It’s Time To Live Your Best Life.
Let’s face it, most of the time we are so caught up in the business and monotony of the everyday routine that we are unable to stop and self-reflect. We fail to take a moment to ask ourselves the big, important questions. Any pause in the action to ponder such questions would cause us to fall behind schedule and have to frantically play catch up for the rest of the day.
However, time moves fast. If you don’t allow yourself to look up and truly evaluate where you are in life, where you’re going and where you want to be, you’re going to inevitably be faced with the realization one day that you haven’t fulfilled any of the things you always see yourself accomplishing.
True self-evaluation can be tough to do. Allowing yourself to remain objective when your own life is the subject, is hard. It is so easy to make excuses for yourself and create narratives in your mind that take some of the blame off of your own actions for why you aren’t living the life you truly long for.
As hard as it can be, making honest evaluations of yourself is something you must become comfortable with if you are going to take advantage of the time you are allowed in life.
The thing is time is the most precious resource you could ever own. It cannot be bought, there isn’t any more of it being made and you can’t store it to use later. One of the most common aforementioned narratives that we often create for ourselves is that we will make a change that will improve our lives later on.
We’ll get to it when things slow down, when we get the job that will create a better financial situation, when we have a family, etc. This procrastination does nothing but decrease the precious time we have to truly make the most out of life.
In this discussion, we are going to consider some of the most important questions you could ever ask yourself when it comes to truly evaluating your own life. While most of these questions are somewhat open-ended and the answers to them will differ for everyone personally, we will dive into them a little deeper to truly get to the source of the questions themselves.
Hopefully, after going through these questions and considering what they mean to you as an individual, you will have a much better perspective on your current state of being as well as a clarified perspective on where you want to be.
8 Questions For Evaluating Your Life
1| What Is Not Working In My Life? What Am I Struggling With?
Anytime you are trying to solve a problem or improve a situation, the first thing to pinpoint is the problem itself. You wouldn’t try to make a car repair without distinguishing between a mechanical or electrical issue first. How helpful would a doctor’s visit be if they prescribed you a medication without asking about your symptoms? Evaluating your life is no different.
Often times, especially when life gets hard, we get this overwhelming feeling that everything is going bad and that our list of problems is literally endless. Because we feel so overwhelmed, we have a tendency to throw in the towel, assuming that everything is the problem and since we obviously can’t fix every single facet of life it is pointless to try.
This is a classic case of not being able to see the forest because of the trees. However, you can rest assured that no matter how complicated your current life situation has become, your problems are not as numerous as you might assume.
Similarly, your overall situation is also not hopeless. Even still, you must stop treating the problems in your life as a shapeless, mass of negativity and take the time to sort out each variable individually.
To begin, it can be helpful to first separate the main categories of your life. This can include things such as your career, family life, social relationships, health, finances, etc. Once you have distinguished them, you have already given yourself a much clearer working space to isolate the things in your life that are giving you problems.
Spend some time evaluating each of these categories; what’s going wrong in each? More importantly, what are some actions you can take right now that will at least start the ball rolling in the right direction? Realize that you are probably not going to completely resolve a chronic issue with a single action, that’s just not how it works. However, taking no action at all is certainly not going to get the job done.
One thing that may become apparent when dividing up your issues into the areas of your life that they fall into is that a lot of your problems carry over into more than your category. Don’t let that overwhelming feeling sink in, this is normal.
Allow yourself to dig a bit deeper into the issue itself and you can almost always trace it back to the actual source, which will shrink it back to one of the categories you’ve already distinguished.
If you can accomplish this step, you have already knocked out one of the most critical steps to improving your life without really even addressing the problems in a tangible way. You’re probably familiar with the term, “divide and conquer.”
Any effective self-evaluation of life must involve clearing the smoke that blends a list of problems and rearranging them into neat little compartments that can be eliminated with further action.
2| Life Contentment And Satisfaction
When trying to evaluate your own life in a way that steers you to the path towards happiness, there is an extremely important question to ask yourself. This question seems so obvious at face value that it often gets overlooked in the process.
The question is: what does contentment, happiness and satisfaction even look like to you?
These are pretty little buzzwords that get thrown around so often that they start to lose any tangible meaning. Sure, all of us want to live a life that is fulfilling and we want to be happy. However, none of these words have a definition that perfectly fits each unique individual.
Being happy can look vastly different from person to person. For some, achieving financial success and having the biggest house on the block comes to mind when thinking about fulfillment. For others, living a modest life surrounded by the ones they love is the perfect picture of contentment.
If you make the effort to truly start living your best life because you want to be happy, that’s great. What’s not so great is beginning this process without forming a clear picture in your mind of what happiness is to you.
Much like any other goal you set for yourself, lacking a specific definition of what achieving a goal looks like greatly reduces your odds of success. If you were to start working out with the simple goal of “being healthier,” how dedicated do you think you are going to be when the going gets tough?
However, if you started the same process with specific, measurable goals such as achieving a certain body weight or being able to do a specific number of push-ups, there is a measuring stick in place that holds you accountable.
Similar to the first step we discussed in the process of self-evaluation, which involved dividing your life into general categories and neatly organizing your problems into them, creating a similar structure outlining your version of contentment and satisfaction is something you need to do.
You are not a generic human being that lacks unique qualities and perspectives. Therefore, your ideal life shouldn’t be described this way. While the quote, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there,” is used a bit too much in irrelevant context, it certainly applies to this point.
3| Considerations For Taking Care Of Myself: Mind, Body And Spirit
One of the most helpful perspectives to consider when trying to improve your life and optimize your fulfillment is to realize that you are the foundation, the source of the entire process. After all, everything that you do, say, or choose starts with you. What’s the point of pursuing external achievements and success if you haven’t first taken care of your internal state of being first? In that situation, all the success and accolades the world has to offer aren’t going to mean a thing.
Realizing that you are the foundation of every experience you have in life is invaluable. However, there are still multiple aspects of you that have to be considered. A simple way to think about this is to compartmentalize your existence into three components, your body, mind, and spirit.
These three aspects are somewhat poetic in that they are quite different from each other but culminate to form one thing, you. That being said, neglecting to take care of any of these three variables harms the whole unit.
Going back to the idea that you are the foundation, you cannot build a stable structure if one part of the base is insufficient. By now, you hopefully get the idea that focusing on yourself is essential and that “yourself” has several variables. The next thing to consider is how do you go about ensuring that you are focusing on building a strong foundation?
Your Body
To begin, we will start by discussing the idea of taking care of your body. This is probably the most straightforward aspect of the equations, we all know the general dos and don’ts of physical health.
However, knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it are vastly different things. Instead of listing a slew of obvious statements describing how to improve your physical health, rephrasing these statements into direct questions to ask yourself makes them much more personal.
In order to objectively evaluate how much attention, you are devoting to your physical health, ask yourself these types of questions.
How often are you making time for exercise?
Don’t answer this question with ambiguous statements; you are not defending yourself to another person.
On an average day, does your diet consists of foods that you know to be healthy or do you get the majority of your nutrition from processed, pre-packaged foods that come in a drive-thru bag or cardboard container?
How much water are you drinking every day?
Taking into account the last week, what is the average amount of hours you have slept per night?
Once again, all of these considerations are reduced to bland info you have heard over and over when presented as general statements. However, when transformed into questions you ask yourself on a personal level, they carry much more weight.
Your Mind
While the importance of looking after your physical health cannot be ignored, making sure that you are nurturing your mind is equally important. The internal environment that you go through life with cannot be self-harming and toxic if you are going to maximize your happiness and level of contentment.
Mental health can be a bit more complicated to evaluate than the physical body, but there are some key questions to consider. We’ll start with your internal dialogue, the way in which you communicate with yourself.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we have non-verbal conversations in our minds on pretty much a constant basis. Truth be told, you probably have more conversations with yourself than you do with any other person in your life.
With that being said, making sure that the way you speak to yourself has a huge effect on your state of mind. Given the frequency with which you interact with yourself internally, make sure that these conversations are supportive and uplifting.
It makes a lot of sense that constant criticism and belittling yourself is going to be detrimental to your mental health.
There are other aspects of nurturing your mind that need to be addressed on a regular basis. One important thing to consider is your mental diet. While we all know that a diet that consists mostly of junk food and sweets has negative effects on the physical body, the mind works in a similar way.
Feeding your mind with negative information, self-doubt and mind-numbing TV shows does not promote a healthy mental state. Think about your daily life. Are you mentally consuming an excessive amount of mental junk food?
Much like regular exercise is important for taking care of your body, there is a similar need to stimulate your mind to keep it sharp. Always strive to be a lifelong learner. How often are you making time to read a chapter of an interesting book?
Are you staying up to date in the latest research and information related to your passions?
When is the last time you tried something new?
All of these habits stimulate mental growth and ensure your mind stays in a state of growth.
Your Spirit
The third and final aspect to consider is your spirit. While differentiating between your mind and spirit can be somewhat of a grey area, there are distinctions to note. Although there is no clear definition that separates the two, it can help to think of your spirit as something bigger than yourself and the physical world.
Whether you are a follower of a specific religion or not, you surely have some thought about your place in the grand scheme of things. This includes thoughts of your purpose here as a human being, what happens after this, how your actions in life resonate after you are dead and gone.
Whatever your views are, everyone needs a bigger purpose for why they get up in the morning and work towards their big life goals. Sure, making money and achieving success is a factor but these aspirations usually lack the deeply rooted inspiration that spiritual needs provide.
Considering what spiritual health looks like for you takes a lot of deep thinking about inward reflection. These thoughts can be scary and take a lot of mental energy, but they are important to reflect on. You need to find your overarching “why” behind the things you do.
4| What Habits Promote My Being Self-Supportive?
When thinking about the factors that have the greatest effects on how your life ultimately plays out, it is the little actions that count the most. Of course, there are big decisions you will make at certain points that carry far-reaching weight, but these are few and far between. The habits that will make or break you when trying to live your best life are the small things.
With that being said, are your daily habits bringing you closer or further away from the ideal image of life we previously discussed?
While we have already touched on taking care of yourself as a whole and important questions to consider, do you have a working routine that gets you a little closer every day to where you want to be?
There are a countless number of little decisions you make every day, usually without even thinking about how they affect your overall journey. I would encourage you to start giving these decisions more consideration. From the time you wake up every day until you crawl back into bed, be deliberate with everything you do.
This doesn’t mean that you must over analyze every second of your life and become a robot programmed to only seek success, that’s not how this whole human thing works.
Rather, allow yourself to identify things you may be doing that are impeding your path to the life you want and stop doing these things. Similarly, think about areas that you are consistently building yourself up and note the positive effects that these habits are having on your life.
5| Do I Know What I Really Want? Self-Discovery Tools
This part of our discussion is somewhat of a reiteration on the importance of actually defining what your best life looks like for you personally. Given that you have taken the time to outline this life, you may still be unsure if your idea of a great life is actually worth striving for.
There may still be some self-doubt and fear that even if you achieve this version of life, you may still lack satisfaction and fulfillment. These are normal concerns that can often be alleviated with the right way of thinking.
So, how will you know if the life you are striving for is right for you?
How can you be sure that all of the hard work and time investment required to achieve this life is going to be worth it in the long run?
The answers to these questions are not black and white, rather a feeling-based process.
Although our feelings and emotions can get us into trouble as times, they are a beautiful aspect of humanity and certainly serve their purpose. This is especially true when trying to discover ourselves and the life we dream of.
That being said, how do your daily actions and steps towards your goals make you feel?
You see, feelings of happiness and satisfaction should not be reserved only for the end result of some goal or achievement. The process itself should be one that brings you joy.
It doesn’t matter how happy or fulfilled you think you will be after reaching a big life goal if you are miserable throughout the entire process of getting there.
Of course, there is always going to be some level of discomfort and fatigue when trying to achieve anything of significance, but this can’t be the overall trend. Not only will this most likely result in you giving up before the finish line, but it will also diminish much of the satisfaction when you get there.
Another tool that can be quite helpful in discovering yourself and getting you on the path to true fulfillment has to do with your natural talents and gifts. Whether you consider yourself to be a gifted individual or terribly average, there are almost certainly things you are inherently good at.
These are the skills and talents that other people may have complimented you on, things that seem to come easy to you that have not required a lot of extra effort on your part. One of the best ways to discover your own personal path to fulfillment is to listen to these things.
Whether you want to call it destiny, fate or purpose, life will sometimes provide helpful indicators that you are following your intended path. Of course, challenging yourself to improve at certain things you are not naturally gifted at is also a great way to grow as an individual, but most people that leave their mark on the world do so by harnessing and building on their natural gifts.
6| What Am I Doing To Make Myself A Priority In My Life?
Many people never allow themselves to create their best personal life because they do not invest in the most important part of the equation, themselves. This is not some selfish pursuit that involves placing your needs and feelings above everyone around you or a “win at all costs” mentally.
None of us want to be considered self-centered or arrogant, which is why making yourself a priority can be challenging.
Giving yourself permission to prioritize your own growth and improvement over other areas of life sometimes requires a simple shift in perspective.
Instead of viewing this notion as a selfish act that decreases your ability to care for and provide for those you care about, you must realize that you are the source from which all of these things flow.
You cannot give things that you do not have. If you don’t first invest in yourself, whether it is improving at some skill or ability, getting enough rest or any form of self-care, you are limiting how much you can give to others.
With this point of view, it almost seems like NOT prioritizing yourself is the selfish action, does it not? We have already discussed the importance of viewing yourself as the foundation for everything else that happens in your life.
If you are making a regular effort to prioritize this foundation, everything will eventually crumble on top of it. Don’t view self-care and personal time as something you should feel guilty or ashamed of doing.
7| Are My Relationships Supportive Of Living My Greatest Life?
While much of our conversation so far has focused on you as an individual and the importance of looking inwardly to honestly self-evaluate, the process involves other people as well. We are extremely social creatures and, whether we like it or not, we need other people to do and feel our best.
When it comes to living your best life, the people that you choose to live this life with are so very important. You may have heard the saying before that states, “you are the sum of the five people you spend most of your time with.”
There is a lot of truth to this statement. The people around us influence us even more than we realize sometimes. Our mannerisms, ways of thinking, habits and various aspects of our being are often a direct result of the individuals that we interact with the most. This is why monitoring your closest relationships is imperative when building the life you want for yourself.
If the people in your inner circle have not accomplished any of the things you are trying to accomplish, demonstrate character traits and habits you know you shouldn’t and constantly have an attitude that is nowhere near conducive to building the life you want, why in the world would you think you are going to reach your goals while being influenced by these people?
If you are like many individuals, you may be under the impression that you are going to lift these people up, to reach down and take them with you to the top. This is a beautiful way of thinking, but things almost never work out this way.
All too often, the same individuals you extend a helping hand to, will pull you down. While it can be hard to come to terms with, sometimes you must let unhealthy relationships go in order to become your best self.
You will be hard-pressed to find the story of a successful person who did not have a positive circle of people in their corner. Don’t try to be the exception to the rule; allowing people who you know are not good for you to remain in your life only makes your upward journey steeper. Find like-minded people who are making an effort to become the best version of themselves and build around them. The energy and growth available when your time is invested in these types of people can be an invaluable asset.
8| What Goals Have I Set For Myself?
When evaluating your current destination in life compared to where you want to go, there is obviously a process and plan that must be formulated if you are even going to have the chance of getting there.
You wouldn’t start a ten-hour drive to the beach by taking random streets on a whim and expect to end up by the ocean. Similarly, if you don’t have certain steps in place to serve as markers along the way to your desired life, you will never get there.
Instead of exits and rest stops that would be useful for a long road trip, setting small goals that slowly add up to your big goals is key. However, the specificity of these goals is important.
You can think of big goals and achievements as these end result of a longer equation, the number on the right side of the equal sign.
Everything on the left is the smaller goals that led to the number on the right. Just like a math equation, your smaller goals must get you closer to the specific, larger goal.
When planning out your best life, make sure that your progress can be measured in the form of smaller goals. Furthermore, make sure that these smaller goals are actually conducive to achieving your long-term plan.
You can accomplish all of the short-term goals in the world, but if they don’t get you closer to where you want to end up in the long run, they do not serve the purpose they were intended for.
What Am I Doing In Furtherance Of Those Goals?
Just as the development of short-term goals that draw you closer to your long-term plans, the even smaller steps you take to reach these smaller goals are important. If you want to think of short-term goals in time spans of, say, two weeks, these smaller actions are the things you do on a daily basis.
Obviously, your long-term success is based on how effectively you conquer your short-term goals on a consistent basis. Zooming in a little closer, you can see how failing to even reach these smaller goals does not fare well for accomplishing larger, more significant achievements down the road.
Within each and every day, you are going to be faced with thousands of small decisions that at first glance seem like they have no significance on your success or failure five years from now. However, everything you will or will not accomplish years from that moment is based entirely on the net result of these tiny decisions.
Think about each individual day as a tiny, miniscule, important step in the achievements and life you dream about years from now.
Not only will this allow you to become more aware of the beauty and significance of each day, but it will also put you in a far better position to reach the life you want.
In Conclusion
At this point, we have discussed the importance of self-evaluation and how creating the life you truly want for yourself involves objectively reflecting on your current issues, limitations, and areas for improvement.
The next several discussion points are meant to serve as brief reiterations of the important questions posed thus far.
These questions should be evaluated on a fairly routine basis, as even the best laid plan can fall by the wayside if you fail to check-in here and there to ensure you are still on track.
4 Considerations For Evaluating Your Life
1| Am I Living My Best Life?
Although your best life is usually perceived as an eventual destination to be enjoyed after lots of hard work, wise decisions, and planning, it is also important to live each day with mindset of already being there. The way in which you view your current place in life, your attitude towards your situation, has a large effect on how fulfilled and content you will actually feel.
On your way to grandiose achievement and conquering your long-term goals, don’t forget to enjoy yourself in the short-term as well. Remember that the process should be enjoyed just as much as the end result.
Making yourself miserable for years on end and saving the good part for the finish line is not the way to live your best life.
2| Evaluating My Tribe
Remember to remain extremely picky about who you spend large portions of your time with. No matter how hard you resist or how impervious you think you may be to outside influences, surrounding yourself with toxic people will poison you in the long-term.
You are not under any obligation to hand on to people that constantly bring you down or make you feel small. There is no debt you owe to these types of people that must be repaid with your unconditional time and energy.
Want to reach your best life and enjoy the realization of your biggest dreams? Surround yourself with people that are headed in the same direction.
3| Am I Proactive In My Life?
You should make conscious efforts each day to get closer to your best life. This means not allowing the waves of life to toss you in random directions and hoping for the best. Be proactive in your efforts, doing everything with a purpose. This means even your small, daily decisions.
Make no mistake; life will have its way with you if you let it. If you do not live life with intent, life will keep you on your heels, reacting to each and every event when it is right in your face. This isn’t some way of telling you to be aggressive and over-assertive, rather to know what you want for yourself, where you want to go and allowing these thoughts to dictate the choices you make.
Don’t be the person who goes through life in a timid, reactionary way. Always have a plan, a set of steps, a pre-determined path that you refuse to stray from.
Staying proactive is the only way to be the captain of your life, navigating the waves that would otherwise steer you in a never-ending series of random directions.
4| What Is Missing From My Life?
One of the worst realizations you may have after seemingly doing everything right, remaining disciplined and steadfast in your long-term plan is reaching your “best life” and still feeling like something is missing. This feeling can, at first glance, make you feel as if you’ve wasted a huge amount of time and energy for naught.
This is not the case. One of the funniest and most endearing qualities of human beings is that we are fallible. We are constantly making mistakes and these mistakes are one of the biggest factors that lead to our eventual improvement. If you reach the place in life that you strived for and still feel like something is missing, there is nothing wrong with starting the entire process over and building even further upward from the place you have now reached.
Even if you formulate a long-term plan to reach the life you want for yourself, don’t assume that you should stop trying to grow and improve even after you get there.
Final Thoughts
Never allow yourself to become static in the pursuit of self-realization. The best life you can pursuit is one in which you are better each day than the one before.
