Dreamline Diary: Your Life. Your Way

Questioning the Rules of Life?
What path will you take?

Questioning the Rules of Life

The rules of society suck.

Laws are good, I like a bit of peace and order in my world, but unwritten rules suck. And people are questioning the rules of life. Let’s see if any of these sound familiar:

Do the best you can at school so you can get a good job

Don’t fail – ever

Don’t make the same mistakes your parents did

Stay in your good, secure 9-5 job no matter what

Invest for the future

Take a job in line with your intelligence

You can’t travel long term with kids

You have to have a big fancy house with the white picket fence

You need to have a husband/wife to be happy

What we can achieve is very limited, so it is foolish to have bigger expectations that the ‘normal’ ones

So often people arrive at a certain point in their life and wonder how the hell they ever got there. The answer is a very simple one – every choice you have ever made has lead you to arrive at this point. What needs to be questioned is the influences behind the choices. Society, parents, friends and media all have an unwritten ‘say’ in how we live our life.

As a child, it is hard to be in a position to stand up for yourself. We are, after all, taught to respect our elders within the context of the culture we have grown up in. When we are given messages such as ‘be seen and not heard’ and ‘don’t speak unless you are spoken to’, it becomes difficult to express your true self. And so we go along with the influences of society and our caregivers.

It would be great to be in a position where we are completely happy and fulfilled. Many people are, but quite a few more are still on the journey to that point. If you are starting to work on your dream life, then it is time to be questioning the rules of life.

Think deeply about the expectations from others that shaped your life to the point where it is now. A great place to start is to remove the word should from your vocabulary and your internal dialogue. Re-write the rules of your life that don’t resonate with you, and start living on your terms. There is no doubt that some of the old rules will be OK for you. But the rules that don’t fit your idea of your dream life need to be erased and your own rules added. Then you have every chance to live your life your way.

Setting goals and objectives seems like a logical thing to do at this time of year. The new year gives us a renewed sense of hope and inspiration and if the past year hasn’t been one of your best, then it feels like a new start. There are plenty of ways to tackle setting important goals. Here are a few ideas:

• Search for tips for setting goals
• Use a setting goals template or setting goals worksheet
• Read a heap of quotes on setting goals and find your inspiration
• Find a good goal setting website and get some cool ideas
• Use a SMART goal template or…

Or you can set Dreamlines! This is something my husband and I did just after Christmas. You have seen the rough dreamline that I posted in Making Excuses Rather than Decisions. So far, my progress with this rough outline is:

6 Months

HAVE: I have bought my laptop, but at this moment, I can’t afford a phone too. The laptop was a higher priority though my current phone has a nasty habit of freezing and turning itself off after I updated it. Not happy

DO:  No cute baby orangutan yet

BE: A business owner not employee. I have now made the firm decision to cease paid employment as of 1 March and give my scrapbooking business a fair crack. Which leads me to….

12 Months

BE: Well, I am the owner of an online business, I just haven’t launched, therefore I am not currently making money

DO: Live overseas for a minimum 3 month period. My new year’s resolution, if there is such a thing, was to book a one way ticket and I have in fact done that. Yippee!!

HAVE: Half my mortgage paid off. This one will depend entirely on income. If the business doesn’t make enough mone in 6 months time, I will obviously consider a real job again, if and only if my basic living expenses are not being met. If they are and the minimum repayments are being made of the mortgage, I will focus on business not employment.

Here are my specific Dreamlines for the next 6 and 12 months.

6 Months

HAVE:

-Galaxy Note 2 Phone. Cost per day $4.12 or $750 in total. That by the way is the cost of a return ticket somewhere… scary.

DO: 

- Learn stand up paddle boarding. Cost about $60 to hire a board or free if I go to a demonstration day. Daily cost $0.33

- Snorkel on Phi Phi Island again and stay overnight. Cost about $150? Daily cost $0.83

BE:

- Able to speak Thai enough to get me by and have a bit of a conversation with the locals

- Confident and fast scrapbooker so I can make products for my business easily rather than struggling like I currently do.

12 Months

BE:

- Financially self sufficient. To me this means that my bills and living expenses are paid through my business not employment. Cost $0. Just lots of hard work

DO:

- I don’t have any particular things I want to do yet. The next six months will be exciting enough!

HAVE:

- Business generating $1000 per week. This is well above my current wage.

- Self Sufficient House. Whilst I still have to pay access to utilities etc, I would like to add to our solar panels so we have no electricity bill and also add solar hot water along with water tanks to support our use. We would still have to pay water access, but not excess usage. We aim to do this through Income Tax Returns at the end of financial year. Total cost $5000. Daily cost $13.70 per day.

So the total income per day that I need to generate on top of my regular expenses is $18.98. Not much actually. I would love it if that income came from business obviously. Rather than doing any of those general goal setting things that I mentioned before (Search for tips for setting goals, Use a setting goals template or setting goals worksheet, Read a heap of quotes on setting goals and find your inspiration, Find a good goal setting website and get some cool ideas or use a SMART goal template), you can set Dreamlines and clearly see exactly what the cost of your dreams really is.

Treat your life like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Set Dreamlines that excite and inspire you and then work hard at making them happen. So, have you set your dreamlines yet? If you have great! You can comment below and don’t forget you can share them with our community here. If you haven’t, then there is not better time than now.

You have had a huge week and you have nothing left in the tank. You are exhausted. The sky doesn’t look blue anymore and the grass just isn’t green. Your life just doesn’t feel quite right. So what do you do and where do you start? Check out the 7 warning signs that your life is off track below, and get cracking on the solutions. You will be much happier and far more productive.

“Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries.”

SIGN #1

You are at the end of the week and you have nothing exciting to look forward. Solution: Look to what drives you to get through the working week. More to the point think of all the things that you dream about while you are at work and start adding them into the weekend. Make a deliberate plan for fun and enjoyment and stick to it.

SIGN #2

You haven’t learnt anything new in the past year. Solution: Take a course. Learn to cook something or make something you have never made before. Learn a new computer skill or language. Just pick something that sparks your interest when you see it and book yourself in.

SIGN #3

You are starting to feel just a little flat. Solution: Book yourself a mini break. A two day weekend to rejuvenate yourself. It can be five stars or no star. From uber cool hotels to beachside or mountain camping. Pick something that will make you feel awesome again.

SIGN #4

You are really unhappy with everything. Work sucks, home sucks, your weekends are boring, you don’t even enjoy nice food anymore – heaven forbid! Solution: Take a long hard look at whether you are living the life you want. Do you need a major change? A relocation? A new job? Write down what your version of an inspired life would be. We can’t all be hammock testers, in fact after a day or so, you would be bored. So what would excite you in life? Find a nice quiet spot and write it down, then start making changes so you are living the life you truly want.

SIGN #5

You are making everyone else’s dreams come true and forgetting about your own. Solution: This is especially common with parents, and understandable. But like any good relationship, the more your value yourself and ensure that you are happy and recharged, the better you will be within your relationships and the more energy you can give to them. Be kind and do something just for you. A little time out to look after you is a good thing.

SIGN #6

You feel stuck. Solution: Feeling trapped or stuck can be one of the hardest things to overcome. Identify exactly what is making you feel stuck and decide what you need to do to move forward. What will take you past this point? This warning sign takes balls to get beyond because it is the sign that can mean the biggest changes in your life are coming up. Look for the future you want, and make the decisions you need to and get yourself unstuck.

SIGN #7

You haven’t ticked anything off your bucket list for ages. Solution: Find your bucket list, or if you don’t have one, start writing one NOW. Then find something on there that you can do this weekend. Not in a month. But this weekend. Nike baby, JUST DO IT. Get the details sorted and make it happen.

Take a long hard look at every aspect of your life. You might need a mini overhaul, or a major reconstruction could be on the cards. Whatever it is, you deserve to design the life you want. You all have responsibilities, but your biggest responsibility is to make sure that if you died tomorrow, you could safely say that you made your life your own.

Writing down your Dreamlines, Goals and Bucket List is the key to getting what you want. I have previously told you the story about finding my Dreamline list and having done everything on it. Now for goals and lists. Or more importantly, writing it down.

When hubby and I took our last mini retirement, we found out while we were overseas that our tenants had kind of trashed our house. There was a decent amount of damage to floors, some creative art on the walls etc etc. The worst was the water damage to our kitchen. We had already decided to renovate it in a few years time when we had the money to pay for it, but this was brought forward very quickly. Life throws the bad at you sometimes, but along with that also comes the good.

We had plenty of time for contemplation at the end of this particular trip. For one, we were traveling slowly, and for seconds, we were caught in a coup in Thailand. As the red shirt riots in Bangkok went nuts and came to a brutal end, people started heading home to Chiang Mai. Holed up in a delightful guesthouse Elliebum whilst Chang Mai was under full curfew, we wrote a list of everything we wanted in our new kitchen, all whilst enjoying the best coffee in Chiang Mai from our host Gade. Both of us have a love of cooking and had some cracking ideas to make a practical and functional workspace. There was also the added pleasure of ripping out our sexy 80s pink kitchen. In Phuket, we spent an afternoon looking at kitchen showrooms for a modern Asian perspective on things. Wow. More ideas were written down and the list ended up being just over 2 pages long.

Two years down the track I found that list whilst looking for a delicious recipe from Elliebum. I read it out to dear hubby and we were amazed. There was one thing missing from the list – a screw on bottle opener like the cool ones in hotels throughout Asia. We had searched everywhere but couldn’t find one. Everything else we had written down was in our kitchen. We hadn’t even taken the list to the kitchen supplier.

Our dream kitchen had cemented itself in our world. BTW, that is why “Have no mortgage and stay out of debt” is on the Bucket List, the kitchen and house renovation is our mortgage. It is worth it though, cooking in our kitchen is a dream.

What have you written down that has amazed you when you found it later on?

Daily Blessings for Today:

Friends who understand how I tick and accept me for who I am

Current Business Goal: 

To make $5500 over the next 12 months to cover one year’s worth of expenses, including mortgage payments on our home if we aren’t living in it.

My next project is:

Redesigning the background and logo for www.digitalscrapbookingdestination.com and set up email for this site

The next steps are:

• Decide on a color scheme
• Create a background
• Make matching embellishments for the logo/header area
• Add email into phone and ipad

Dreamline linked to project:

Live Overseas

Total Daily Income Required:

$15 per day

Things to do Daily:

• Make two healthy meals in one day
• Exercise including a beach walk

Calls I need to make:

Book beautician to un-bushy eyebrows…