Re-Decorate Your LIFE!

Does your life sometimes feel like a storage room where everybody else has dumped their mess and it seems there's no room left for you? Maybe it's time to forget about the living room...and Re-Decorate Your LIFE!

Here are the 4 key factors to an effective system in Re-decorating your LIFE.

1. CLEAR IT: In your storage room of a life, you can't see past all the leftovers, daily junk, and misplaced energy to vision how it could be an efficiently functioning room that could bring you happiness. The clutter in your life - physical, mental, and emotional - is the biggest obstacle you will face when you start to Re-Decorate Your LIFE. But in order to have room for the new in your life, you will have to clean out the old. You wouldn't buy a new couch and just stick it right on top of the old one, would you?

2. DEFINE IT: After you've removed the clutter, it's time to decide on a purpose or function for the room. What's your vision for the perfect room? What are you trying to accomplish? How do you want it to function? Function is very important. You probably wouldn't want to put a bed in the middle of the kitchen, would you? Nor should you try to combine opposing things in your life. By choosing how you want your life to function, you can screen out the stuff that doesn't fit.

3. FIX IT: Keeping your vision firmly in mind, it's now time to begin to work on creating the room you want. It's important to make sure that the foundation issues in your life are on firm ground before you begin to add other things so that you don't topple over or get off track at the first sign of stress. Would you invest in new furniture for a room that had holes in the walls, a water leak in the ceiling, and worn out carpeting? Of course not; anything you added would be damaged by what's already there. So it is with your life. While it might look good for a while, the same old problems will creep back to the surface - damaging anything new you try to put in your life - until you fix it.

4. PLAN IT: Now that you have cleared out the old stuff, decided on your purpose, and have corrected any foundation issues, it's a good time to come up with a workable plan. If you have a large room, you probably can't afford to do it all at once. And if you have large goals, you will need to divide them down into smaller, more maneageable ones. What is most important for you to do right now if you want to (be a better parent, get a better education, write a book, find some balance, etc.)? Each resource must reinforce the others to create a system, a lifestyle, that supports what you want out of life.

I hope that you've seen that with a little bit of planning, a little bit of imagination, and some common sense strategies, you too can have the life you love. Whether you use the image of Re-Decorate Your LIFE, or find another one that works for you, it is important to remember that a simple and purposeful life is not an accident. Just like in building your dream home, it takes patience, vision, research, and planning to build your dream LIFE. nnn