Prioritising These 2 Things Will Enrich Your Life
By: Thomas Oppong
Tags: Relationships, Lifestyle, Self, Personal Growth, Life

Prioritising These 2 Things Will Enrich Your Life

Want to enjoy life to the full? Stop prioritising the wrong things

There’s no one way to enrich your life — but there are different paths you can take to have new, better and deeply satisfying experiences.

An enriched life is one of endless growth and discovery that brings out the best in you and makes you come alive.

Living life to the fullest is the ultimate goal of many people, but rarely do people achieve it because they focus on the wrong things in life.

While these two ideas might not be all that surprising, the explanations serve as powerful reminders that we might be prioritizing the wrong things in life.

1. The people in your life

Human connections plays a key role in our well-being. The people in our lives contribute to your happiness more than anything else.

Connecting with others is inherently more rewarding. People with strong and healthy relationships are less likely to feel stressed by challenging situations.

“Social connectedness generates a positive feedback loop of social, emotional and physical well-being,” explains Dr Emma Seppala of Stanford Medicine.

Better and meaningful human connection is about having people present in your life like anchors. It’s about the relationships you create, nurture, develop, support and maintain with parents, siblings, spouse and children, friends and colleagues.

Heaps of research suggest that social connections make people happier. Satisfying relationships not only make people happy, but they also associated with better health and even longer life.

Every person we know can add an invaluable and memorable experience to our lives. Even the most difficult and complicated relationships can teach us something worthwhile.

Relationships are also connected to some of our strongest emotions. When they are positive we feel happiness, contentment and calm. When relationships bring out the worst in us or they are non-existent, we feel anxious, depressed, and lonely.

Want to live longer, enjoy life more and actually find that elusive happiness? Prioritise the people close to you and plan to spend more time with them, even if you can’t meet them in person, you can call them.

Make the most of online tools in these difficult times — just because we are “socially distancing” doesn’t mean we have to socially disconnect from the people close to us.

“When your goal is to connect or strengthen understanding, use phone calls and video chats to implant nonverbal cues back into your conversations,” write Alicea Lieberman and Juliana Schroeder of Behavioral Scientist.

The more you connect, the happier you’ll feel, and the more likely you’ll be to build even more connections.

2. Something to do that drive you forward

“Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”― Immanuel Kant

Do you have an idea of what you really want in life? Nothing gives a person inner wholeness and peace like a distinct understanding of where they are going. Simon Sinek, author of Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Finding Purpose for You and Your Team, explains:

“Once you understand your WHY, you’ll be able to clearly articulate what makes you feel fulfilled and to better understand what drives your behavior when you’re at your natural best. When you can do that, you’ll have a point of reference for everything you do going forward. You’ll be able to make more intentional choices for your business, your career and your life. You’ll be able to inspire others to buy from you, work with you and join your cause.”

What actions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors are you attracted to the most? What guarantees meaning can deeply enrich your life.

Meaningful activities, personal projects and creative hobbies that add value to your life can change your outlook in life. People who successfully pursue their life’s work, ask themselves the same questions every day:

What is my purpose in life? Who am I? Who do I want to become? What makes me happy? Where should I spend my time and energy? With whom? What makes my life meaningful? Fun? Satisfying?

Without something worthwhile to do, some people can struggle mentally feel great confusion in life — they also tend to question their existence or purpose in life.

Engaging in something that drive you forward, whether it’s meaningful work or something else, is a crucial slice of having meaning or purpose in life.

In her book, “Brave: 50 Everyday Acts of Courage to Thrive in Work, Love and Life, Margie Warrell, writes: “Knowing your why is an important first step in figuring out how to achieve the goals that excite you and create a life you enjoy living (versus merely surviving!).

You are the author of your stories in life and you can change how you are telling them. Your life isn’t just a list of events, it’s also how how you define and create it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

For a more meaningful and enriching life, choose your experiences carefully, and once you start pursuing them, watch out for peak moments because they will provide the closest thing you will ever feel that could be identified as oneness.

Instead of picking projects, hobbies, and relationships based on how happy they will make you feel, focus on things that make your life more significant, worthwhile and bring out the best in you.

It’s okay if you don’t find an all-consuming purpose yet — just making an effort to steer your life in the direction of something that makes you come alive can make a big difference.