lifestyle

If your life was for sale would you buy it?

Location, location, location - Bargain hunters take note.  Foreclosure forces sale of perfect Fixer-upper.  Run down, but with plenty of potential.  In need of TLC.  Apply with in.  Price on Application

When you buy something like a house, you are faced with a mass of different choices.  You are forced to decide what is most important to you.  What are the essentials, what are the desirables and what are you trying to avoid?  This can be a handy way of evaluating your life.  It can really help you understand what is important to you and what you should change about your current situation.

Step 1 - Write an advertisement page.  Pretend you are going to put your life on the market.  You will be selling your relationships, work, lifestyle, possessions, experiences, physical self, psychological/emotion self, spiritual self and everything else that is part of your life.  If you like you can just make a list of points rather than spend the time writing convincing copy.  Make sure you include everything that is significant about your life.  This will end up being a sort of inventory of your life today.

Step 2 - Take out a highlighter.  Mark everything in your list that you would not want to be without, in one colour.  Mark everything that you’d be happy without in another colour.  Take some time over this and try to think about what is personally important to you, not anyone else.

Step 3 - Get out another colour and add to the list anything that is really important to you but is not there yet.  What is missing from your life as it is?  What people, experiences, satisfaction etc. is not there.

Step 4 - Hold the page as far away as you can from your face and let your eyes go out of focus.  Try to get a general impression of what colour shows up most on your page.  This will give you an idea, not only of how many of each different colour there are, but how much you wrote about each item.  If you are anything like me, you will write more quantity - be more specific - about things that are important.  What do the relative quantities of colour tell you about your life?

Step 5 - Put your page away for a day or two and come back and see if you agree with what you wrote.  If it still describes your life and the bits that are missing, then you have an extremely important document in your hand.

Now I am not advocating that you put your life up for sale, as I believe there has to be something illegal about that sort of thing.  Just imagining that you will put your life on the market will help you decide how you are going with crafting your ideal life.  No life is perfect, but how does yours compare with your ideal.  What are the big areas for life renovation?  What areas are you content with?  What areas are completely missing from your life today?  Now that you know the answer to these questions you are better prepared than most people, to be able to effectively pursue your ideal life.  So get to it. 

P.S. If anyone finds that they would like to sell their life after this analysis, I am in the market for a spare one.  I’d love to have another life to fill up with all of the things that I want to do but don’t have space for.  Just drop me a line.

Thanks

Tom