Very often, I come across people who tell me they are not or not entirely satisfied with their life. Something is missing. Something is wrong. Something doesn’t show up. Or it doesn’t appear. But in most cases, it’s more gut feeling than actually knowing what’s wrong. In this post, I would like to explain a simple ánd fun method to design your life and thereby your future.

Take a few minutes to think about every major aspect of your life. Really, take that moment. Are you happy and satisfied? Do you have the job you want? Is your relationship the way you always imagined a relationship should be? Are you healthy? Are you in the process of manifesting those things in your life that you’ve been dreaming of?

In case you are living the life of your dreams and you’re perfectly satisfied, I would like to congratulate you. You are one of the very few, and I hope you have thought about how to maintain the good life you are living. We can go into how to maintain living your life ‘Wow!’ in another blog post, because this one is dedicated to the majority that is not at all, not or not perfectly satisfied with the life they’re living.

To get from where you are now to where you would like to be, you have to know where you stand, and where you would like to go. Too many people start wondering how to get ‘there’, without knowing where ‘there’ is, let not where ‘here’ is. I would like you to avoid that mistake, because that saves you a lot of time wondering around without getting anywhere.

To find the answers to these two questions, I can recommend you the following ouburst of creativity, which looks a bit like mindmapping. Take a big sheet of paper and put a picture of yourself in the middle. You might want to go to the office store to get yourself a really nice sheet of A2-paper, because you might need a lot of space to jot down your thoughts. Now, write down the aspects of your life that matter most to you around your picture. Think about health, your job, your relationship, friendships, money, living, dreams, fears, and so on. Then, pick a term and draw a short line from it. At the end of the line, write down where you stand. From there, draw a long line. At the end of that line, write down what you want your life to look like in the most ideal circumstances. Don’t limit yourself here! Just ask yourself where you would like to be, not how to get there. Not yet!

Repeat that process for each of the areas of your life that matter to you. Make sure you leave enough space around each aspect to write down some things later.

Now you’ve written down what matters to you. You’ve also described where you stand on these matters, and where you would like to stand, ideally. Now you can start writing simple to-do lists next to the longer lines you’ve drawn in between your starting points and destinations. Think logically, search the web for solutions, ask your friends and family for suggestions and write down all tasks you have to fulfill to get from A to B.

Now all you have to do, is complete each little to-do list that you’ve just made. Some steps might be easier than others, but in nearly all cases each small step will make it easier to get from A to B than trying to get there in one big step. This gives you the chance to design your life at a very detailed level, and gives you back some of the control that you might have felt you lost.

Tip: If you have plenty of space, you might want to expand your masterpiece with pictures, and turn it into an advanced vision board. Put it somewhere where you can see it every day, preferrably multiple times.

PS To clarify this concept, I will illustrate this topic in a couple of days with an example of the design of my future. Stay on!

Photo by S. Spivak

Take a moment today to sit down and briefly describe your best possible future. Imagine everything goes exactly the way you want, realistically. Also make sure it’s brief enough to put it in your pocket or wallet, so you can carry it around.

Researcher Laura King from the Southern Methodist University found out, in a study called The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals, that those who described their best possible future ended up significantly happier after three months than people who were asked to do the same with a traumatic experience, or even by just writing down their plans for the day.

Describing your best possible future will not only be likely to make you a happier person, it also challenges you to actually think about what you want your life to look like and makes you consciously thinking about how to achieve that state.

Photo by asifthebes