A life without regret: 8 Ways to get yourself out of the FUNK

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not a life that others expected of me.”

Do you ever get that feeling like life is going nowhere? You fell like your stuck and unable to get out? Feeling restricted and like this is how life is meant to be but deep within you there is a yearning to be free?

Life is challenging, life is full of ups and downs, and life can be difficult, sometimes it feels so hard and complicated that you may wonder what its all for, but this shouldn’t be the case!

Life is grand. Life is a gift. At times life might present you with challenges but they shouldn’t be meet with struggle and disdain but rather be greeted with a smile and treated as healthy and exciting challenges.

Understand life and what it truly means and you may just find it’s actually not so hard but rather easy and pleasurable.

Life is continually evolving and forever changing yet sometimes we do not change with it. It is when we don’t change or feel that we are unable that we become stuck.

Nothing is constant, time never stands still, and so when you stand still, friction is created. The longer this goes on the greater the friction, life starts to burn, life begins to not be so pleasant.

Like water that becomes stagnant, so is a life without flow, change and the ability to adapt.

We know this and for most of us we are aware when there is this friction and a sense of dissatisfaction and a lack of fulfilment in our lives. The way we deal with this friction is by trying to numb the burn or fight the fires of struggles that are created by using temporary measures.

These measures do not heal; they only cover the pain temporality. Like the doctor that subscribes medicine to the patient without any attempt to prevent future occurrences this is how many of us deal with our current distasteful life.

We are stuck, we are unhappy, we are lacking substance, and we feel empty of hope, without significance, without greater contribution. We simply want to create change yet are fogged by clouds of doubt, fear, social conformity, and others expectations.

Instead of looking for the right path, the path that will take us on a transformational journey, we simply medicate the current path. The medicine we choose will only slow us further, limit our opportunities, further impede our ability to take courage to face change, further inflame our pain, and the reality is we will become more stuck.

This is a very drastic view and perhaps worse case scenario but the truth is that for many of us this is likely that case within some area of out life. And usually when we feel stuck in one area there is a flow on affect to all the other areas of our life.

If work is no longer getting you excited and is simply just a means to pay the bills your energy levels deplete, your happy chemicals are less likely activated day to day and you start to disconnect from life. You start to medicate.

Most of us have the ability to mask our pain so well that life from an external perspective seems perfectly fine. This helps protect our self-respect, our ego, allows us to appear and feel like we are in control yet deep down we are not fine.

We can even trick ourselves into believing this yet the truth is we are not satisfied and we want more. We want more freedom, more certainty, more significance & more impact. We want to live a life that is authentic and true to all we wish for and desire. And we can!

If we don’t and we continue to cover the void that exists in our life, if we continue to medicate the burn caused by the friction we create by standing idle we get to the end of our days, whenever that is, with some level of regret.

Bronnie Brown is the author of the New York best seller “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”. For this book she discovered constant themes that kept appearing among all the people she interviewed. Well worth a read!

The top regrets of the dying in order are:

1.     I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2.     I wish I didn’t work so hard.

3.     I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4.     I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5.     I wish that I had let myself be happier.

These insights are truly significant and should raise clear messages for us all. The truth is that life and time are limited and we never know when our time will reach the end so its important to suck and squeeze out every last drop of each and every moment we are given.

Staying stuck, staying in a place of displeasure, medicated by all those vices we choose to cover our hurt may get us though this life, may just sustain us for a little longer but at what cost?

To me the thought of reaching the end with any level of regret would be a disaster, a waste, and a crying shame.

Not having lived a life true to myself, not having expressed myself fully, and having spent too much time working hard for everyone else, neglecting my own dreams and desires, my friends and those that I cared for scares me.

If this resonates with you also then you know its time to make change happen, you know what needs to be done, you must become unstuck and climb out of that funk.

There is light and there is always hope. There is an abundance of knowledge and information available to help get you out of that hollow you may be held within.

As life is ever evolving, transforming, adapting, healing in each moment of time that passes so is your being, your body, your reality and therefore your ability to jump back on board.

Make it a choice to live a life of your desires. Take the courage to do all that it is you truly want to do. Make is your mission to live a rich, abundant life with great passion and purpose and one that is without regret.

This is your life! This is your why!

To help you on this journey I have come up with 8 areas that you need to focus on that will assist you to making the required change necessary to live the life of your desires.

Reignite your passions

The word passion is derived from the Latin word pati, meaning to suffer. Passions are typically joyful and things that we just love to do yet equally can be greatly painful.

They exist as strong and barely controllable emotions, which is why they can be so painful because when you really connect with them you will do anything to follow them.

You will go above and beyond, you will push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will step into fire to follow what it is you are truly passionate about.

To reignite and connect with your passions will enhance and magnify life in ways that you never thought possible. While painful at times it brings with it joy, happiness, a sense of purpose and significance in life, learning and growth, change and opportunities.

It creates more meaning in your life and when your life has meaning each and every waking moment it pure bliss.

Experiment and try things

In order to find things that you enjoy, to connect with some past passions or create some new ones it’s important to experiment in life and try new things everyday.

Don’t drive the same route to work or walk the same path to school, take the alternative road.

If what you do you simply don’t enjoy, if it’s monotonous, boring, or just bringing you down in life than try something else.

If you stand in one place for long enough you will make an impression in that ground but so will you make an impression in the couch if you sit watching TV for too long.

The problem is that if it doesn’t grow you, excite you, get those creative juices flowing, have greater impact, help others, bring you sustaining and natural joy then it is just a waste of time.

Don’t feel guilty of trying new things, remove yourself from those naysayers that try holding you back, taking courage to step outside your comfort zone and give life a go.

As you try new things and experiment with life you will feel challenged, you will learn, you will open doors to new opportunities and with all that you will get more out of life and be on the path to creating a life with greater legacy.

Ask questions

Those that ask will often receive. Those that never do will often never get. By asking powerful questions you will receive powerful answers and it are often these answers that help us on our journey in life.

How can I have greater impact today? What can I do today that will help me towards living my values? Why do I do whatever it is I’m doing? Why does the sun glow so bright? “What is one thing in life you will not compromise?”

Questions help us find answers and come up solutions to any problems that may exist within our lives, solutions for those problems that exist in others lives.

They help us become more purposeful in all that we do and in each moment that we have. How does it help me towards my goals, have greater impact, learn and grow, live with more happiness.

Quality questions invigorate a curious mind. Curiosity sparks passion that then has the power to ignite life. The most successful people have child like curiosity and never stop asking questions.

Those that ask will receive. If you don’t ask the question you will never know the answer. Knowledge will take you places further than you could ever imagine.

Personal Development

For many of us our education ends when we finish school. This may be earlier for some than it is for others but the truth is learning should never stop.

Personal development is a key component to leading a long, successful and happy life. Self-improvement is a life that is constantly improving, evolving and forever bringing with it greater fruits of joy.

Life becomes stale and murky when we stop growing ourselves and this is why so many of us find ourselves in places we don’t enjoy, a life in which we feel stuck. We must make efforts to continue both constantly and consistently to learn.

The average adult reads on average barely a book a year and reading is by far the surest and fastest way to fast track your success. Reading brings new insight, lessons, learning, joy, creativity, love, and excitement.

Successful people read a lot!

There are many other activities we can do to help us grow and develop we just have to remove the shit that discourages growth and replace it with some quality activities that stimulate growth, and never stop.

Healthy habits

Mahatma Gandhi has a powerful quote that goes:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, and your values become your destiny.”

To choose and create good habits takes great work and discipline but the idea that our habits create our destiny is massive.

If you can work towards removing those habits from your life that are restrictive and certainly the ones that are holding you stuck you will improve your chances of living a life with greater passion and purpose.

Implement positive behaviors and all areas of your life and no matter the pain, struggle of challenge that you face, as you will undoubtedly continue to do so, you will be able to work through it with great ease.

You can read my post or listen to the podcast on 5 steps to create powerful and sustaining habits here. 

Environment

The environment places a very important role in our ability to change. If you are finding it hard to make change and become unstuck try changing the environment.

This means to remove yourself completely from the location that you exist. By doing so you will clear the cloud, remove the debris from the paths, and take away any distractions that attempt to hold you down.

Our environment has the power to influence how we think and behave and if our current environment isn’t conducive to positive thought and behave we must change it.

This may include choices the people also that you surround yourself with as often they form the environment you live. We all have an incredible affect on one another- positive infects positive and negative infects negative.

Simply practices to help you daily may also be adopted including quite simply taking a walk outside or doing some meditation exercises both all help isolate us from our environment to help refocus our thoughts that ultimately affect how we behave.

Relationships

Those relationships we all have in life are fundamental to who you are and where you are in life. Quality relationships are like a fantastic diet, they give you good nourishment to help you preform better in life.

Not all relationships however are grand. We need to be mindful of this and choose as mentioned above those we associate with.

Healthy relationships will motivate you and encourage you to keep improving, they will support you in times of needs, and they will fill your tank when needed to help you get to that next destination.

Unhealthy relationships have the tendency to do the opposite, they can suck you dry.

The people you choose to listen to will also affect the efforts to progress. Be aware of these people and mindful of the hero’s, mentors and coaches you adopt they too can make or break you.

The direction you travel in life will be formed and supported by those relationships you hold in life.

Contribute

Contribution is a fundamental need of all human kind. Tony Robbins describes this as our sense of service and focusing on helping, giving to and supporting others.

“If you struggle to share a nickel when all you have is a dime you will struggle to give a dollar when you have millions.”  Tony Robins

The truth is that when we give we feel good it fills us with a sense of greater self-respect in knowing that we are making a difference.

We don’t need money to do this let alone millions of dollars we can simple be in some level of service to others. Sure more money means you can affect many more lives but the ability to just help one other person is within us all.

Contribution and helping others has been proven to lift people out of their sorrow and states of depression as it give them more meaning. It is through connection and being in service to that many more paths and opportunities present themselves.

What is one thing you can do today to help another?

I hope you have enjoyed my 8 ways to help you get unstuck in life. From all the people I interview and talk with, people that seem to live their life large with a greater sense of passion, purpose and success seem to have these commonalities.

I would love to hear your thoughts and certainly encourage you to leave your comments below.

Until next time, peace, passion and purpose.

Don’t forget to grab your free audio book if you haven’t already- here is the link.