I’m going to ask you a question. It may be a little bit daunting, but bear with me.
Do you feel absolutely fulfilled in your life right now?
Think about it for a moment, and answer honestly.
Now I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m willing to bet that a lot of you may have responded with something along the lines of this:
“There’s so much more I want to accomplish in life – I don’t feel absolutely fulfilled yet”.
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That 3-letter word: ‘yet’
I want you to take a minute here and think about the word ‘yet’. This is a bit of a tricky word. Why? Because it makes us believe that the key to being fulfilled lies somewhere in the future. That we must accomplish ‘XYZ’ before we can be fulfilled.
This isn’t quite how it works though.
Life fulfillment doesn’t just “appear” once you’ve accomplished your goals. Instead, what we mistakenly label as being “fulfilled” after we achieve these things is more like fleeting satisfaction. It lasts for a short while, and then it disappears. All of a sudden we’re back to feeling how we were before – unfulfilled.
If you keep believing that fulfillment will only arrive once you’ve achieved your goals – you’ll constantly feel unsettled, unsatisfied, and ultimately unhappy with what you’re doing in life.
Fulfillment is available to you NOW
The truth is, life fulfillment is something that you should feel every single day – starting right now.
Before you turn away and mock what I’m saying as “wishful thinking”, I want to share with you one very important quote:
It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit – Denis Waitley
Finding life fulfillment isn’t this big, mystifying quest that a lot of us may imagine it to be. In reality, it’s really quite easy to find.
True life fulfillment, as Mr. Waitley illustrates, can be found in the “happiness of pursuit”. In other words, it lies in doing things that we enjoy doing. Pursuing things. Whether these are larger life pursuits such as starting your own business, writing a book, or raising a family – or smaller pursuits such as learning how to draw, learning about different tree varieties, or even reading books.
We should be pursuing things every single day.
This may sound like a big ask, but it really isn’t. It doesn’t mean we have to accomplish and achieve a certain “goal” every day, it just means we have to occupy ourselves with doing something we enjoy every day. Doing “our stuff”. It’s all about the action of doing, not the end result.
And in the action of doing these things – in pursuing something we like – we will feel completely and totally fulfilled.
The best part is, this feeling of fulfillment won’t just disappear when we stop doing the activity we enjoy. It will last. It will radiate through our whole body every second of the day because we’ll know that we’re doing stuff that means something to us – stuff that we’re interested in, stuff that’s important to us, stuff that we love.
The #1 trick to help you feel more fulfilled
Okay, so in writing, it sounds easy. To be fulfilled, we just have to spend some time during our day doing things we enjoy.
But I know that life gets busy. I know that a lot of us may want to do more things we enjoy during our day, but we may scratch our heads wondering how. Our days seem to go by SO QUICKLY, right? Where on earth are we supposed to find the time to do the things we enjoy doing, right?!
Well, there’s one trick that’s going to help you with this. Here it is:
Cut out the things you don’t care about
Related Article: The One Simple Trick to Becoming Happier
We spend SO many hours of our day occupying our minds with stuff that we really don’t give a crap about. Life is short, and we only have so much mental capacity. If we fill our minds and our lives with too much stuff, we’ll have less time to spend on the stuff that really matters to us.
Now of course there’s the stuff we have to do. We all have obligations and things that we need to do every day whether we like them or not (*ahem* washing dishes *ahem*). But the truth is, a lot of the time there are other things we don’t truly care about that we can easily cut out of our lives.
To give you some examples, here are the 5 biggest things I’ve cut out of my life to make room for doing more of the things I enjoy:
1. Mindless TV:
I still watch Netflix every now and then, but not nearly as much as I used to. I find TV can be entertaining, but I really don’t care that much about it. It doesn’t make me feel truly fulfilled.
2. Social media:
I have a small group of friends that I’m very close to and I message them regularly. Other than that, I don’t feel the need to see every random person’s life updates and photos on my social feed. It’s a total waste of time, and distracts me from doing the stuff that’s really important to me.
3. Eating out of boredom:
I used to be a heavy snacker. If I ever had free time during my day, I’d just reach for a little snack and eat it to pass the time. The thing is, I wasn’t even hungry. It was just another useless (but tasty) time-sucker.
4. Keeping in contact with people I’m not close to:
I find it very difficult to keep in regular contact with a lot of people via text. It’s just something that I don’t love doing. I used to stress myself out by trying to keep in contact with old acquaintances constantly, but I finally decided that it was taking up too much of my mental headspace. It may sound a bit cold, but stopping this has helped free up so much of my time!
(FYI – I communicated this to all my acquaintances, so they know that I’m not just ghosting them! I still keep in contact, but only rarely, and they are okay with this)
5. The desire to do too many things:
This was the biggest one for me. There are SO many different things I’d love to learn about and do (like most of you I’m sure!). It got to the point that I never knew what to start doing! I had all these fantasies of things I could do – but it was too much choice. It was too overwhelming.
Finally, I decided to narrow it down to TWO (only two!) things that I truly wanted to spend time pursuing. It ended up being yoga and working on my online business. Once I got all the other stuff out of my mental headspace, I felt like I had so much more clarity! Now I can just laser focus on each of these two things! Honestly, I’ve never felt so fulfilled in my life!
To find out what YOU can cut out of your life, I encourage you to ask yourself these questions:
- What activities during my day make me feel bad?
- What activities during my day make me feel bored?
- What activities during my day are nice at the time but really don’t add anything to my life?
- What is taking up too much mental headspace in my life?
- What is keeping me from doing the things I actually want to do in life?
Remember: the point here isn’t to cut EVERYTHING out of your life that you don’t like. The point is to define what things don’t bring value to your life so that you are better able to make room for things that do bring value to it!
True life fulfillment is available to you right now, this very second. All you have to do is allow for room for it to flourish!
If you’re looking for more useful tips and tricks on how to start living your BEST, most FULFILLED life, then download my goal planner below! It also comes with all of my other self-care and lifestyle worksheets to help you live your best life!