Why I Changed My Life Instead of Changing My Job
By: Breana Wallace
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Life, Personal Development

Designing Your Life

You need a North Star

I can’t tell you what your ideal life looks like, but I can share how I peered behind the curtain to see what was actually important to me. Once I took the time to do some digging, it became easier to move in the direction of building a life that I was holistically happy with.

It’s a hell of a lot easier to make decisions when you know what your desired outcomes actually are.

Find what’s important to you

Take a look at your life and assess where you’re at outside of work. We often give our leftovers to our home life, and our family and friends. The message that we’re sending to ourselves there is that these things don’t take as much energy and effort. But what if we reframed that?

What if we made it a priority, and let our job be just a job?

Below are some questions that might get you started in the right direction. Give yourself permission to answer without thinking about the constraints of your responsibilities. That’s the only way to accurately start to get a glimpse of what you want. From there, you can start to work backwards and slowly build a life you love over time.

Try starting with these:

What does your favorite morning look like right now?

How would you ideally spend your time during the day if you didn’t have work?

What hobbies would you have?

What would you like to learn that’s new?

Who would you spend your time with, and doing what?

Build your life around those priorities

For many people, they find that their relationships haven’t been getting the attention that they deserve, to thrive. People grow apart over time and without the effort to connect, relationships become more fragile.

Maybe you find that you want to spend more time on hobbies that you’ve long forgotten about and used to enjoy. Maybe you have a long list of things you’ve always wanted to learn but have never had the time or energy for.

It might not feel like it, but this is all actually great news!

Once you know what your answers are, you can focus on putting your energy back into what matters to you. Realistically, you won’t be able to change your life overnight, but now you have a direction to move in. You have something to help make decisions about your time, energy, and effort. You now have your very own North Star.

A personal example in action

For me, it became clear that a huge priority was travel. I always had to be living for our next trip. If I didn’t have at least 2 things booked to look forward to, I was distraught. They didn’t have to be big, they just had to be based around new experiences with the people I loved, and they generally involved some fantastic food experience as well.

Knowing this, I was able to start moving in the direction of finding a way to travel more. A year later, we live in our RV and travel full-time. I started putting a concerted effort into the relationships that I’d been taking for granted. My grandparents now get multiple calls a week and I’ve loved how much closer I’m feeling to them again. I stopped spending money on things that didn’t fit into my dream life. Now we save 80% of our income and know exactly what we want to spend it on. Our life has been the best it’s ever been since I stopped prioritizing work as the most important thing in my life.