Is Your Life on Track? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions to Be Sure
1. Freedom — How much choice do you have?
2. Wellbeing — Is your environment healthy?
3. Purpose — Do your days flow smoothly?
4. Perspective — Is your inbox organized?
5. Love — Do you enjoy your family?
It’s not as hard as you might think to stay on track and it’s not too much to take on. It’s asking yourself five essential questions on a regular basis and paying attention to your life.
Scoring well on this checklist means your life is more on track than you may think. And if your answers reveal that you are on track, try to notice signs from the Universe that confirm it.
Synchronicity is a series of little nudges and happy coincidences. It can validate your choices, confirm your instincts, and even reward your intentions.
Pretty painless, right? Let’s see what these questions reveal…
1. FREEDOM: How much choice do you have?
Are you stuck, overwhelmed, distracted, lost, wasting time, or not sure why you can’t make progress? Is your day not your own, beholden to your job, your responsibilities, the mistakes of your past? Is disruption a temporary obstacle or a major derailer? Do you feel trapped by your circumstances or empowered with the freedom to make decisions in your best interest?
Do you have a savings account, a retirement strategy, a college fund, an emergency fund? Do you have goals for yourself, as a family, for your marriage, for your career? Are you deeply invested in your current life, but also actively building the next stage? Do you have options?
Freedom isn’t unlimited choices. It’s choosing to live the way you desire in any given moment.
Can you opt in for an experience, opportunity, invite, or trip without months of planning or rearranging everything? Did you learn something today you are so excited about that you couldn’t help but share? Is your energy sustainable, is your attention focused, do you fill your days with activities that feel good? Do you have a healthy mix of productivity and joy for the sake of joy in your life?
2. WELLBEING: Is your environment healthy?
Do you feel inspired and safe in all your day-to-day environments? Are you at peace in your house and comfortable in your skin? Is your home your sanctuary, filled with happy mementos and comforts, and do you let your guard down and rest well there? Your body and your home should be as compelling, if not more so, than the rest of the world. Both should be a source of comfort and stimulation, a respite, and a soft landing.
In the same way that your body takes you where you want to go, your home waits to welcome you back again.
Do you feel confident and capable of navigating the world? Does your home rise to meet you when you return?
Do you work out? Do you eat well? Do you care for your body and your home? It’s ok to have a massive to-do list, it’s ok to be a work in progress, but if you can be where you are, in your body, and at home, and know you have created a healthy clean environment, you have a great foundation for wellbeing.
3. PURPOSE: Do your days flow smoothly?
Observe if your daily systems (routines, habits, traditions, and processes) are working for you, your health, and your family. Personal systems aren’t about monotony and they aren’t about control. They are about facilitation and potential, ease and expectation, living your purpose.
If your daily systems are outdated, insufficient, ineffective or irrelevant, it’s time to course correct or upgrade. If you don’t wake up rested feeling eager anticipation for your day, skip digital time in the morning in exchange for soul time (family time, outdoor time, fitness time) first thing.
Do you intermix in-the-zone work with brain breaks and social time? Or are much of your days filled with struggle and the grind? Do you find yourself caught off guard or overwhelmed by deadlines, appointments, and responsibilities or did you anticipate the implications? Did you do something yesterday, do something today, that will benefit your future self? Do you have time, energy, and resources every day to do something that feels good and moves you forward? Do your days feel effortlessly motivating and rewarding?
Flow isn’t about comfort. It’s about freeing up time and energy for purpose.
If you don’t feel a certain fluidity to your days, if you’re stuck or always playing catch up, it’s time to reevaluate. Don’t beat yourself up, just take care of it before you get stuck or inadvertently build momentum in the wrong direction.
4. PERSPECTIVE: Is your inbox organized?
Having an organized inbox isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it is representative of what information you are consuming and how you are processing it. If it’s full of inspiring emails that you can’t wait to read, that’s great. If it’s overflowing with emails that you ignore, delete, dread, postpone, or even wonder how they got in your inbox in the first place, that’s not so great.
Whether you have a traditional job, work from home, don’t work, are a student, or none-of-the-above, your inbox is a constant reminder of your reality and what it contains shapes your perspective. If your inbox doesn’t reflect who you are, adjust.
Why are you subscribing to newsletters that don’t resonate? Why are you notified about events or topics you don’t care about? Why are you spending time and mental power on brands, products, and issues that don’t mean anything to you? Choose what influences you.
And if when you hear the ding or see the alert, you run for cover, pare down subscriptions, turn off notifications, set boundaries, and create a system for managing your inbox that is productive and effective.
Choose to feed your brain meaningful, relevant, empowering content and put your attention where it will serve you.
Your inbox is one thing you can fully control. Revel in that power. You run it, so run it in a way that works for you.
5. LOVE: Do you enjoy your family?
Notice I didn’t ask if they are they well taken care of. Quality family time is about showing up. Providing for them is essential but showing up goes beyond meeting their needs. Does your family regularly tell you how much you mean to them and do you feel excited, grateful, affectionate, tender, and proud when you see them? Or are all of you going through the motions unconsciously or out of obligation?
It’s not only that life moves quickly, and you might miss meaningful moments with your favorite people, it’s that if you don’t really see each other, you could miss out on opportunities to create intimacy, or celebrate each other’s existence in a deeply personal way that only family can do.
Be, really be, with those you love. Be with them in a variety of locations and situations and moods. Be an example for them, share your ideas, life lessons, and joys. Ask them important questions, wonder together, and savor the delights of exploring the world as a family. Give them your time and your emotional commitment and feel yourself grow together.
Life is hard and we all get overwhelmed by the hectic, plugged in, “always on” pace of it. Because of the lack of space and time for ourselves, our families are often get shortchanged because we assume they know how much they mean to us or because we know they’ll forgive us. But family time is truly the most important thing, so why not prioritize it at the top of the list?
If you say it’s temporary, or not reflective of your values, know that how you spend your days is how you spend your life, and every action, particularly this one, sets a tone. Instead, be present. Celebrate milestones, create traditions, be kind, be generous, and in your family, find solace, belonging, renewal, motivation, inspiration, joy, love, and so much more. Tell and show your family you love them every single chance you get.
Let being together be enough and everything else be additive.
Managing a family, a relationship, and a career, while cultivating good health, investing in your future, and making wise decisions about your life can be complicated, often requiring an overwhelming amount of choices, decisions, and processes. That’s why when we have a win, it feels so good.
It doesn’t even have to be a big win to be motivating. And, if we stack wins in many areas, we can build momentum, and momentum leads to sustainably feeling good, getting what we want, and living a good life.
For better or worse, whichever direction we are headed, it snowballs. Use these questions to stay on track and ensure you are “snowballing” in the right direction.
