- The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life -

Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it. Here are 10 Ways to get a life and start living it.



1. Give yourself permission to claim your life. That is right — permission. You are the only one who can decide you are in charge of your life. Even though it feels like you are not supposed to do so, turn off the internal editors, the old tape recordings, the “shoulds, have tos, and musts”, and the rules that did not come from you.

2. Define what living means to you. It is not as hard as it sounds. Just picture yourself at the end of your life looking back. What words would you want to describe how you lived your life and who you are as a person?

3. Stop living in the future. Every time you think “someday” or “when I have time I will,” stop. Ask yourself, “Why not now?” Think about this sentence, “I always wanted to, but never did.” Start doing the things you always planned to do. Choose your life every morning. Plan one thing you will do that day to feel alive.

4. Surround yourself with people who enjoy living. They have obviously discovered how to have a life and live it. Why not hang with the pros?

5. Lay down your pain and your anger. Carrying them around makes living harder and less fun. It does not bring anything, and it steals a lot.

6. Let the losers win. Do not argue about things that you do not care about. Unless there is some real threat, let the folks who have something to prove, prove what they need to. Why waste your living time trying to fix what is wrong with them?

7. Create energy. Jump to forgiveness and love, then figure things out. Most conclusions we jump to are not only wrong, they are negative. Negative conclusions lead us to prepare a defense. Being on the defensive is not living. It is hiding from life.

8. Learn the physical symptoms of when your head and heart become disconnected. We know when we are having a knee jerk reaction, when we are feeling sorry for ourselves, and when we are being blind to people’s feelings. We can remember how it felt physically while we were behaving badly. Get to know those symptoms, and you can stop the behavior. Living life will feel a whole lot safer because you will not be in danger of shooting yourself in the foot.

9. Take small risks that push your boundaries in every way. The joy of life is packed in learning that matches our skill set. When we stretch just a bit intellectually, physically, emotionally, we grow. Living is growing. Even your cells know that.

10. Value and protect the people and the places you care about. A job is not a life. It is just a part of one. Let the people you care about come first, and let everyone know that you do. Re-read numbers 1 and 2.



We come into life with whatever we have. It is ours to do with. It took me a while to figure that out — that my life is not just what happens to me, that I could take hold of it.


I want to have the time of my life.



You have already got a life too. Are you living it?