This is how you’re really going to improve your life
Want realistic self-help advice? These techniques are the foundation on which you improve your life.
by: E.B. Johnson
Everywhere you look, you’ll find a life coach or a self-help guru that has a personal promise of guaranteed happiness. More often than not, when you look beneath the surface of these techniques — they’re little more than get-rich-quick schemes masked beneath toxic positivity. We can absolutely improve our lives, but it doesn’t all involve the mind and changing the state of our thoughts. Really transforming our lives is far more than that and asks us to consider the bigger picture at hand.
Happiness is multi-faceted.
You can look across the internet and find a million different definitions of happiness and none of them will apply to you. That’s because true happiness is self-determined and looks different to every one of us. But even so — building true happiness must occur across a number of planes. Improving your relationship with one person, or improving one-instance isn’t enough. True transformation is an inside-out job.
Really improving our lives comes down to improving ourselves.
We build better lives and better relationships by looking inside and healing the injuries and the wounds that plague us. If we want to climb out of the hole that we’ve dug for ourselves, we have to look across of our lives and understand where we’re at and what we’re lacking. Who are you? What do you truly want from your life? What will it take to let go of your past? All of these questions are what it truly takes to get to the root of change and lasting joy in life.
The best ways to practically improve our lives.
Are you ready to realistically improve your life? Are you ready to make changes that last? There’s no hocus pocus to creating a life that is livable and joy-filled for us. When we grow our sense of self, address our physiological needs, and make peace with the past — we can find a way to manifest a reality that is ours and fulfilling.
1. Grow your sense of self
Knowing who you are is the key that unlocks the garden of promise and of opportunity. When you know who you are, you know what you want and what is worth spending your energy on. In order to discover who this core person is, though, we have to experience life and question ourselves, our beliefs, and everything that has made us who we are.
You cannot make any valuable or effective improvements in your life if you don’t know who you are and what you want. It’s time to grow your sense of self and come to know what it is that makes you tick in the core of who you are.
What means the most to you in this life? What do you want from your family? Your career? What are your values? What are your priorities? When it comes to your last day on this planet, what do you want to look back at as a successful life? The more you realize who you are and allow that person out, the more confident and self-fulfilled you will become. Self-esteem is your launching point to creating a future that’s entirely yours.
2. Address your physiological needs
There’s a lot of talk out there about the power of the mind, and while that is certainly true — improving your mental and emotional states means little without also considering the state of your physical body. The mind and the body are an intertwined circle. When one is impacted negatively, so is the other. True living happiness cannot be manifested without also addressing the physical needs of the body.
You can think as positively as you want, but that won’t change the physical pain or distress that you’re living in. Your brain struggles to tolerate the discomfort of the physical body, and it feeds into your mental and emotional states (both through the emotion of the experience and the release of stress hormones in the brain).
It’s not all about “thinking positive” — you also need to address issues that are going on at a physical, mental, and emotional level. Brain chemistry exists. Hormones exist. Chronic illness and chronic pain exist. All of these factors come together to inform the quality of your life. While changing your mindset or finding spirituality can help you deal with these things, you can be truly happy unless those issues are also dealt with. You can be happy living in physical pain and discomfort.
3. Make peace with the past
The past is a heavy burden to care when you have a childhood or experience behind that is rife with stress, conflict, or trauma. In order for us to move forward in any real way, we have to learn how to make peace with our painful pasts. We have to find ways to allow it to inform who we are without controlling us. This in itself is a journey, though, and a process which is both challenging and impossible to undergo on our own.
You’ll never be able to leave the past completely behind, but you can shelve it like a textbook. Appreciate it for the lessons it brought to you. Appreciate that those experiences have now brought you closer to yourself. Now, though, you have to let it go and let it be separate from who you are here in the present moment.
Find ways to make peace with your past. This is not always a process which can be undergone alone. Sometimes, the pain and trauma of our past runs deep. Reach out to loved ones and mental health experts to build yourself a support network that can help you through the journey. You don’t have to forget the past; you have to learn to detach yourself from it.
4. Build mental resilience
There can be no denying the power of mental resilience when it comes to building the life we want. This experience is filled with ups and downs. Nothing is ever going to go our way all the time, and mistakes and heartbreak are going to happen. The only way to survive this is by enhancing our strength and the way in which we approach adversity in our path.
No matter how happy you get in this life, the experience will get no easier. You will still be tested and challenged in innumerable ways. Mental and emotional strength and courage are a must-have. The more reactive we are to the chaos of the world around us, the more power we give away to everyone but ourselves.
Increase your mental resilience. Find ways to make yourself emotionally strong. When bad things happen, don’t explode. Instead, tap into that deep inner sense of calm and begin questioning yourself and the best paths forward. Take back your personal power. Stop giving your energy away to the inevitable setbacks and delays that life has to offer. Nothing is ever going to go all the way right. Find the silver lining and learn to strengthen your resolve to thrive.
5. Learn how to love yourself
Self-love is an inevitable part of the self-transformation process. If you’re actually serious about finding happiness in this life, you can’t gloss over the act of pure and unconditional self-love. Until you can love yourself as much as anyone else, you will never believe in your right to genuine fulfillment and joy that is undeniably yours. By learning how to love ourselves, we learn how to lead better, more stable lives (Leary & Baumeister, 2000).
Fall in love with yourself and the person that you’ve fought so hard to become. A great way to start this process is by falling in love with our physical bodies first. Every morning when you get up, look in the mirror and say 3 things you love about your body. At night, do the same. Likewise, you can work on getting to your level of healthy and falling in love with your body that way.
As you get more comfortable with your physical body, turn your attention inward. The “real us” is often the hardest one to love, but we have to learn to pull this inner child to ourselves and love them for the broken thing that they are. Recognize all the ways in which you are strong. Celebrate the hardships you’ve overcome. Each day, write down 3 things you handled well, and keep a journal of the regular improvements you make in mind and spirit.
6. Heal your inner child
All of us have broken inner children living within, who live perpetually in that moment in which we were traumatized or destabilized in childhood. Moving on becomes impossible in many ways, because this traumatized little person is living inside of us and affecting every decision that we make, and every relationship that we decide to form in this life. To really root ourselves in happiness, we have to help this child find their peace and stop living in fear.
Allow your inner child to heal. Bring them close to you and reassure them with a loving kindness that they are safe to be who they are. You need to re-parent them the way they never were parented, and you need to teach them that you (and the decisions that you make) are there to help them improve.
While it’s a hard road, it’s one that you must travel in order to find real peace from the inside out. Your relationships, your career prospects, even your general life opportunities will all dwindle until you give your inner child some peace. Create a safe space for them to explore their creativity, their curiosity, and all the things they were denied in childhood. Giving your inner child a chance to thrive gives you a chance to heal.
7. Prioritize yourself mindfully
Too many of us find ourselves living lives that aren’t attuned to our true needs. Why? Well, for many it’s as simple as forgetting to put themselves first. Rather than pursuing the people and opportunities that bring them joy, they go after what other people want for them. Beyond that, they lose themselves in the needs and expectations of the people they love most…but that’s a sure-fire recipe for disappointment.
All those feelings of resentment? That anger you can’t seem to let go of? That irritation at the world? So much of it is coming from your inability to make yourself an important part of your life. You matter as much as anyone else in this world. What you want — what you need — it is just as important (on every single level) at the needs and desires of anyone else.
You can’t be the best for the people that you love until you are first the best for yourself. Develop a self-care routine that allows you to regularly check in and take stock of where you’re at. You need to make sure that you’re fulfilled and at peace before you can help anyone else do the same thing. It’s a bit like an oxygen mask on a plane. In order to help others, you need to help yourself. Make yourself a priority and value your own needs, interests, and desires.
Putting it all together…
The life coaches and the self-help gurus make a lot of promises when it comes to building lasting happiness, but transforming our lives in that way is an inside out job. We can change the way we think, but that does little if we don’t address core psychological and physical issues that are holding us back. Want to create a life that is entirely your own? Commit to taking the right action in your life, instead of pretending you can only think your way out of it.
Grow your sense of self and figure out who you are from the inside-out. Address your physical needs and make sure they are attuned to your mental happiness. Make peace with your past and learn how to separate yourself from it emotionally. It can inform your life without controlling it. Build mental resilience and learn better ways to deal with the lows and the upset in life. Rather than being blindsided, control your reaction to upsets with grace. Learn how to love yourself above all, however, and use this love to build a better relationship with your inner child. All of this means little if you don’t learn how to prioritize yourself mindfully, however. Put yourself first from time to time and learn how to make your needs just as important as anyone else’s.
- Leary, M., & Baumeister, R. (2000). The nature and function of self-esteem: Sociometer theory. Advances In Experimental Social Psychology Volume 32, 1–62. doi: 10.1016/s0065–2601(00)80003–9
