If you’ve read my previous posts, so far I’ve talked about choosing to start over after my divorce.  I was unhappy and unhealthy and I knew that this was not what I wanted for my life.  I didn’t know how to change it, I just knew I needed to start by changing me.  That’s it.  That’s all I had to work from.

So I started with what I love – reading.  I went to the library and checked out books.  I Googled books on self-improvement and parenting.  I talked to people about books they found influential. And I read.  I read all the time.  

One of first books I read that really changed my thinking was The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.  It was recommended to me by a virtual stranger one day so I downloaded it and read it.  I can’t say that I agree with the overarching ideals of the book, but I will review the book in a separate post.  The premise of the book is that you can control your universe by controlling your thoughts.  

While I had a hard time with concepts such as “if you think about money coming in, money will appear” there were a lot of ideas in the book that really spoke to me.  Most importantly, as a result of this book I took time to visualize what I wanted my life to be; visualize who I wanted to be.

This was my first time writing in a journal, but I felt that I needed to write down a picture of what my life could be like.  I tried to be very concrete and included details that might not end up matching reality but that brought this future to life.  I included color, sounds, smells, names.  I wanted to be able to see this every time I closed my eyes.  Over the course of several weeks I would add to or change this future I was envisioning for myself but most of the larger components remained the same.

What came into focus from this exercise were my priorities.  I started to realize what was most important to me, what areas I wanted to focus on first.  

My current life is nothing like the one I envisioned so many years ago.  But this was truly the first time I felt completely in control of my future.  If you’ve never tried this before, try it now and let me know how it goes!