6 Steps to Making Your Life Meaningful

If you make your life meaningful, then it helps you understand and achieve your goals. Here are ways to bring meaning, motivation, and happiness into life.
A girl jumping with joy after making her life meaningful

Oftentimes, we’re not able to achieve our goals. However, if you make your life meaningful then it’s a different story. You’re able to understand your ultimate goal of life and master your innate skills. You feel valued and are able to stay motivated to live your dream. Here are some practical tips and ways to make your life more meaningful to bring true happiness into your life. ~ Ed.

We’re all guilty of not following our dreams and goals in life even though that’s all we keep thinking about. So why don’t we act on it?

Is it because we don’t know how to start or is it because we’re afraid of failing if we started?

Some of the time, the above reasons are valid but not all the time. I’ve seen people talking about the reasons why they can’t do what they want to do. They say that they are not motivated.

Let me tell you why you don’t feel like being motivated.

Motivation is nothing but your acceptance and belief that you have the tools and skills to achieve that which you’ve always wanted. You’ll be motivated when you really discover and understand yourself. If you make your life meaningful, you’ll be motivated enough to pursue and achieve your dreams.

I’m going to share my six best guidelines, which I followed when I was going through a tough time, and how they helped me to stay motivated.

6 Tips to Stay Motivated and Make Your Life Meaningful

Here I’ll share with you the six ways in which you can make yourself valuable and your life meaningful.

Don’t Have Expectations from Anyone

We’ve all been through bad times and all we have heard is ‘time heals everything’. Maybe it will, but do you really want to waste more time while waiting to be healed without getting anything in return for this valuable time you spend?

When you go through a bad breakup in a relationship or reach failure in your business or work, we all sulk for some time. Sure, it was a tough time but then who did make it tough? We did, by keeping expectations from people.

When you expect something from someone and they don’t deliver it, we’re the ones who suffer. Maybe for some time only, but that does sometimes teach us a lesson: Never expect anything from this person.

What if we keep that attitude about everyone and everything from the beginning? When we don’t expect anything from anyone, we can never be disappointed, no matter what they do.

Expectations are like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.

~ Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

Embrace Failures

What a stupid thing to say, you might think! But…

If you really want to succeed in life, embrace failure; for that is your greatest treasure and a wonderful teacher. As has said:

Your best teacher is your last mistake.”

~ Ralph Nader

If you follow a successful person and do exactly what he did to succeed, you may not fail but you may not succeed as he did. He went through those failures and emerged a new person, he learned from his mistakes but you don’t know that. No one knows the struggle and failures of a successful person.

Failures are the true heroes that show you the correct way. If you don’t encounter a failure, you never know if you’re on the right path or wrong one. Each failure you encounter brings you closer to the right path.

While you prepare to succeed in life, be ready to fail and stand back up, and get up every time you fail. You’re not a failure until you’ve accepted so and stayed down.

Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.

~ Coco Chanel
live your dreams

Vision for Your Dreams

When you have a goal or dream to achieve in your life, it’s imperative to have a clear focus and vision of what exactly you want to achieve. A vision is a clear thought of where you want to be in your business or career in the future. However, vision alone cannot help you.

You may say like “I see myself as a book author in the next three years.”

The vision is defined, but still, there are lots of barriers to pass.

  • Is the vision clear?
  • Is it telling you what exactly you need to do to be a book author?
  • Does it tell you what problems or setbacks you can come across?
  • Have you thought about what you want to write, or you’re just winging it?

You have to devise an action plan to achieve this goal. Then you have to divide your vision into goals and create a strategy to achieve it. That will keep you motivated because now you can achieve your big goal through smaller goals.

How to do it?

There are two choices you can take:

1. Let’s start writing a book without any plan for your vision.

You sit on the table, open your laptop, and start writing as long as you can. You get tired, and you take rest. Tomorrow you wake up, you procrastinate because you have a whole day to write. In the evening you tell yourself, you’ll do it tomorrow. That tomorrow never comes.

In this scenario, you have your own choice. You can write one word or 100 words, and your mind will get satisfied because you wrote something, but was that worth it?

2. You divide your vision into goals, goals into objectives.

An objective can be completed in a matter of an hour. Now you know the time and number of words you have to write.

Next, you’ve to achieve the goal: Decide the Book Topic. For that, you divide it into objectives:

  • Find the 50 topics I really know about and can write
  • Remove the 30 least interesting topics
  • Among the remaining 20, find which five people are most looking forward to or are most interested in. You can do an online search or visit Quora or any forum for that.
  • Among the five, you have your one Book.

These are your objectives. Look how easy they sound when you read. They don’t just sound easy, they really are. Now you have achieved your goal of “Deciding the Book”. You’re one step closer to your vision.

If you would’ve just winged it, you’d never ever know how close or far away you are from your vision.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.”

~ Hellen Keller

You wish and dream to be something, but you don’t envision yourself as that something, is the one thing that keeps people where they are.

Don’t Ignore Your Passion

If there’s one thing in the world I can guarantee you’ll be successful in, it’s your passion. Your passion is something you can do all day long and still be happy.

We all dream of a job in which we can stay happy, but why don’t we take an initiative for it.

I was asked this question in 2018 and my answer was “How would I know which job I can stay happy in?”

The person I asked said, “Yeah, that’s the problem with me too. I guess we have to go from job to job to find where we can stay happy.”

I changed three jobs since then to find my happiness but there was no sign of it. Then I read a quote somewhere:

Allow your passion to become your purpose, and one day it’ll become your profession.

Have you ever felt exhausted after coming home from work even though yours is not a strenuous job?

Why is that? Why are you tired?

One plausible reason is that you have so much experience and skill inside you and you feel your job is not utilizing it at full potential. Since you have this untapped skill, which most of the time even you won’t know you have, your mind believes you don’t need it and it starts clearing this ‘unnecessary clutter’.

And what happens when you lose your precious self bit by bit every day? It reduces your capabilities and what you can do. One day you will lose everything you had, and all that remains in you is the experience and skill of ‘That Office Work’ which you absolutely hate.

What is that good skill?

It’s the thing you once loved to do, and still want to do, but are not able to do it due to either limited time for such activities and exhaustion from work.

To tackle this, you MUST utilize your full potential. Maybe it won’t be possible at work but if you give just 30 minutes in the morning to this passion of yours, one day this passion will make you who you are.

Your Thoughts Make You or Break You

What you think about yourself is who you’ll become.

Remember that Mind is a terrible master and a wonderful servant.

~ Robin Sharma

Your mind is one of the most powerful tools (if not the only one) you have at your disposal but most often than not our mind seems to control it. It remembers everything you say, everything you do. It doesn’t differentiate between a joke, a lie, or seriousness. Everything that comes out of your mouth, your mind is programming yourself on the basis of what you are.

Even if you jokingly say: “I’m not good looking.” Say it for few days and you’ll feel it.

Have you ever come before the mirror looking all dashing and feeling confident about your looks and style? And after a few days, you’re like “Man! What happened to me?”

Your mind is programmed every single day when you sleep. Whatever you think or say or do throughout the day, your subconscious mind is learning it and it will alter your behaviour towards it. Now, it could be negative behaviour or positive, happiness or sadness, motivated or lazy. The choice is yours.

conscious and subconscious mind

Tip: Affirmations are great and time tested methods to train your mind towards positivity and happiness.

The Power of Self-Awareness

Self Awareness is a rare but extremely important trait you can have or develop to improve your habits, relationships, and addictions. It is your ability to notice your feelings, sensations, reactions, behaviours, thoughts at the moment and the clarity over your strengths and weaknesses. Self Awareness is the power of being aware of your real self, not that you claim or believe to be.

Self Awareness allows you to see for yourself how others perceive you. It’s the process of understanding your flow of thoughts, their origin, and reason. This is the process of not going with the flow of life but by subconsciously finding out why you’re doing that you’re doing, what are its benefits and consequences.

How to do it?

Be true to yourself. Analyse everything you do. Whenever you have a thought, don’t remove it. Try to understand why you’re having this thought. This will open you up to the inner self. Write down every feeling you get and monitor your feelings.

We’re never in direct connection with our subconscious mind, which is actually the main powerhouse of our thoughts and actions. Usually, we just do whatever comes to our mind, without thinking why this thought came to us and why we should put it to action. Our mind holds the key to our real self, which we can only understand when we’re aware of ourselves.

Instead of going with the flow, note down your actions and thoughts.

An exercise you can do:

Write down your thoughts from your head onto the paper. It gives you the connection and opportunity to directly communicate with your mind. You’re basically asking questions to your real self. Let the answers pour in. You can start by answering these questions.

Remember you’re asking these questions to your real self. There’s no one in between so you can be true to yourself. Write down each and everything. Don’t think of not using cusses and bad words. These are emotions, write them down too. Each and every bit.

  1. What did I learn about myself today?
  2. What did I create today?
  3. What skill I learned today or what knowledge I gained?
  4. What were my emotions/mood throughout the day and why were they present at that time? (Very important question)
  5. Who hurt me emotionally today, what could be the reason they did it?
  6. Was I rude to someone today, why?

Remember, you may feel like you’re judging yourself or being too harsh to yourself but actually, that’s your true self telling you and teaching you what you need to do help improve your life.

Do this every day in the evening and after each week, read what you wrote a previous week and see the difference and change in yourself. You’re becoming better and you don’t even need too much effort to do this except writing the thoughts down.

Takeaway

Life can only be made meaningful if you know what you have to do or what your ultimate goal in life is. Everyone has an innate ‘hidden skill’ which they can master and you can discover this skill only by self-observation.

Most of us in today’s world are so busy with meaningless social media and fighting with strangers in comments sections that we forget to live our real life. You will see your life taking a turn towards positivity if you tried to adjust and incorporate the above ideas into your life.

Over to You

Now tell me, what are you doing with your life to improve yourself? Is there anything that you still feel is missing and holding you back? Share in the comments below and I’ll be glad to help you out.

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  1. Great post! I especially like the part about directing your attention.
    Naturally, we give too much attention to the little negative things that happen to us and keep focusing on them and reliving them in our heads instead of switching to something positive. So much wasted energy! Would be nice if we didn’t have to control this as much and naturally leaned into positive thoughts instead. But we have what we have, oh well.
    It’s a good thing that as humans we are smart enough to at least try and be more mindful about our attention 🙂

  2. Great article, thank you for sharing. Definitely something new to take away. And love the exercise as well, I love methods that include some writing 🙂

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