right now. Those things we take for granted are often blessings that other people would kill to have. They’re often really basic things that we don’t even see anymore because our sights are set on what we think is more important.
- Stop pining for what you don’t have (yet). Don’t focus so much on how you don’t have the marriage or the kids you want or the white picket fence. Those things will come to you in time. If you obsess over them, you’re missing out on the happiness you can create in your life right now. Hint: you don’t need a boyfriend/husband/kids to experience it.
- Focus on today. Yeah, it sounds really cliched, but amazing things can happen if you just focus on what’s happening in the present. If you struggle to focus on nothing but the current hour, focus on today in general. Think about making today amazing because it’s never coming back. A good way to concentrate on the present is to keep a journal in which you write down things you’re grateful for or just the cool things that happened. It might seem silly but it really does help.
- Don’t waste the time at your disposal. Stop procrastinating! Saying “someday” you’ll achieve your goals keeps them out of reach. Yes, it’s frustrating that you need to take baby steps to achieve your dreams, but if you start now, those baby steps will add up—and make for an exciting journey along the way. The minute you start doing what you want to do in life, you’ll draw more success your way.
- Enjoy your single life. Trust me, when you’re happy and in love with someone, you’re going to look back on the months or years you had as a single woman and miss them. Even if you don’t pine for them, you’re going to wish you’d made better use of them at the very least. Imagine all those Friday nights when you were so depressed about the bad date you’d been on that you stayed home instead of partying all night long. Yeah, you’ll want them back! Bonus: living up your single years will make you a better girlfriend to someone when it happens.
- Know that you can only control the present, not the future. There’s no way you can control what happens to you even if your plans seem rock-solid, so why obsess over them so much when you’ve got all the minutes and hours of today just begging for you to do something awesome with them? At least those are under your control and you have the freedom to do whatever the heck you want with them.
- Your plans shouldn’t sacrifice your enjoyment. Having plans and working towards your dreams is awesome, but it’s not the only thing to enjoy about life. There are things that don’t appear in your plans that are amazing just for the pure experience of them. Those are the things that make for a happy life, so make the most of them while you can. They’re the kisses in the rain and the pulling over on the highway to watch the sunset, and they’re the long chat with your friend you haven’t seen in ages even though you’re busy AF at work. They only come around once.
- Scare yourself. Go visit a hospital and see all the people in there who are sick. Go to a hospice and see the people with terminal diseases that are never going to walk out of there. I know it sounds scary, but sometimes scaring yourself with the sad realities about life will wake you up. You’re not going to live forever. You don’t actually know how long you have. When you think like this for a few minutes, you’ll see that you’ve got so much life bursting in your veins and you’ll stop putting a great life on hold.
- Stop being so hard on yourself. Nothing good ever comes from beating yourself up or being extremely critical of yourself. So what if your plans didn’t work out or you failed at achieving a goal? So what? You’re now in a better position to either see how you can achieve it in a better way, or how else you can spend your life.
- Be open to surprises along the way. If you only focus on what you want to achieve like climbing the corporate ladder or starting your own creative business “someday,” make sure you’re not blocking out other possibilities in your life. It’s strange but sometimes people who procrastinate on achieving their dreams are actually supposed to take their energy and time elsewhere but they remain stuck because they don’t see those other possibilities opening up for themselves. Don’t be like them. You’ll thank yourself someday.
