Do you love your life?
If not, what will it take?
Money in the bank? Everything going just the way you want it? Millions of adoring fans chanting your name?
If I were to take a guess, you’re probably not even sure what it is that bugs you about your life. One thing you’re pretty clear about…you don’t love your life.
You go about your days experiencing this vague, but nagging sense of dissatisfaction, even if everything looks good on paper.
You’re likely puzzled by your own negative feelings and reactions to relatively minor and insignificant events.
You then get mad at yourself for feeling the way you do and you begin to feel even worse about your life.
To make matters worse, you see people living it up on social media.
All the happy pictures and stories of people going on fantastic vacations or marrying the person of their dreams or starting a multimillion business have caused you to come down with a bad case of the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side syndrome.
And yet every now and again, you bump into someone who is seems worse off than you but appears much happier.
You may have also run into others who seem to have everything and yet are miserable. What gives?
If you’re tired of hating your life for no good reason, if you’d like to love your one precious life no matter what, here are three things you need to start doing today:
1. Hang around the people who love their life
You’re probably heard the advice to stop comparing yourself to others more than a few times.
I’ve given that advice myself in the past and on the surface, it seems sound. Except that it’s pretty tough for us to stop comparing ourselves with other people.
We’re social animals to our core and we’re hardwired to observe and compare. It’s how we make sense of our world and our place in it.
Asking someone to stop comparing is like asking them to stop breathing.
What if instead of comparing you could respond differently. This is an easier way to start to love your life.
Instead of comparing yourself negatively to someone who seems to love their life, why not strike up a friendship with them.
You’ll likely find yourself picking up some of the good habits they’ve developed in order to stay positive and keep things in perspective.
2. Monitor your expectations
Your expectations, conscious and subconscious, are probably the biggest obstacles to your happiness. And the bigger they are, the more effective they are at crushing any sense of happiness, contentment, or joy.
Tony Robbins once said “turn your expectations into appreciation and your whole world changes in an instant.”
The biggest expectation of all? Ironically it’s the one that says “I need to be happy all the time” or it’s cousin “I’ll have a happy life only when things go my way all the time.”
The problem with these expectations is that we don’t consciously create them.
They just sit quietly in the back of our minds. We’re not consciously aware of them but we make all our decisions about how to think and feel about the events of our lives based on them.
Expose these dangerous expectations to the light by taking time to reflect on them and write them down on paper.
Then turn each one of them into statements of appreciation and gratitude.
For instance, turn “I expect people hold the door open for me” to “I appreciate when someone chooses to hold the door open for me.”
Do this enough times and your whole life will change.
3. Serve others
The reason why so many of us are unhappy with our lives is because we focus too much on ourselves.
Simply put, we were not built to focus solely on our own needs and wants, no matter how compelling they are. Instead, we were made to serve each other.
Serving gives us meaning beyond ourselves. This meaning making is critical for our overall happiness and well-being.
Unhappy at your job? Think about those you get to serve in the course of a workday.
Wrestling with a personal issue, volunteer at your local church or community organization. You almost instantly feel better about the situation and over time, you’ll feel better about the meaning of your life.
Love your life
Here’s the thing.
You only get one shot at living your life. That makes it precious beyond measure. Don’t waste another moment believing that it’s meant to be miserable.
It starts with choosing to love your life, no matter how you’re feeling about it right now.
Then following these simple, easy steps will go a long way to helping you appreciate and love your one precious life.
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