Tips for Winning your Game of Life

We all start our New Year full of the hope that this year will be better than the one before. For some, it’s the year we are going to finally achieve a longed-for goal. Does that feeling last? Not always, as it’s so easy to slip back into old habits without realizing it.

Are you still focused on the goals you resolved to achieve on New Year’s Day? Have you taken any steps towards your dreams or have they stayed put in your imagination?

When it comes to resolutions and goal setting I have a pretty relaxed approach. I set my satnav of life with a couple of destinations, then I let life unfold, trusting that what I have done before and what I choose now will take me step by step to where I roughly want to be.

Of course, when you play the game of life, obstacles get in the way. So below, I have listed some simple tips on how to move through your emotional minefields and keep your positive energy and hope alive.

Do what you really want to do

Make sure your internal navigation system is set to the right destination.  Think about the destination really carefully before you plug it into your personal satnav. You are going to put a lot of thought, time and effort into what you want to achieve so make sure the foundations of your goals are solid.  Ask the following questions; do your goals have meaning for you, affirm your interests and values, or are you doing something to try to prove yourself?

Your internal pilot system will start working the minute you set the satnav in motion, so make sure, it is going in the right direction for you.

Positive energy turns into negative energy.

If you don’t use the energy of hope and well-being that you start the year with and transform it into something real and tangible, it turns sour and bad (negative energy). So, use your energy in a positive fashion, otherwise it will create chaotic feelings such as anxiety, fear, and hopelessness within you.

Positive energy feeds itself (so does negative energy).  

This tip is simple, the more you do towards achieving your goal, the happier and motivated you will feel and vice versa; the less you do the less connected to your goal and the more you will feel that your life is going nowhere.

Don’t delay

Delay taking action on your goals and you will get lost on your journey.  You will get lost in self-doubt.  The more you procrastinate, the bigger self-doubt will grow. You will cycle through endless versions of the questions, ‘shall I do this, or shan’t I, ‘is this a good move right now’,’ is this the right thing for me’, or ‘shall I do something else’. To keep hope and positive energy alive, don’t over analyse everything you do (unless you are making big financial commitments, or are involving other people, that’s something else), act according to your internal pilot system.  You can always change course if something doesn’t work out.

If you were driving a car, you wouldn’t stop and question the satnav at every roundabout or road turn. You would trust you typed in the right address and the satnav was working off the GPS system.

It’s the same for your life, plug in the right address and your body’s internal guidance system will take you there if you allow it.

If you experience a lot of doubt and resistance about what you are doing, you may not have the skills to do what you want to do, in which case, seek help. Otherwise, I would question the goal you have set for yourself.

So, don’t delay your goals, focus and stay in action to keep your hope and energy vibrant.

The closer you get to confront an emotional block, the more powerless you feel.

If you have an emotional blockage in place, then your energy will drop away, and tiredness will take over the closer you get to your goal.  Your hope and positive energy will just go flat.  The reason you feel more powerless the closer you get to your goal is that your emotional roadblock is heavily policed precisely to prevent you from taking these particular actions you want to take.

You are protecting a wounded part of yourself.  Take the steps you need to take to look after your wounded parts.  Seek help and learn new emotional skills.   In this way, you will change how you look at yourself and what is possible for you to achieve.

When energy drops away, reset your mind by keeping your eye focused on the goal and the action you need to take. In this way, you can and will break through old patterns of behaviour.

Emotional Paralysis is often the result of two sets of values fighting against each other.

If you are frightened of taking the next step, or you are not aware of any fear but you just don’t do anything, you may be suffering from emotional paralysis.

Emotional paralysis means your feelings prevent you from taking any action at all you get stuck and do nothing. The lack of action protects you emotionally from confronting a decision you have never faced.

Your emotional paralysis is confronting because you don’t know which path to take: the life you ‘should’ live or the life you want to live?

Your imagination tells you that if you go down one path you are committed to a whole series of activities and will lose your freedom. If you go down the path that you want to explore, you have freedom but lose the safety of your comfort zone, or you won’t get the material things you want.

To move through your emotional paralysis, you have to question your goal. Does your chosen destination reflect your values or are they are about looking good, fitting in, or being accepted. A life you feel you ‘should’ live is usually based on an external value system, your parents, peers, community or society not your own.

If your preferred life involves the positive aspects from both paths, how can you make this happen? Make the commitment to living life on your own terms.  If you need help establishing your own ground rules in life, seek help so that you can claim your place at the finish line of your goal.

Listen to yourself

Use your feelings to guide you towards the right path for you. Your internal voice and the images that come to mind are like the voice on the satnav that tells you to go right or left.  Develop your ability to listen to that internal communication system and it will guide you clearly towards the best actions for you. The internal communication system will do whatever it can to make you pay attention. Even if it shows the image of the person who irritates you the most, it might just be the person who takes the actions that you need to take.

Exercise

We all need exercise, so stop fighting it. Instead, use exercise and the endorphin system to your advantage and activate your hormonal feel good system to support your goals. Work out which time of the day is best for you to exercise.  I tend to go to the gym in the morning because for me, exercise is like a shower, it makes me feel clean.  If you prefer to clean up at the end of the day, then what exercise can you do that isn’t time-consuming and doesn’t take away from your family time?  Use your imagination, play a game of football, or shoot hoops with your children in the yard, it will be far more fun than 20 burpees in a gym. Besides which, it might just take care of another goal which is less screen time for you and the family.

Know when to stop

I personally find that it’s very easy to keep embellishing a goal to order to make it look pretty.  We all love perfection, but perfectionism is an energy killer. It moves the goal post, it stops any action, because the action has to look and sound a certain way.  For some people, not all, perfectionism hides emotional blockages or emotional paralysis. For others it is a habit formed from experience, these people do life and death jobs or find that their work is based in detail that simply has to be right or otherwise face failure. For instance, an engineer that makes a machine that is a couple of millimeters off is in danger of making a machine that grinds to a halt.

Whatever your approach is to a goal, if perfectionism is a problem for you then set a new goal which is to learn when enough is enough and draw the line and stick to a deadline. Remind yourself that changing your habit of perfectionism will not let your standards down.

Remember if you land up at the wrong destination, you can always reset your personal satnav based on what you learned.

Keep these tips in mind as you follow through on your goals for the year, and you will find not only the success you seek but keeping your hope and positive energy alive will inspire others.