If you are ready to make 2020 a year of clarity and purpose—and you know you want this year to matter— stay tuned here as I will be covering ten essential steps to leading yourself towards a life that you love. Today I will give you an overview and then for the next ten weeks I’ll be diving a little deeper into each of the steps. If you have a dream for your year, these steps will help you make your dream a reality! My work is geared towards those who struggle with emotional and stress eating, so going forward these steps will offer guidance specific to those needs, however, they fit well with anything you’d like to achieve and will offer everyone inspiration and motivation along the way!
Step 1: Self-Awareness
This first step is all about becoming deeply self-aware. In order to know yourself fully and understand your patterns and get comfortable with the discomfort of change, you must have self-awareness. This step creates the ultimate foundation for change. When you become self-aware you will explore and examine your internal emotional world, how you respond to life and any potential blocks to change that are standing in your way. Mindfulness allows you to create opportunities to know yourself and accept yourself completely. This step presents opportunities to create practices to live a truly mindful life. As you become more self-aware, present and accepting, you will begin to be able to tune into and listen to your inner wisdom.
Step 2: Aligning with a Sense of Purpose
Step two is about creating a sense of purpose that drives your motivation towards the change you’re seeking. When you can align consistently with your purpose you will be able to explore why change is important to you and why it is necessary. When you understand the change process and create a vision that supports your why, you will live in that alignment and remain motivated and inspired towards the change you desire. There’s a lot of talk about finding your purpose out there, which can feel daunting. This step allows you to break it down and offer a way to explore your sense of purpose if it isn’t clear—and how to work within why you want the change you desire and aligning that with your personal values. If your sense of purpose is clear to you, you will access that consistently to remain in alignment with your vision.
Step 3: Creating a Plan of Action
Without a plan your vision will remain only a dream. Step 3 will help you outline your specific plan and use it to create consistent action towards what you desire. Once you have a sense of purpose and a clear vision, you will focus with a new mindset on how to execute effectively in order to create a life that you love. Having a plan offers an opportunity to do just this and is an essential step to creating change. Creating a vision is fun and creative. Formulating a plan is practical and action focused. Your specific plan will allow you to move into a space of action, a space of change and is specific, doable and desirable.
Step 4: Evaluating Your Current Life and Lifestyle
Step 4 is all about evaluating how you are currently functioning in terms of living well, feeling well and being well. This step will help you understand and evaluate how you are integrating the foundations of wellness into your current lifestyle. You will have opportunities in this step to create greater wellbeing within your current life. There will be opportunities for self-reflection and to assess your current wellbeing within this step and where you might create more fluidity in your lifestyle that will help lead to the changes you desire.
Step 5: Monitor Your Process and Respond to Obstacles Along the Way
Step five outlines the need to monitor your progress in order to create the change you desire. It’s one thing to create a plan, it’s another to execute it! This step allows you to explore your inner resistance to change and learn how to build your resilience to ensure that change you desire shifts from a fantasy into reality based action. Resistance to change is the number one reason we don’t follow through. Resistance dampens motivation and zaps inspiration and keeps us stuck in this discomfort of our comfort zone and convinces us that that is better than the discomfort of stepping out of our comfort zone and into change. There will be opportunities in this step to build resilience as an anecdote to resistance and some serious reality checks to keep you moving forward!
Step 6: Create a Support Network
Step 6 emphasizes the need to have a strong support network on your side in order to make the changes you desire in your life. Without support change is way more difficult. Without support, life can be difficult and lonely. With support, you can reach out, stay motivated and feel inspired to move forward even when it’s difficult. You will evaluate the nature of your relationships, acknowledge the ones you’d like to improve, explore how to continue to develop new healthy partnerships all while improving your ability to communicate assertively, compassionately and effectively.
Step 7: Moving Forward with a Steady Pace to Create True Self-Leadership
Step 7 helps you create an understanding of how to continue to lead yourself through the change process at a steady, manageable pace. This step offers opportunities to evaluate and adjust your plan as needed, to continue to forge through any residual resistance and personalize your change process. Understanding leadership skills and becoming a strong leader for yourself is emphasized. We are often used to either being led or leading others, however, leading yourself is where your true internal power lies.
Step 8: Building on the Change Process
Step 8 is about celebrating your change process and nurturing it as it develops. With this step you will focus on the good, the wins you are achieving, and the positive shifts that are occurring. You will have opportunities to make adjustments when your motivation needs some tweaking. Developing a consistent gratitude and appreciation practice will be outlined and encouraged to integrate into daily self-awareness positivity practice. When you focus on what’s going well you tend to create more of it!
Step 9: Create Adjustments Through Self-Reflection and Acknowledging Change
Step 9 is about understanding how new learning can be integrated throughout your personal change process and how you can apply it to all areas of your life. Fine tuning your change process will be discussed which allows you to continue to deepen your self-reflection and self-awareness. This ensures that you continue to feel good about the person you are growing into on a daily basis. Celebrating any changes that have occurred is encouraged!
Step 10: Self-Reflection and Re-Evaluation
The 10th and final step is about graceful living and self-compassion through the growth process—which really is a lifelong process! With this step, you may find that your goals shift and maybe even majorly change. There will be opportunities for evaluating your personal change process and ensuring that you create a life-long dedication to being Wholistically, Unapologetically and Authentically You!
So consider something you’d like to shift, change or create within your life and join me over the next ten posts to lead yourself towards the change you desire!