7 Ways To Level Up Your Life Without Doing A Thing

The journey to self-improvement is an inside game.

You don’t need to do a lot to get ahead in life. I know that this will sound like heresy when you’re repeatedly told to have miracle mornings and productivity evenings, getting ready for the next day.

In a world of achievement and get more done, this advice will not resonate very much, but in my own life, it has never been doing more and getting more done. All of my personal growth or lack of personal growth has come from going within.

I’ve always known what I needed to do with my life, and the experts have always filled me in on how to do. I’ve read their books, taken their courses, and watched their videos. I’ve concluded that it’s not the how that I’m missing but the internal blocks that are stopping me from doing what’s needed of me to live the life I want.

The experts want us to think that we need to do more to get ahead. They are type A types productivity machines so suggest we do 12 personal development rituals a day to get ahead, like they do. The way to achievement and doing more is simply being more of yourself.

The secret to living the life you want requires you to be more of who you are, which may not require any external work at all. Instead, to be more of you are, go within to clear the internal blocks, release the past, and live more authentically.

7 Ways To Transform Your Life By Going Within

1. Don’t buy into your own story.

You’re telling yourself a story about yourself and all the events that happened in your life. You pieced the parts of your life together and have told yourself a story that could be true but most likely not.

I’ve experienced a lot of loss in my life from places that I’ve lived in, people that I’ve loved, and professions that I’ve had. If I continue to tell myself a story of loss, grief, or of being cursed in life, I am essentially ensuring that I’m going to continue this story in my life.

If you examine the story you’re telling you about yourself, it may be a negative story, that makes you feel like a victim, or might be disempowering. You may be using words like you “always” fail or you “never” succeed. You may be ruling yourself out in your own mind by believing your own story.

To make a change, change your story. Stop replaying the story of heartache, suffering, and loss. Tell a story of progress, improvement or resiliency.

2. Align your life with what matters to you.

You may not be happy and doing whatever it is you want in life because you may be looking at income figures and house prices for your success. You may be looking to climb the corporate ladder or switch jobs. You may be looking for love or to start a business.

I was on an entirely different trajectory until my life fell apart completely with a divorce. I ultimately lost the house, my spouse, and my career within a one year span. The wife left me by choice, and I left my career by choice. All this leaving allowed me to realize that all the external things that were in my life were not in alignment with my values.

I got clearer on what was actually important to me and what I valued in life. On the top of that list was simplicity, compassion, creativity and freedom. My marriage and my career were not in alignment with these values so I set about creating a life that would be more in alignment with it.

Today, house-less, wife-less, and car-less but happier than I’ve ever been. Your values are your key to your happiness.

3. Choose your thoughts instead of going with default thoughts.

Your thoughts pop up based on default. Your thoughts are like unruly squirrels and unpredictable tropical storms. There’s no rhyme or reason for where your thoughts come from. Most of our daily thoughts are negative, disempowering, and try to tear us down.

This is why mindfulness is so helpful these days. People don’t like their thoughts and their scattered brains. They want some control over their thoughts, which has so much influence over their lives. If your mind is out of control, work on slowing it down and examining the thoughts that pop into your head.

You don’t have to choose the loudest and most repetitive thoughts. You don’t have to adopt the thoughts your mind generates daily. You can pick the ones that will move your life forward and ditch the ones that try to sabotage you. You can substitute and adopt new thoughts that you intentionally think.

4. Be an emotional alchemist.

Instead of running away the emotions in your life, welcome them it, sit with them, and offer them the compassion they are looking for.

You can take away the power of emotions over your life when you stop resisting them. For the longest time, I denied that I even had emotions. Later, I tried to suppress these emotions. Both were recipes for disaster.

You can take the negative emotions that come into your life and feel them completely. You can write them out, journal them out, speak them out, or share them with a professional or trusted friend. Transform your negative emotions to ones that are more empowering to your life.

Don’t be held captive by your emotions. Process your feelings and use them to support the life you want.

5. How you see anything is how you see everything.

If you have had bad experiences with relationships, your views of relationships will be colored with the most negative lenses. If you have had bad bosses at work, your views of management and work will be colored by your experiences.

You get a choice about how you view the happenings in your life. You bring your perspective to the table, and your perspective can be changed. If I asked you to look at the pandemic in the most favorable light, you would be able to do that. If I ask you to look at the pandemic in the most negative light, you can do that too.

Your perspective isn’t permanent. You have control over how to view the world and the happenings in it. You may not be able to change every situation but you can change the way you view a situation.

6. Your answers are a lot closer than you think.

As personal development junkies and self-help seekers, we want to believe that Deepak Chopra or Oprah have all the answers. They don’t. I kept reading the books, accumulating the knowledge and hearing what others wanted me to do, but you know what — we are wiser beyond our years.

You and I have our own answers. You know what’s right for you. You know what you should be doing. You don’t slow down enough to ask yourself. You don’t think you’re wise enough or knowledgable enough to know what to do.

You have the deepest truth in the form of your lifetime of experiences. You can rely on this wisdom. And your superpower is your intuition. Slow down and quiet down your mind so you can tap into your intuition. It has all the answers that you’re seeking.

7. Your past isn’t your present, and you don’t have to repeat it.

You may believe that because each experience in your life has happened a certain way, that your current situation will turn out that way too. You are predisposed to failure, heartbreak, or loss because you’ve continually experienced that in your life.

This once again isn’t true. Your past doesn’t equal your present. What happened before is preparing you for now. You overcame, you learned, you had experiences of failure to prepare you for today. Your past was preparing you for the present. You are not going to repeat the past because you’ve smartened up and toughened up.

Look at your past for inspiration and wisdom. Your past doesn’t have to repeat if you have learned from it.

Get off the self-help treadmill.

Most of your personal growth work is internal. The things stopping you and slowing you down from living the life you want come from within.

Your job is to process, work through, and overcome your emotional blocks, your past, and your perspective to live the life you want.

Step away from the self-help treadmill of doing more for the sake of doing more. Do less so you can examine what’s going on within. Work on healing, releasing, and shifting within to become the person you are.

Replace achievement with authenticity. The more you become who you are and live according to what matters to you, the more you will transform your life and live the life you want to have.

Want to remove the other inner obstacles in the way to the life you want? Pick up my book, How Do I Get Unstuck here (affiliate link).