Daily Living a Life I Love

--turns out this is my 200th post.

As the saying goes, “Death by a thousand paper cuts.” Life, then, is created by a thousand moments of transformation. Living a life you live is based on a transformation of your daily life.

One of the assignments from the workbook is identifying values or virtues important in your life. These values are selected from moments where you feel inspired, reflecting on why you admire certain people, and a few additional strategies (see the blogs on pivot points, values, creating your future).

The current paradigm I emphasize is based on helping an individual make a choice between acting out or choosing something he/she finds important. Today’s blog is to also emphasize how you can cultivate the virtues on a daily basis outside of the crisis moments. The key in cultivating a life you love is to identify values to shape your behavior at all times. By cultivating these experiences on a daily basis, an individual will be able to move toward the type of life he/she desires.

For example, take the principle/virtue of courage. Courage has many definitions, and the one I like is, “Courage isn’t acting without fear, it is acting in spit of feeling fear.” This definition is helpful in shaping ALL of your behaviors moving forward. Asking yourself, “What is the courageous thing to do in this moment?” can help you overcome the small little fears in daily living. It might be as simple as assertively communicating your requests, saying yes when you mean yes, being honest about how you think/feel, being proactive (vs. passive), and a multitude of other behaviors. Courage may strangely be the opposite, depending on the circumstances. Courage might be simply waiting for the situation to naturally unfold, trusting others in their statements, or giving up control.

The value of expressing courage is to address the infinite times where you might feel the anxiety/fear/hesitation in your DAILY life. It is in the daily moments where we are fully alive. It is also the daily moments that become the building blocks for the times when we experience a major trigger/risk of relapse. The daily practice can help us respond to the larger events is a courageous manner.