When clients initially approach me to talk about coaching, they’re trying to decide what they want to do next. Should I stay in this career? Should I start my own business? How do I become better at leading or feel more confident? What do I want from the next stage of my life? How do I transition into semi-retirement?
These are useful questions. But with a focus on the future, they can move us away from the moment we’re in, and we don’t always reflect on two other important questions.
How do I want to live while I’m figuring all of this out? What would it mean to be really true to myself?
Our lives aren’t simply a series of destinations. They are made up of busy weekday mornings, conversations with people we love, the work we spend our days doing, evening chores and the pleasant things we occasionally make time for. We can spend a great deal of energy thinking about what we want to achieve in the future without noticing that, in the meantime, we are living a life through the choices we make every day.
This doesn’t mean that we should just accept the life we have. There may be things we genuinely want to change, and sometimes a significant change is needed, but we don’t always need to turn our lives upside down to make them feel more like our own.
We can begin by becoming more intentional about the life we are already living.
1. Let yourself be who you are
I recently revisited Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star. She makes a distinction between a life that feels truly authentic and a life we believe we should want.
This can often be difficult to untangle. Most of us have spent years absorbing messages about what makes a successful or worthwhile life. We may have learned that we should be ambitious, sociable, financially successful, productive, adventurous, endlessly youthful, available to other people, or always working towards the next achievement.
Some of these things may genuinely matter, but others may be habits we have never fully examined.
Perhaps you’ve always thought of yourself as someone who loves a busy social life, but as you get older you realise that you feel most restored by a quiet afternoon with a book or time with a couple of close friends. Perhaps you’ve spent years being ambitious at work and now crave more time for family, creativity or space in your week. Or perhaps you’ve spent so much of your life being dependable that you have become very good at knowing what everyone else needs, while being less certain about what you need yourself.
Being authentic doesn’t necessarily mean making a dramatic change. Sometimes it means allowing your life to reflect what you’ve discovered about yourself.
You might still enjoy your career but want to work differently. You might love your family but need a little time for yourself. You might discover that travel no longer appeals in the way it once did, or that you’re increasingly drawn to other things, such as gardening, writing, walking, or being involved in your local community.
The point isn’t to create a life that looks good from the outside. It’s to become more honest about what actually works for you.
2. Make room for work, love, health and play
A new book I’m reading is Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I love the authors’ framework for thinking about the different parts of our lives: work, love, health and play.
It reminds us that a satisfying life is unlikely to come from getting just one area right, and it’s an easy approach to restore some balance.
What I see with clients, and something I recognise in myself, is that many of us become overly identified with work, particularly if we’ve spent many years building a career. We can also become so focused on our responsibilities that our relationships, interests, health and enjoyment gradually get squeezed into whatever time is left.
Play is often one of the first things to disappear.
We prioritise activities that are either measurable or purposeful. If we’re going to take a course, it should improve our career. If we’re going to exercise, there should be a tangible health benefit. If we’re going to spend an afternoon doing something creative, we should turn it into something useful.
But some things can and should simply be enjoyable.
You might take a pottery class without any intention of becoming a potter. You might join a choir because you enjoy singing, walk with a friend because you like being outside together, or spend a Saturday afternoon looking through old photographs because you find it absorbing.
These things may not lead anywhere, and they don’t need to.
You might look at your own week and ask: What has plenty of room in my life, and what has gradually been squeezed out?
3. Invest in your important relationships
The people we share our lives with profoundly influence our happiness, yet we can become so absorbed in work, family responsibilities, and the practicalities of daily life that friendships, partnerships, and other important connections end up with whatever time and attention is left over.
A book that has influenced my thinking about relationships is David Richo’s How to Be an Adult in Relationships. Richo describes five qualities that form the basis of what he calls mindful loving: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing. I like the simplicity of these five areas because they shift the focus away from finding perfect relationships and focus on how we can engage more meaningfully in the relationships we have.
Attention means being present enough to really notice another person, rather than listening while distracted or thinking about what we are going to say next. Acceptance involves allowing people to be who they are, rather than continually trying to change them into who we think they should be. Appreciation means noticing what is good and valuable in another person, including their strengths, their unique qualities and what they bring into our lives. Affection is the warmth we express through words, kindness and touch, while allowing involves giving people the freedom to be themselves and accepting that we cannot control every aspect of a relationship or how it unfolds.
None of these qualities means accepting behaviour that is harmful or abandoning our own needs in a relationship. Rather, they offer a useful way of thinking about the kind of relationships we want to create and the person we want to be within those relationships. We might ask ourselves where we are genuinely present, where we are trying too hard to control an outcome, or whether there are people we have stopped noticing and appreciating because familiarity has taken over.
As we move through life, our relationships also change. Friendships that once revolved around work or young children may now occupy a different place in our lives. A long marriage can move through periods of distance and closeness, while relationships with our children inevitably change as they establish their own lives. Some friendships deepen with time, while others naturally become less central. New relationships can emerge too, and they usually need some intention if they are to become deeper and more meaningful.
Creating a life that feels like yours includes thinking about the relationships you want to make room for, and knowing how you want to show up with the people who matter most.
4. Build small habits that support the life you want
There is often a gap between the life we say we want and the life our everyday habits are actually creating.
We might tell ourselves that health is important, that we’d like to read more, visit the gym three times a week, spend time outdoors or develop a creative interest. Yet when the week fills up, these things can be the first to disappear.
James Clear’s work on habits is useful here. His central idea is that our lives are shaped not only by the big decisions we make, but by the behaviours we repeat, often without thinking very much about them.
We can create change most easily by adjusting those daily behaviours, by changing small habits.
Creating habits isn’t about becoming more disciplined or creating another list of things you should be doing. It’s about creating a new rhythm, which makes our lives easier and more meaningful to live.
For example, if you want to become someone who reads more, you might intentionally go to bed thirty minutes earlier and have a book beside your bed. If you want more time outdoors, you might establish a regular brief morning walk rather than waiting to arrange a hike on a perfect Saturday afternoon. If making time for your friends has become important to you, perhaps you’ll make a commitment to arrange one lunch every fortnight.
If you value exercise but dislike gyms, perhaps the answer is not to force yourself to go to the gym three times a week. It might be finding a form of movement that fits naturally into your life. If you want more creativity, perhaps you need to protect an hour on Sunday rather than hoping you’ll somehow find the time during the week.
These are small things, but they matter because they turn an intention into part of the structure of your life.
Over time, these small choices will begin to change the nature of your life.
5. Live more creatively
Creativity is often associated with artistic talent, but I prefer the broader idea explored by Rick Rubin in The Creative Act. Creativity, in his view, has much to do with attention: noticing what is around us, becoming receptive to ideas and being willing to follow something that interests us before we know exactly where it will lead.
This is particularly relevant when we’re thinking about how we genuinely want to shape our lives. Paying attention to what draws our interest, what we’re curious about and what we feel moved to explore can be a way of getting back in touch with ourselves.
A creative life doesn’t have to mean becoming an artist or producing something that other people admire. It’s about connecting with something that is inherent in all of us: our capacity to notice, imagine, explore and make something of our experience.
There is something deeply human about making things. Long before we thought of creativity as an activity or a talent, human beings were painting on cave walls, shaping objects, telling stories, making music and finding ways to transform the materials around them. Creativity is still at the heart of who we are, although many of us lose touch with it.
It might mean cooking without a recipe, taking photographs on your morning walk, writing down a family story, planting a herb garden, learning to play an instrument, rearranging a room, making something with your hands or following an idea simply because you’re curious about it.
And perhaps the ultimate point won’t be about becoming more creative, but being more connected with the creative part of ourselves that is already here.
You don’t have to reinvent your life
When we’re unhappy or uncertain, it’s tempting to think that the answer lies in overhauling our lives completely. A new career, a new relationship, a move to a new place, or some other dramatic reinvention can seem like the answer.
Sometimes we do need to make big changes, but often the more interesting work is looking at the life you already have and asking how it can be fine-tuned or adjusted to feel more like yours.
Perhaps you don’t need a different career, more friends or a new identity. Perhaps you just need to pay closer attention to what is already there: what gives you energy, what you want more of and what no longer feels right.
And perhaps you don’t need to know exactly where you’re heading before you begin. We are shaping our lives each day, whether we’re doing it consciously or not.
So perhaps the question isn’t only, “Where am I going?”
It might also be: “What is the life I can create now, if I’m being completely true to myself?”
