Ongoing life adventures are crucial to happiness and health. Take a holiday, start a new hobby or learn a new language to strengthen the functioning of your brain, improve its neuroplasticity and keep learning more about your values.
Those rich life experiences encourage the brain to release dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. In turn, these chemicals generate all those feel-good emotions like pleasure, happiness and joy! Here are three way to stretch and sharpen your thinking:
Find Joy in Learning Something New
Extraordinary life experiences can be forged at all ages. I love seeing all the hugely varied ways that clients create gratifying life adventures. From writing books to volunteering, they report that new experiences are stimulating and fun.
Understand your motivation
When new experiences align with our values, an altogether more profound level of joy is delivered. Clients want to feel fulfilled rather than just busy or occupied! Gaining awareness around motivation unlocks enormous value for us. Did you know that leveraging your intrinsic motivation is far more likely to result in success and contentment? To explain, think of all the activities you want to do versus all those activities you’re told you should do. Which activities are you more motivated to begin, and why? Which activities are you more likely to complete or finish? And which tasks will give you a greater sense of fulfilment?
Build Upon Past Achievements
Mindful planning courtesy of a life stocktake is the best way to kick start your next big adventure. A life stocktake can take many forms – you can write a journal, create a picture board with images drawn from your life or draw a life timeline. Look at how you’ve previuosly spent your time and energy. What skills and knowledge did you acquire? What did you achieve? What gave you joy? What challenged you?
A birdseye view of your life allows you to identify what has traditionally motivated and driven you. Ultimately, a life stocktake puts you in the driver’s seat of your life so you can examine your overall life journey and answer the following question: “Should I use the next life stage to realise and consolidate my dreams or forge a shiny new direction?”
Value your life journey
Above all, please don’t create a life stocktake and then shelve it. Do the opposite and revisit it regularly. Treasure it. Consider sharing it with people you trust and who are vested in your success. It’s all part of building up your enthusiasm and making sure you commit to action to bring your dreams to fruition. You are important. Your life counts. As the saying goes, you only live once, so why not enter each life stage by being empowered, focused and deliberate.