How I Created My Dream Life and Started Living It

This is the story of how I decided that it was time to create my dream life and to start living it. For me, this was about deciding what I want from life and then starting to live intentionally working towards the life I desire. In turn, I was able to start living my dream life every day.

Three years ago I was in a low point in my life. I didn’t know it then, but this extremely difficult and challenging gift was coming my way. This gift was lockdown. I know I shouldn’t even use those two words in the same sentence, but you’ll understand at the end of the story.

When lockdown started to become a permanent way of life and I accepted the isolation for what it was, magic happened. I was given a once in a lifetime opportunity to disconnect. Not just disconnect for a little bit, but truly disconnect in all aspects of the word. It was a challenging time because I wasn’t talking to my friends much and I deleted Instagram because of difficult reasons, but this was the first time since childhood that I was given the chance to be away from outside influences.

You don’t realize how strongly the content you consume and the community you surround yourself with affect your thoughts, opinions, and worldview. In this silence, I realized that I had become so much of a product of everyone around me that I didn’t know who I was.

Even though this feeling of not knowing who I am was scary, it gave me the opportunity to create who I want to be from the ground up. I was able to look at the life I was living from a lens of purpose and realized that I was living my life only ever thinking about the present. I had a fear of the future. I would only think about it if necessary and was extremely defensive when asked about it because the unknown of it terrified me.

So now that I was given the opportunity to build from the ground up. I was able to take a deep breath and just start the process.

I started by journaling. About anything and everything that I was feeling and everything I felt like I needed to think through before deciding what I wanted to do with my future.

Some of My Journal Prompts:

• How do you feel at this moment?

• How did you get to where you are now?

• What have been some of your successes and points of learning?

• What trauma are you still hurting from and how is it affecting your life?

• If you could do anything in life and money, time, or any other constraints didn’t exist what would you do?

• Who do you want to be?

• If you died tomorrow, how would you want to be remembered?

After journaling, I had a good sense of who I wanted to be and how I wanted my everyday life to look. This gave me my starting point for creating my dream life and I was also ready to start showing up as the person I wanted to be. My next step was to create a vision board and vision statement for myself. (If you want blog posts on how I did these let me know in the message box below!)

From here I started working on my creating my goals. These were big and little goals that I prioritized in order of importance. Once the list was finished, I broke my most important goals into actionable steps that I could actually start working on. This gave me an outline of how I was going to start living my dream life each day at a time by working towards it with my actions.

I would say the hardest part about this process is how easy it is to fall into old habits and patterns that simply don’t suit you anymore. Also, as time goes on you will learn about parts of yourself that no longer suit you and you have a moment of realization that there is even more hard work ahead. My advice? Go easy on yourself. You are trying your best. I am so proud of you for first of all loving yourself enough to see that you have flaws, and second having the desire to better yourself. My second piece of advice for when you are feeling disappointed or unsatisfied with your life and your progress on this journey is to practice self-compassion.

The moral of this story is that I am so thankful that I had the time to sit with myself, journal, think, meditate, and from there be able to start working towards and living my dream life by being intentional with what I am doing because I know it is leading me towards or embodies my dream life.

Three years later I am working for two of my dream companies, am going to complete one of my biggest life goals within the next year, and I’ve improved myself and my habits along the way. If you want to know how I would embark upon this journey if I were to start it again and potentially help you start your own journey of creating your dream life and starting to live it, stay tuned for my next blog post!