Life is hard. Sometimes, every day feels like struggle for success. Things happen, people walk into your life and before you know it, your life is a mess.
However, the good news is that you are free to take the initiative and embark on a journey to get your life together. Here’s 20 things you need to consider if you want to take back control of your own existence and cultivate a life worth living.
How to Get Your Life Together: 20 Tips to Help You Take Control of Your Life
Breathe…the Right Way
Breathing properly and taking a step back before analyzing your life can help you to look at things objectively, without emotion. Inhaling through your nose, waiting a few seconds and then exhale.
Although you may not think it, the way you breathe can have an effect on your mental health and your physical health, and the way that your mind works as a whole.
When you breathe properly, it increases your sense of relaxation, calms your mind and reduces the feeling of anxiety, depression and anger. It’s important to do this before you take stock of your life and begin to try and get everything together.
Commit to Better Health Habits
If you get sick often, suffer with fatigue or are overweight, improving your health habits is a very easy way to improve your life. You’ll feel better, your immune system will be stronger and the more that you apply healthy habits to your life, the better you’ll feel.
We should all make health a priority in our lives. Our physical and mental space are of the utmost importance, and our physical and mental health are closely interlinked.
This means that if you’re carrying extra weight, this can an impact on your mental health, increasing negative emotions and bad feeling.
Don’t waste energy complaining
You feel miserable, and when times are hard, it can feel like a relief to complain to your friends and family. But, though this can be a relief at times, if all you do is complain about the problem, you’re never going to make any progress.
Complaining doesn’t help to improve anything in your own life, and can lead you towards a victim mentality. For this reason, it’s in your best interest that you save your energy so you can put all of it into becoming a better person.
Cut toxic people out of your life
The truth is that toxic people can have a dramatic impact on our lives, even if you try your best to avoid them. It is even hard retaining your positive mindset when you are surrounded by these people, especially when it’s a close friend or family member.
You may have trouble achieving progress if you have cynical people in your life belittling your efforts and dragging you down. For this reason, it can be a good idea to cut them out completely, to ensure that you don’t lose sight of the end goal.
Think more carefully about your decisions
We make hundreds of individual choices every single day, and they compound to make up how your day goes. We can then add all of these days together to make a year, which then adds up over the course of a lifetime.
This seems dramatic, but it’s the truth that singular decisions will impact our life. So, choose carefully, avoid negative things whenever you can, and think about the choices you’re making on a daily basis.
Learn to Follow Your Intuition
Intuition becomes important when making decisions in the moment, and over time, you’ll become wiser and more able to rely on your natural senses. We all make mistakes, but not all of us learn from them as we should.
Learning from your errors can help you to live a more intuitive life, with out the need for conscious reasoning to help us conduct our day to day activities. If your instinct says something is wrong, there’s a good chance that it’s right.
Repeat Successful Actions
One of the quickest ways to turn around your fortunes is to double down on the things that are working for you. Depending on the to do list you’ve made, this can be in a variety of different areas.
Seeing results at the gym? It could be time to double down and push yourself to the next level. New client at work? Maybe this is the route to go if you want to obtain more money and more freedom.
When you see something working well, rule of thumb is to put more energy into it. This can lead to increased success, which has a knock on effect on their rest of your life.
Surround Yourself with People with THEIR Lives Together
If you want to begin to get your life together, it can help for you to find people with the things you want so you can try to emulate their success. This doesn’t mean that you need to abandon all of your friends, but it can increased personal growth if you socialize with others that have their life together.
How do you picture your future life, and what does it have in it? Think about the people in your social circle that have achieved the things you’d like, and then try to spend more time with them.
Develop Consistent Routines
Developing routines for self-improvement can help you to achieve great things. If you are still struggling at a certain point in your life, it may be because you’ve not managed to find a routine that works for you. Not everyone is an early riser, so this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to join the “5AM cold showers and black coffee” crowd.
Routines and habits can provide the foundation to achieving happiness, health and wealth. Many successful people attribute their success to a routine – this can help to ensure you get enough sleep each night, and don’t spend too much time playing video games in the evening.
Set short, mid, and long-term goals
Setting a personal goal is an important way to find out what it is that you want from life. What does get your life together even mean? For some it will mean getting in shape, for others it will mean career progression, or even finding a partner and starting a family.
There are no rules for the end goal, so you need to make them yourself. This includes both long term goals and short term goals that can help you reach the end goal over time.
Start saving your money
Whatever the stage of life, you can never have enough money. In time, the target for many of us is simply financial freedom, and the ability to do whatever we want with our lives. Making your own financial decisions with your weekly salary can help us to do this, even whilst being employed.
This freedom allows you to change jobs when you want, or even going solo and becoming an entrepreneur. So, if you plan to get your life together, it’s important that you begin by saving money, even if it’s only a few dollars every week.
Get organized
Why does organisation matter? Without it, you’ll never be able to structure your life, as being organized gives us the ability to ensure that our goals are met. Whilst you can be disorganized and successful, it’s much easier if you know where to look when you need something.
Organization is both a physical and mental thing. So, this applies to organizing your home and your daily activities, but it’s also useful to organize your thoughts too.
Stop chasing external happiness and validation from others
Trying to chase the external validation from others is an ongoing race that goes nowhere. And, when you reach that end target goal of validation, you’ll probably still be searching for more in some way.
The real way to get your life together is to set goals for yourself – and yourself only – and then meet them over time. You’re the creator of your own destiny, and if you spend your life looking for the approval of others, you may never get that life satisfaction you’ve been looking for.
Live your life proactively instead of reactively
Is there any excuse for procrastinating? When you procrastinate, you’re missing out on an opportunity to really get your life together. To stop procrastinating, you need to start living your life proactively instead of reactively.
And in real terms, this means that you need to grab the bull by the horns and start taking action. Stop over thinking, start writing your to do list, and get on your way to a better life.
Work to face and overcome your fears
One of the most common reasons people don’t reach their potential is fear. Fears can be a big obstacle in life – fear of failure and fear of judgement being common amongst the youth of today.
To combat this, take a moment to reflect and be honest about your feelings. Ask yourself whether fear may have been holding you back from getting your life together, and if it has, try and get the courage together to move forward apprehension-free.
Quit taking things so personally
Sometimes it can feel like the odds are stacks against you. In some cases, it can be – there are a variety of different factors that make affect the way that other people treat you in your life.
The opinions of someone else in the world about your life are largely irrelevant – unless they’re your family, it’s not something that’s worth getting offended by.
Don’t get me wrong, something other people will have valid criticism of you, and in these scenarios, it’s worth listening and learning. However, when you feel someone is being critical for no reason, just leave them be and keep it moving.
Distance Yourself From Drama and Negativity
Following on from the last one, do you know how draining it can be to acknowledge and respond to what your haters say? Drama follows some of us more than others, and it can definitely keep you down while you’re trying to make progress in life.
A life filled with negative emotions and drama has limited room to grow. It’s important to think of your own well being, so when other human beings try and drag you down, avoid this at all costs. Whether it’s a toxic relationship, a friend that lowers your self confidence or someone that projects their issues onto you, focus on the goal.
Remain calm during setbacks
When life is not going in the direction we want it to, it’s important to keep the faith. The road to success is likely to have setbacks along the way – this is inevitable. This should not affect the way you act on a daily basis.
If we focus on achieving our goals, then setbacks can be taken in your stride. No matter how many times life knocks you down, you need to get back up and keep going. Showing strength, character and determination is essential if you want to be successful in this world.
Look into the Future
As humans, many of us are stuck living in the past. We think back to our best times in life and tend to avoid thinking about the times when we were at our lowest. The truth is that it’s much better to think about how we are in the present moment than to stay dwelling in the past.
And, more importantly, we should look to the future to ensure that we’re moving in the right direction. If you plan to get your life together, it’s important than you make a conscious effort to build on what you have today – one step at a time.
Only then can we ensure that we slowly begin to get our life together, as all of the pieces begin to fall into place.
Be grateful
After everything that you’ve been through, an essential part of success is to practice gratitude for what you have, and what is to come. Even if your financial situation isn’t the best, or your career path is different than what you’d imagined, take account of the positives in your life and show appreciation for them.
The truth is that there are likely things about your own situation that others would be jealous of. So, focus on your own problems, but remember to give thanks for the things that you do have.
