Out of all the different goals, aspirations, and paths through life that people pursue, there are typically just a few desires at the bottom of them all.
Everyone wants to feel at least a bit accomplished and recognized, for example. And everyone wants to be happy.
Perhaps most of all, however, most people want to live lives that they can be happy with – and that they can look back on with a sense of contentment and positivity.
That exact thought is what lead me to quit my job on January 26th, 2018 and pursue Carolyn’s Blooming Creations full time. I started my creative “side hustle” over 15 years ago while working as a teacher and learning consultant. Using my talents to make cakes, do makeup, illustrate books and more always made me truly happy. I dedicated all my spare time to growing CBC and when the time was right, I dove head first into making it something I did full time. I always figured I had to at least try to make my dream a reality because I don’t want to regret not doing so one day.
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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Cemetery vases and ornate headstones can help to commemorate and celebrate a person’s life. But, when it comes to looking back on the years of your own life, what can you do to enhance the chances that you will have few regrets and a sense of overall contentment?
Here are some tips for living a life you can be happy with. These are not guaranteed “one-size-fits-all” solutions, but they’re likely to help anyone find their own footing and sense of direction.
1- Pursue what intuitively feels meaningful to you
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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If you spend your life pursuing goals and working on things that fundamentally don’t feel meaningful to you, but which seem “lucrative,” or which satisfy someone else’s dreams or aspirations for you, there’s a very good chance that you will accumulate plenty of regrets and will feel as though your time is being wasted.
Living in alignment with your own sense of meaning might be one of the very most important things for leading a life that you can be happy with, and that you can look back on with fondness and contentment, instead of regret.
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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And when it comes to identifying and pursuing what is meaningful to you, you simply need to get in touch with your own intuitions on the subject.
Pursuing what is “meaningful” to you relies on a feeling, a sense of being in proper alignment and balance. It’s not a rational exercise in calculating the costs and benefits of particular goals or career paths.
For your own sense of well-being, it’s important to live a life that’s meaningful to you, instead of a life that is meaningful to someone else.
2- Fall in love with the process and the journey, instead of the destination
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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If you’re constantly focused on goals and destinations in life, there is a very real risk that you will miss, or undervalue, the entire process and journey along the way.
But a truth that is revealed by many wisdom traditions around the world – and which people often painfully learn late in the game – is that the process and the journey are actually what life is. The destination is an illusion.
By restlessly pursuing a goal, you put yourself in a position where you are unable to be content or happy until you have achieved that goal. If you fail to achieve the goal, you are more miserable than ever. But even if you do achieve the goal, the satisfaction you feel is bound to be short-lived, and you’ll then need another goal in order to continue the cycle again.
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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Continue this process for long enough, and you may well reach the end of your life wondering what happened along the way, and why you were always rushing ahead.
Of course, it’s important to be active and to do things in life. That’s where falling in love with the process and the journey comes in.
If you want to do something creative, for example, like being an artist, focus on the process and experience of painting regularly – without expectation. Just paint, and fall in love with the process.
Down the line, you may well sell your art and make a name for yourself.
But if you take up painting with the aim in mind of making a fortune and becoming famous, you will be largely missing the entire point entirely.
3- Constantly try new things and expand your comfort zone
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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A lot of the greatest, most uplifting, and most powerful features of life itself, are found in those moments when we try new things, test our perceived limits, and expand our comfort zones.
There is a lot of life out there to be experienced, and whenever we expand our sense of what’s possible, we develop new parts of ourselves and add new and rich threads to the tapestry of our lives.
If you allow yourself to stay in your comfort zone indefinitely, the opposite happens. You stagnate and miss out on a lot.
4- Emphasize quality more than quantity with your interpersonal relationships
4 Suggestions for Living a Life You Can Be Happy With + Living a Life Without Regret
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Interpersonal relationships are vitally important for a contented and uplifting life. Research in the field of psychology consistently shows that close interpersonal connections are the most important thing when it comes to people's sense of happiness and well-being.
It’s good to be socially engaged and ongoing in general. But it’s important to realize that quality matters a lot more than quantity with your interpersonal relationships.
Spend as much time as possible with your closest family and friends. Nurture deep relationships, instead of getting overly hung up on how you appear to broad and distant acquaintances.
This is a sponsored article. All opinions and ideas expressed in this post are based on my personal point of view.