Is The Life You Have Good Enough?

July 28, 2017,  Exercise, Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Limiting Feelings, Limiting Beliefs and Limiting Behaviours

There are various ways to relieve yourself from a script and a game your mind is used to playing. Many of these are therapeutic which includes many different techniques and practices. In the USA there are about 450 registered associations that offer different help for limiting beliefs, behaviours, and feelings. These three combine to create the scripts we live our lives by.

“Limiting” here means something that holds you back, restricting you from living a truly happy life. It refers to an old way of being that is no longer useful in your life. Feelings, beliefs, and behaviours based on negative past experiences can all be limiting if held onto.

In therapy, you get an opportunity to review those limitations and make changes so that you can live your life as you now want and deserve it to be.

What Do You Want From Your Life?

All the modalities used in a therapeutic setting, ask you to really look deep into yourself to where all the limitations of your life are.

Most therapies begin by asking you to think about what you want from your life as an individual—and as a couple if you are in a relationship.

It starts by separating all the aspects of your life into different parts. Relationships; you with your family of origin, you with your partner, you with your career and your relationships with colleagues, health and exercise, finances, personal development and your spiritual path.

Set Your Goals

You can use one technique that will visually help you to better organize and describe your wants about the different parts of your life. For each of the aspects of your life, as mentioned above, you can rate each of the parts of your life with a number from 0 to 10 in order to describe the level of satisfaction it brings to you: 0 means no satisfaction with that part of your life while a 10 is extremely satisfied with that part of your life.

When you do this exercise think in terms of real satisfaction, not in terms of success.

For example, you may not have the newest car but you love your car because of the colour, of the memories you have in it, you feel familiar with it and it satisfies you to drive it. You have the money to buy a new car but choose not to. Then the score you would give your financial situation would fairly likely be a 10.

Same with your relationship with your partner – sometimes we want things from our partners that they aren’t able to give us because of the emotional, physical and intellectual capacity in order to fulfil our expectations. But we still get something else that satisfies us so the score may also still be 10.

On the other hand, there are parts of our lives we don’t give enough time and energy, eg our health or personal development, so their rate may be lower.

After you have completed this organization and analysis of your current life, you can then describe how all the zones would look like if all of them were rated at a 10. You can use whatever format works for you in order for you to be able to define what that would look like most clearly – it can be a painting, a song, a sculpture, a collage of magazine cuttings, photographs or anything else you think will fit.

Once you have a picture of how you would like your life to look, write out the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that would match that picture. For example, for me to have a 10 for my health I would be eating the right foods, exercising several times a week and feeling excited about being alive and greeting each new day.

If you are doing this for you as a couple also consider what would be the individual qualities, interactions, and communication patterns you would like to in this relationship. These may actually become your guidelines as to how you agree to be with each other. Once you have your perfect life clear and represented in this physical way, you can place it somewhere visible in order to see it frequently. Then do whatever you need to make it real; every day. Live it out fully for yourself and for each other. You might even have to make some tradeoffs and tough choices on the way. It might not be easy but that’s OK.

To the wonder of you,

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