So what is Lifestyle Design? Why is Lifestyle Design more important than money?
Lifestyle Design is the ability to take the resources you have (money and skills), and transform them into the life your soul craves to live. Rather than waiting for a random life to form around you based on the spontaneity of luck, lifestyle design is the act of creating the life you want to live using hard-work, discipline, and vision.
To experience your best life, you need to create your best life. To master the art of lifestyle design you need to stop seeing money as a source to buy things. You must see money as a tool to help you create the life experiences and freedoms that will make you feel like you are living a fulfilled, accomplished, and happy. This is the magic I call: “Lifestyle Design.” If you can design your future to feel good all the time, then you’ll naturally begin to live a life where you feel good all the time. In short: Find the things that make you the happiest, and then use your money to design your life to experience these things as much as you can.
In my opinion, there are four major tools that need to be used to master the power of lifestyle design. Here they are:
THE FOUR TOOLS YOU NEED TO DESIGN YOUR LIFE:
#1 SELF-AWARENESS: You’ll never know what life you want to live, until you can learn to hear yourself think. You must be able to travel deep inside of yourself to find the source of your own thoughts. You must know yourself, before you can know what you are supposed to do.
#2: MONEY: A human can’t move mountains in life, until they can acquire the proper tools and teams to help them move the mountains that need to be moved. Money is the only resource that you can transform into anything you need. Money can help you buy the right tools and the right teams to help you accomplish your goals.
#3: PSYCHOLOGY: A human being can’t enjoy their life, until they can convince themselves to be grateful and appreciate what they have. You must master the psychology of your own mind to unlock the happiness that is often right in front of you.
Also, you must learn how to push yourself beyond the limits of fear and pain, so that you can see and design the life that extraordinary people live. You have to believe you can do it, and you have to then convince yourself that you are meant to do it no matter how scary or painful the journey to your dreams may be.
#4: SPIRITUALITY: Why are you alive? What were you created to do? What does your soul crave to experience, see, and create with your time alive? You have to be able to find your why, before you can devise your plan of what, where, and how. Spirituality can be the quest that can help you find your why.
LIFESTYLE DESIGN EXPLORED:
Let’s break these four individual concepts down (Awareness, Money, Psychology, Spirituality) so that you can see that when they are combined, they can help you design the life you’ve always dreamed of living.
LIFESTYLE DESIGN TOOL #1: SELF-AWARENESS:
First off, who are you? Answer that question now. If you can’t answer the question, of “Who are you?” with a confident statement consisting of a few powerful and meaningful sentences describing your reasons, motives, and ambitions, then I first recommend that you focus on becoming aware of who you are.
How do you do this? Turn off the TV. Shut down your social media. Abandon friends who make you numb to life. Abandon every influence in your life that is creating thoughts inside your head that are not yours, and go on a mission to find out exactly which of your thoughts are yours.
Search for your own peaceful place of silence so you can learn to listen the thoughts coming from your soul. I personally do this by going for long walks, sometimes with the help of music or podcasts with a positive and enlightening message, and I just become comfortable listening to the thoughts in my head. I meet them, and evaluate them, and I examine them. I ask myself, “Where are my thoughts coming from? What are they telling me to do? What is the underlying purpose behind them?”
I evaluate if my thoughts are coming from a place of insecurity or are they coming from a place of confidence? If my thoughts are originating from a place of insecurity, motivating me to over-compensate my natural actions, then I try to find confidence in who I really am. If my thoughts are originating from a place of confidence, then I do everything I can to encourage those thoughts to develop because they are the thoughts that will lead me to become the person I am meant to become.
But before I ever attempt to design my life around the voice of my thoughts, I spend 80% of my time trying to understand who I am. Achieving actual goals in life only brings 20% of the happiness. The remaining 80% of happiness comes from the time and effort it takes to shine a light into the dark depths of your soul and finding the revelation of why you must accomplish this goal to be happy. The first tool to master lifestyle design is found when you unflinchingly stare into the depths of your soul and become powerfully aware of who you are, and what you’re meant to do in your life.
LIFESTYLE DESIGN TOOL #2: MONEY
How do you view money? Do you view money as a gateway to buy more possessions that you don’t even need? Or do you view money as a gateway toward total freedom over your time, so that you can design a life that will allow you to accomplish the dreams you were meant to live?
If you view money as a source to own more things, then you will always be caged into a lifestyle that is dependent on a job-like existence to work for more money to buy more things. The need for more money and more things will never leave if that’s what you live for, which means you will never be able to leave a working lifestyle to earn the funds to buy them.
However, if you view money as a gateway toward total freedom over your time, then you will begin to use your money to build a life where you are free to think and create however you like to. Time to allow yourself to learn, grow, and ultimately succeed is the #1 thing wealthy people use to design their dream lives. DON’T see money as a gateway to buy more things. See money as a gateway to have total freedom over your time, so you can become a smarter, more skilled human being, and wealth will often be produces as the byproduct of becoming a more talented human being.
LIFESTYLE DESIGN TOOL #3: PSYCHOLOGY:
Abandon the pessimist mindset. Embrace the optimist mindset. Trick your mind to see the good in everything. You will never be happy until you learn to appreciate the fortunes that you do have.
Forgive more. Share without expectation more. Help more. When you choose to engage in healthy activities, you will be proud of yourself more.
Wealth is an act of consciously feeling better about yourself, and doing the things that will make you feel better about yourself. When you feel good about yourself, and have a financial cushion to protect yourself from the harsh realities of running out of resources, it’s amazing how happy you can begin to feel about life.
LIFESTYLE DESIGN TOOL #4: SPIRITUALITY:
The world is a gigantically large and powerful place. It is far bigger than the limited number of brain cells in your own mind. Use the massiveness of the world, and the spiritual forces that are here, to find bigger visions than you could ever imagine on your own.
I personally believe in God. I strategically utilize my belief in God to imagine ideas and visions that I would not be able to imagine if I didn’t believe that there was a bigger purpose to being alive.
If you are someone who has had bad experiences with man-made religion, I am sorry that you experienced this, and I have a lot of empathy for you. But don’t let their mistakes shrink the potential of your life and your own relationship with God.
Use the power of spirituality to find the strength to see past your own selfish desires, to live for a greater good of helping, sharing, and inspiring. Jesus’ teachings are my own personal inspiration to live my life. Having a bigger, deeper calling than simply working, buying, and dying, has helped me design my life in ways I could have never done on my own.
LIFESTYLE DESIGN IN CONCLUSION:
“Lifestyle Design” is the ability to bring the tools of self-awareness, finance, psychology, and spirituality together to create the life that makes you the happiest. I recently read a quote that summed this subject up. The quote read: “Build Icebergs with your life, not skyscrapers.”
This idea was profound to me because it made me realize that the achievements in life (the skyscrapers) are things everyone can see. But it’s the icebergs in life, (the power of the soul and subconscious) that guides people to live their best lives. It’s in the icebergs – the tools of Lifestyle Design — is where all of the greatest quests and lives originate from.
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