You are currently viewing Make Your List, Live Your Life: How to Align with What You Love
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Have you ever stopped to consider how much of your time is spent doing the things you truly love? In the rush of daily life, it’s easy to lose track of what brings us joy and fulfillment. This exercise invites you to make a list of your top 50 favorite things to do, reflect on how often you engage in them, and explore what really matters to you. 

Whether you’re doing some or none of these activities, this is an opportunity to reimagine your life and make space for more of what you love.

Get a piece of paper and number it 1 to 50. Now, use that paper to make a list of your top 50 favorite things to do. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 

Once you have your 50 things, or at least a good start on it. Go back to your list and walk through each item carefully. Give yourself a score of some kind – perhaps a star for those things you love to do that you are doing regularly. Or highlight them. Underline them. Whatever way you choose, notice which things on your list you do. Be curious and not judgmental.  Try not to focus on the number of things you are able to do, just give yourself credit for the ones you ARE doing. 

Now, look at the list again. Are there things on that list that really speak to you? 

That if you were doing them regularly you would be living in the zone. Make a tick mark next to those items on your list. Hopefully, some of them are things you’ve already highlighted. 

Next, consider how you spend your days or weeks. If you are a little like me, sometimes you marvel at how quickly a day or week can go by. There are so many tasks to accomplish and never enough time to finish them. There are things we long to do but never get around to doing them. Consider your list and where you are in the way of doing things you love or long to do. Give yourself time to think about this. Maybe your list needs refining or adding to. 

Are there new things you’d like to be doing that aren’t on the list? Are there things on the list that you no longer wish to do? Did those items make it on your list because you felt somehow that you “should” still want to do them? 

Making a list can be very revealing. When I do this activity in workshop settings, women find themselves surprised – maybe because they are doing a couple of things on the list. Upon reflection, they wish they were doing more. Or because they discover their list is filled with things they love to do but they aren’t doing any of it. It can be dumbfounding to realize we aren’t doing things we love. That we’ve essentially stopped playing! 

Here’s where the dreaming begins. When we are reimagining our lives, we need to look both ways – at the things we love or have loved doing and at the things we long to do. 

Performing funerals for as long as I did, I learned that there are seasons of our lives. Times when we are invited by life to evaluate and re-evaluate what’s important to us. Funerals taught me that life is brief. That we think we have all the time in the world to do that thing we’ve always wanted to do. We might plan for the things we want to do after we retire. 

I performed funerals for people who lived as if they had plenty of time to get around to what it was they wanted. And I’ve performed funerals for those who lived as if life was brief, and they made choices and lived lives that reflected the desire to really live forward into their dreams. 

Surviving family members have taught me that there is never enough time. No matter how their loved one died, the most important thing to their family was how they lived. Did they live towards love and their ideas and the things they most wanted to do? Did they celebrate their life successes and stories while they were alive? Did they set goals and accomplish them? If legacy was important to them, did those family members feel like their loved one lived a legacy life? 

Whatever is on your list, I invite you to look at it deeply and with soft eyes. 

How are you living the list you’ve made today? In this moment? If you look at your list and see that there are not many notations for the things that mean the most to you, how can you create the space for that? Can you let go of distractions? Check-in with curiosity to learn more about what does matter and how to find your way toward it in your daily living. Look for what’s working and how you might be present to more of that. 

Working with a life coach is an opportunity to reflect, share ideas, develop working strategies, be held accountable and most of all be creative. If that resonates with you, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute initial consultation where we can explore co-collaborating towards the life list you desire.

 

A watershed moments coach can come alongside your experience of grief and loss providing support, encouragement, education about the nature of grief and insight that can assist you as you mourn. Collaborating with a coach is an investment in finding your way forward after a significant life change.  Connect with us for a brief introductory conversation where we will explore whether we are a fit for your current grief needs.  Click here to schedule a no-charge, 20-minute conversation where we will learn more about one another.