Shape the Direction of Your Own Life
Set Your North Star and Calibrate Your Inner Compass
Do you feel in control of your life?
Or rather, do you feel lost?
Are you confident that things will go your way?
Or are you uncertain and anxious about the future?
Today we’ll explore what it means to lead the life you want to live, and what it takes to maintain this path.
In our lives, we will face setbacks.
Each of us will experience challenges that test our spirit. We will meet forks in the road where we must make a decision that affects our future.
Where do you turn when your faith is tested? Where do you look in moments when you’re made to question your decisions or beliefs and decipher what to do next?
Let’s consider your North Star.
Your north star is your ideal situation. Your north star is the destination you’re striving toward. Your north star is where you are headed, as long as you have these two things:
a calibrated compass
and determination
How can you know where you’re going without a destination?
No wonder you may feel lost. Let’s work to strengthen your sense of direction by visualizing the place you’re headed and manifesting the things that come along with it.
This works to help you recognize when you’re on the right path. This recognition will be a huge help to you in your moments of weakness, procrastination and the temptation to quit.
Although distractions may work to throw you off your path, the validation you recognize around you will encourage you to stay on course.
Step 1 - Visualize your destination
Grab a pen and a notebook. Take 10 minutes to sit in a comfortable place and relax. Breathe, meditate and let go of anxiety and stress, at least for now.
With this feeling of serenity, use your imagination to dream up the most wonderful things that could possibly happen in your life. Release limitations and negative-beliefs. Consider this a fantasy if you have to.
What is the best case scenario? What if everything went right in your life? What would happen to you? What would you see around you? Write these things down.
If a genie could grant your every wish, what would you wish for? Jot down a loose list of the best things you can think of.
Step 2 - Organize your visions
Take the items on your list and create a vision board. Whether you gather physical printed material or design a digital collage, bring the images from your visions to life so you can see them with your own eyes.
This act will make your visions more real. No longer just dreams, now these visions are recognizable to you, together in one place.
Step 3 - Study your visions
It’s not enough to know what your dreams look like in real life. In order to attain these things, you must know what they’re made of.
Take one list-item at a time and Google each term. Search for phrases like, “how to get ITEM A,” “How to become ITEM B,” and so on.
Read the first three articles that result from your search (skip the ads.) This is how you’ll learn what it truly takes to attain something that may seem foreign to you, like a dream job, an opulent lifestyle or a healthy relationship.
Step 4 - Chart a path
As you study each item on your list, take notes on the key steps one must take to reach each item.
Study how other people have achieved these things. What did they do to get where they are? What are the various paths to success in each arena? From beginning to end, what needs to happen before you can have each item?
Step 5 - Affirm your potential
At this point, you can clearly see and understand the paths you can take to have what you want. All of that information was readily available on the internet.
The next things to gather is perhaps the most important and can only come from within, the belief that you can achieve these things. These visions started off as fantasy. Now it’s time to speak reality into existence.
Affirm to yourself, say out loud that you can have these things. You can take it further and claim that you DO have these things. These affirmations work to negate the negative self-talk and beliefs we hold deep inside.
These are the subconscious feelings and thoughts that tell us we can’t have what we want. That we don’t deserve it. That’s it’s impossible. We need to combat these negative beliefs every day, so that we can finally prove them wrong.
A healthy compass
All of these steps are meant to calibrate your compass. Your compass is your inner belief system and sense of direction.
You have to be able to recognize and understand where you’re going. You have to trust in your instincts and believe you’re on the the right path. This will get you through your tough times.
In those moments when you get knocked down or led astray, look into your compass and it will point you toward your north star. Then dust yourself off and continue on your mission to get what is rightfully yours, what you’ve been working for.
Determination
Last but not least, you need to be determined to reach your goals. No matter how long it takes. No matter how many disappointments along the way. No matter how many false starts or mistakes you experience, determination means you’ve already made up your mind to keep going.
Giving up is not an option. Quitting is not to be considered. You know what it takes to make it, now you just need to stay the course.
Have courage and follow your dreams. Show others your progress and gather like-minded peers around you. They’ll give you comfort and encouragement along your journey, because they understand what the struggle is like.
You don’t have to be lonely to go your own way. We’re all in this together. Show me what you got.
Maximillian
