The First Step to Authentic Living? Working Out What You Really Want
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Sometimes the pressure to live up to our own expectations or those of others can leave us feeling unsure about what we want our own life to look like
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Dean Fraser explores the value of authentic living and how you can get there
Any of us can make the choice right now to change things to become more empowered, to live a more authentic lifestyle.
There’s an art to being empowered and although we certainly need to be passionate about our personal goals, we equally need to become a little detached from the way in which it all plays out to allow ourselves the chance to engage in unexpected new opportunities. This can be one of the more challenging lessons for many of us to learn, including myself for a while.
The greatest martial artists in any discipline practise controlled power – here is true empowerment. The martial arts practitioner who uses only unchanneled aggression or, worse still, anger, is unlikely to stay the course. And it is precisely the same for us when we walk the path of our goals.
The truth that this is genuinely possible for any one of us to make the conscious choice to live an authentically real life.
Ways that you can live more authentically:
- Learning to trust our intuition – it will not always seem to make logical sense to follow our gut instinct, but we would be wise to develop this habit.
- Investing all actions with one ocean load of passion and adapt along the way, but still authentically within our own personal life-plan.
- Develop a personally empowered mindset.
- Staying focussed in the moment to ensure maximum effectiveness.
- Controlling of our own personal future by setting targets and finding ways to take direct action every day, however small, to achieve them.
- A few simple adjustments in lifestyle can dramatically reduce stress and, equally importantly, the likelihood of developing serious health issues.
Not everything is going to go exactly as we anticipated every single day, it happens. An empowered mindset ensures we keep on going anyway and not get distracted or start feeling sorry for ourselves. The best way to improve our reality is to take personal responsibility for our own life and then get out there to make those changes we want for ourselves.
Anyone can change things to make their life more empowered and live a more successful lifestyle…
What is the first step towards this new way of life? Deciding what it is we genuinely want!
Yet surely all of us desire above anything else to be happier, don’t we?
Well…that all depends.
Unhelpful internal programming from the past still running on a loop through our decision making and influencing our choices can block us from achieving all we already possess the latent potential for.
If someone grew up in a home where parents always struggled with cash and as a child they witnessed their friends getting cool presents for birthdays and they didn’t – this person may end up having a few issues relating to money to overcome on their own personal road to success.
If you have a bad track record with making and keeping money what were your experiences growing up? What did your parents say when you wanted something in a shop that you could not have? If it was more like “we can’t afford that” or “there isn’t enough money to buy you things all the time” it could well have set up feelings of anxiety about money. There will be never enough for everything, creating a kind of poor mentality self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents naturally never mean to do this, they’re just striving to making ends meet.
For the moment though, let us get back to this what do you really want? question.
It is all down to what success means to you. To some this is going to be limitless amounts of cash, to others the freedom to do what they want without having to think about budgeting for it.
Many (like your friendly author) have their personal concept of success as helping others realise their own potential, while being healthily stress-free; and all that combined together with possessing the financial freedom to able to afford to do more or less anything they wish.
Take some time to do this, ponder deeply about what you really want and that is half the trick complete.
Taking control of our own future can be our choice at any time in our lives – all it requires is making the decision to empower ourselves, and giving life 100%…
Dean Fraser is the author of The Magic of Authentic Living
