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!