Five of the best ways to start living your dream
If you ask anyone at all whether they would truly love to live their dream life, the answer is sure to be yes. Of course, we all want to live the life of our dreams.
However, even though we would all like to do this, the majority of people never take the steps necessary to reach their dreams. This can lead to discontent in their own lives, unhappiness, it might even lead to depression and other mental health issues.
Yet the ability to start living your dream is often right there inside you, and even though it might be hard, even though it is going to require you to overcome several challenges and difficulties, there is always a way you can do it – or at least attempt it.
If you want to start living your dream life, read on for five tips to help you make the changes you need to if you’re going to get there.
1) Work out where you want to be
Before you can put any plans in place to start moving towards living your best life and your dream, you need to know exactly what that dream is. The very nature of dreams is that they can be somewhat vague and unformed. If you’re not happy where you are and you want to strive towards something else, those dreams need to become much more tangible; you need to understand exactly what they are.
Once you have a better idea of what your dreams are and what is going to make you happy in life, you can start planning a way to get there, but until this time, any plans you make are going to be as vague as the dream itself, and that means you won’t be able to follow them.
Think carefully about where you are now and what you don’t like. That’s an excellent place to start. Then think about what it is that truly makes you happy. Are you able to replace the bad with the good? This could form the basis of your plan because you won’t be able to reach your ultimate goals by keeping everything the same in your life right now. Something – and often many things – will have to change.
2) Research
Once the idea of what you want from your life is more concrete, you will have to start researching it. You need information about how to make your dream a reality. Start with a straightforward search about whatever it is you want to do.
If you’re going to start your own business, search online for precisely that – how to start a business. If you’re going to build your own house, search for that. If you want to become a singer or artist or fly a plane or become a nurse or anything else, you should look at how it is done.
When you have this information, you can start to make changes. You can go back to school or start to buy the right equipment or understand how to market yourself. No matter what, without this research, your dream is unlikely to come true because you won’t know what decisions to make or even how to get started.
Of course, you must also ensure that the steps required are something you can do. If not, what else would need to change so that you could carry them out? Perhaps you’ll need to save up some more money first or move to a specific town like Hillsboro so you can work in the Silicon Forest or Hollywood so you can get into movies. This shouldn’t mean you have to let your dream die; it just means you need some extra steps before you get started.
3) Acquire the skills
If you need specific skills to move forward with your dream, you’ll need to acquire them. This is often a big sticking point, sometimes even an excuse for those who want to change their lives but are afraid to. If you really do want to live your dream life and that dream life requires you to have some skills that you don’t currently have, you’ll need to learn them. It’s really that simple. Without those skills, you won’t be able to get any further ahead.
Depending on the skills you need, this could take anything from a few days to many years, but unless you get started right away, you’ll never achieve what it is you want to achieve; the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have the skills you need – the time is going to pass anyway, so you might as well make the most of it if you want to follow your dream.
4) Eliminate bad habits
Bad habits are going to be detrimental to you living your dream life. That’s because you will want to be the best person you can possibly be if you want to achieve your dreams, and bad habits like smoking, eating junk food, not exercising enough, even habits that involve thinking badly of yourself, are all going to get in the way of you being able to enjoy your life once you do achieve your dream, and that might stop you from achieving your dream altogether.
Plus, when you eliminate bad habits from your life, you are showing yourself – and others – that you can stick with something, that you can make changes, and that you can do what you know you want and need to do. If you can do it to eliminate your bad habits, you can do it to achieve your dreams.
5) Set goals
Having one big dream is a good thing, and we’ve already seen some of the ways you can start working towards it. However, this one big dream might be something that feels too big. If you don’t break your ultimate goal down into much smaller, more easily achievable goals, it will feel far easier to give up altogether because it’s all just too hard.
When you have smaller goals, they are easier to reach and overcome. You can measure your progress, and you can feel motivated to continue because you see how far you have come and what you still need to do to reach your dream. Breaking large goals down into smaller ones is a great idea for all aspects of life, but when it comes to helping you live the life of your dreams, it’s essential.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez
