Communicated Content – You’ve read articles on goals, motivation, increasing your creativity, changing careers, and finding purpose, but at the end of it all, you don’t feel any more able to make changes than before you read them. You don’t even know what changes are needed or where to start, only that everything seems like a mess. If this sounds familiar, you can start to get a handle on your life again with the steps below.
Stop
If you can, just stop everything as soon as possible. Plan a weekend or a couple of days mid-week entirely on your own, either as a staycation or off somewhere that you love, whether it’s the beach, a big city, or a quiet mountain. Since this isn’t possible for a lot of people–in fact if your life is a mess, it probably isn’t–grab what time you can, even if it means getting up at a ridiculously early hour in the morning or going to bed later than you’d like at night.
The problem is that when your whole life feels out of control, it can be hard to get a moment to think, to start to remember who you are and what you want. Turn off your phone, and sit quietly. Be in the moment. Do this for a few days or a few weeks until you no longer feel as though your mind is constantly racing ahead of itself. Maybe you’ll even get some ideas about the changes you want to make, but it’s okay if you don’t.
Organize Your Finances
One step nearly everyone needs to take that will improve most people’s lives is a financial wellness check. Money is handy because it gives you some breathing room. It’s often helpful to have money to throw at a problem in order to solve it. This is a good reason to make a budget and go through a multi-tier process of getting your finances in order. Basically, you need to pay off debt, build up emergency savings, start putting away money for retirement and make other investments.
Part of starting to live within your means and have money for all of this involves cutting back on your expenses. Look at where you are spending more than you should. Common areas are things like entertainment and food. Look at less obvious ways to cut spending as well. Having student loan refinancing available as an option might give you a lower monthly payment. Rolling your credit card balance onto a lower-interest card is another option for saving money.
Choose One Thing
By this point, you are almost surely thinking more clearly. However, whether there are a few or a lot of things in your life that you need to fix, you are probably still feeling a little overwhelmed. The best next step is to choose just one of them. Don’t get too bogged down in what you choose. It doesn’t have to be the hardest or easiest or most important thing. It matters less if you want to find love and improve relationships or make a career change, it just needs to be one thing you can work on, and as you take the steps to improvement, you’ll find that adding on a second one is easier. Before you know it, you’ll be well on your way to knowing what you want to achieve, and you’ll have a plan to get there.
