5 Steps to Take Ownership of Your Life

After completing yesterday's post, I thought further about what steps you and I can complete to take ownership of our lives. I already wrote about why taking ownership is important and how important it is to grant ourselves the opportunity to ask ourselves how we feel about our lives. For clarity sake, I thought it beneficial to break things down even further. I always find information most helpful when it has been broken down to its bare essentials, and that's what I've tried to do here for our collective benefit.

So, without further ado, here are 5 Steps to Take Ownership of Your Life.

Step 1 - Permit Your Own Feelings

This step should be a no-brainer, but I've included it because it's exactly where I got hung up. As I pointed out yesterday, I literally spent years not even permitting myself to realize the feelings I was having about my career. Day by day, I was hiding behind the assumption that "because I have a decent job in my field, I must be happy. Case closed.". I was completely wrong to think this way, and I may have lost valuable self-improvement time because of it.

So, Step 1 is to give yourself permission to examine your own feelings. If you've created a "no-fly-zone" for your feelings about a particular aspect of your life (career, health, relationships, etc), dismantle it NOW. If you're going to be in charge of your life, you have to permit yourself to understand your own feelings. Throw away any assumptions you have. Start fresh. If you have existing feelings about the topic in question, sideline those as well. What you need to be able to do is examine how you feel today.

Step 2 - Ask Yourself the Big Question

With your feelings on tap, ask yourself (aloud, if necessary):

"Am I happy with [...]?"

You can fill in the blank with whatever attribute of your life you are examining. "Am I happy with my job?", "Am I happy with my health?", and so on. Take note of how you feel. Write your feelings down if it helps you. You may discover some new things about yourself. I did.

Be as truthful with yourself as you can. Within yourself, there should be no judgement, so even if your answer to the big question isn't what you want it to be or think it should be, accept it all the same. The more accurately you identify your true feelings, the more appropriately you'll be able to target improvement later on.

Step 3 - Consider Your Options

Once you know your feelings, you're ready to start considering options for change, as required. Even if you are happy with the particular attribute of your life being considered, you can always look for ways to make things even better. More importantly, if you're not happy with how things are going, you can point yourself in a new direction and begin to make improvements.

Spend some time pondering what options you have available to you. If you don't like your career, perhaps you could start transitioning to a new one. If you're unhappy with your health, perhaps you could identify some areas for improvement. The more effort you put into this step, the broader your list of options will become. Even if you feel trapped, there will undoubtedly be a small way forward.

Capture the options you come up with in a way you deem appropriate. Write them down. Memorize them. Email them to yourself. You want to make sure that you don't lose track of what options you have. These are the off-ramps from your current situation and the on-ramps to greater happiness.

Step 4 - Act

Without a doubt, this is the most important step. As I've read about numerous topics, this step always comes up as crucial in one form or another. Any amount of planning or thought is meaningless unless you follow through with action. You don't have to do something enormous right off the bat, but make sure you do something, even if that something is seemingly small.

The reason for taking immediate action, in my opinion, is two-fold. First, it starts you actually moving in a direction you want to go. Even if change doesn't come immediately, you can rest assured that you are getting closer to where you want to be. This is enormously significant and will help motivate you for further action. Second, I've always found that taking action is a great way to discover new options that are available to you. In Step 3 you considered what options you have available to you. Once you start moving, you will discover even more of these.

Don't be disheartened if progress seems slow at first. If, for example, you're keen to get in better shape, even deciding to take the stairs between office floors instead of the elevator will move you in the right direction. Remember, you have to walk before you can run. So, take that first step, and don't delay.

Step 5 - Repeat

If you're going to keep your motivation and direction, you need to keep repeating the above steps over, and over, again. It may not be something you do daily, but you must do it often enough that your goals and desires do not become stale and foreign to you. With each passing day, you know yourself better and better, so you must keep reevaluating to discover new feelings, new options as you consistently take action for a better tomorrow.