Wake up Lady! : 3 Ways I Stopped Living on AutoPilot and Started Living on Purpose
Whether we realize it or not, most of us live our lives on autopilot. We’re creatures of habit, sleepwalking through life, making unconscious decisions that may or may not align with our values and goals.
One month ago, I heard a metaphorical alarm going off and realized that I was clearly operating on autopilot. My daughter Zoë had turned one years old a few months prior, and I was back in the groove of work, getting acclimated to my new normal of running from home to daycare to work and back. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have some big goal I was chasing: a degree I was pursuing, a wedding I was planning, or a baby I was preparing for. I’d fully settled into adulthood with my husband, daughter, dog, and home, and for some reason, my life felt like a series of mundane work and home tasks snitched together by time -- projects to manage, dinners to be made, baths to be given, and lunches to be packed.
My life had become a series of “how’s” with no appreciation or acknowledgement of the “why’s”. It was at that exact moment that I ran across an article on intentional living. Intentional living is a conscious and deliberate attempt to live your life according to your values and your beliefs. It’s rooted in being more purposeful in your words and actions and making thoughtful decisions based on who you want to be, how you want to be perceived, and what you want to be remembered for.
While intentional living as a broad philosophy makes sense, this concept didn’t truly hit home until I became a mommy. My time, energy, and money are more precious and limited now than ever before, which has forced me to be much more deliberate with my yeses and disciplined with my time. More importantly, Zoë’s a living, breathing manifestation of my legacy, which has forced me to grapple with the fundamental question, “what do I want to be my legacy?” “If I died tomorrow, what would I be remembered for?” While I’m not convinced that I’m currently living a life that aligns with or supports my answers, I’ve discovered three strategies that have helped me to change that, and allowed me to stop living by default and start living by design:
1) Define your core values
2) Identify your goals
3) Understand your current state
1) Define Your Core Values
As a management consultant, the first step in understanding whether any organization is successfully delivering on its mission and values is a review of its strategy. A business strategy is nothing more than a set of guiding principles that help make decisions and allocate resources. In the same vein, every boss mama has to define her personal values in an effort to more intentionally divvy up her time and make decisions about where she spends her energy. What matters most to you? What are you passionate about and what gives you energy?
Defining my personal values has not only been a major step in making decisions that are more deliberately grounded in my core beliefs; it’s also been a way for me to become more intentional about how I engage with my daughter, and what I pour into her.
2) Identify Your Goals
If we were to use the metaphor of GPS, your core values would be your ultimate destination and your ambitions or goals would be your turn-by-turn directions. I reflected on and wrote down goals I could complete over the next week, month, and six months that were directly in line with my values. Actionable, achievable goals by nature give us something to work toward and help us adapt our routines and habits to better deliver on our core values.
In defining my goals, I had to reflect on all the areas of life I juggle -- self care, Zoë’’s care and development, professional development, relationships, and finances -- and consider where I’m excelling and where I can improve. I then prioritized the areas that I felt were most important right now. Since time is finite, and there will come a day when Zoë is no longer wholly dependent on me and my husband Boysie, spending time intentionally nurturing her development and curiosity is an important goal for me right now. Whether it’s prioritizing working locally so I can drop her off at daycare each day and put her to bed each evening, or spending one Saturday a month trying to give her a new experience we can share together, goal setting has helped me to be just as intentional and efficient with my time outside of work as I am on my client projects.
3) Understand Your Current State
Our values and goals are accelerators for determining where we want to go and who we want to be, but they’re useless without some acknowledgement of where we currently are. A critical activity in writing any strategic plan is considering your current situation. How would you candidly describe your current conditions? Does the way you spend your time align with the values you identified as most important? What are your strengths or gifts, and how are you using those gifts to help yourself, serve others, and build a better life for you and your family? What are your weaknesses, and what small changes can you make to begin to improve upon them? Answering these questions honestly has helped me envision and begin to better position myself to create a life that I personally view as successful.
Going through this exercise monthly or even weekly and writing down the very personal answers to these questions has been key in helping me conceptualize what a life of intentionality looks like for me. In fact, evaluating life through the lens of my values, ambitions and current state is what brought me to blogging.
I realized that what gives me energy, and what drives me is setting others up for success -- my daughter, my husband, my colleagues, my former kindergarten students, my clients and myself. But I also noticed that I yearned to do this on a broader scale and in a way that helped me improve upon some of my personal weaknesses such as procrastination, apathy, laziness and inconsistency.
I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what it means to be a more purposeful mom and live a more intentional life, but I’m happy to be on the journey and excited that you’re here to accompany me and hold me accountable.
So, as I begin another rotation around the sun, I’d like to thank God sincerely for all my blessings, and claim that this year will be a year of discovery, fulfillment, joy, peace, and most importantly, purpose. Let’s make it a good one folks.
If you enjoyed this post and would like more information on being intentional with your motherhood, check out my posts on value and goal-based living, intentional self-care, childcare and development, and relationships.