73. What does taking charge of my life look like?
So many newsletters and blogs offer science backed information on taking charge of your life. These are great, but what does taking charge actually look like.
Free subscribers get my insights into how I use affirmations in my daily routines . Paid subscribers get:
How I use ChatGPT to create a list of affirmations.
A set of affirmations for confidence and for the gem quartz.
Prompt ideas for customising your list of affirmations.
Taking charge of your life doesn’t always mean a dramatic overhaul—it often looks like small, consistent moments where you choose your mindset. Using affirmations is one way that I choose my pathways in life.
I’ve read countless articles about the science of affirmations, willpower, mindset. But what really matters to me is what it looks like in practice—how I use what I learn to steer my life when I could so easily let it drift.
I was feeling down about my goal progress early this year. I felt like I had pulled together a list of things I wanted but they weren’t going anywhere. I wanted to buy a laptop so I could easily deal with my pattern business while I was away from my desktop computer. This goal was leading to my goal of being able to work in exotic locations. It’s an OK goal but it didn’t seem very fulfilling.
I have had some experience with writing future identities. I have had a lot of experience setting goals and creating task lists. I had the idea that I should create a future identity full of lovely things about:
How I want to look.
How I want to feel.
How I see myself learning.
How I see myself having inspirational experiences.
How I see myself working with my aging body.
How I see myself in the local community and in the wider world.
How I see myself being productive.
I suddenly saw all my individual goals as pathways to being that future identity and it opened something in my mind that showed me that there were multiple pathways all leading to my future identity. I was giving myself permission to:
start something and change mid way.
start twenty things today and work on them all at once for weeks on end.
read three books at once.
journal all morning.
fail at something that I enjoyed having a go at.
write a newsletter about things I thought were important.
earn money and spend money any way I wanted to.
Affirmations
All my affirmations started to make sense. What seemed to be completely unrelated statements about my life were now all part of my bigger picture or my latest future identity.
Goals
All my goals started to make sense. All those crazy things I love to do and achieve are now pathways towards my bigger picture that is my future identity. My future identity doesn't include things like, I want to be a competent pianist. Working at becoming a pianist is just one of the many pathways I can take to be successful or joyful or mindful.
How did I get to this point in my life?
Affirmations and goal setting are practices that I take very seriously. I act on the science every day.
For the last month I have been saying my affirmations relating to my latest future identity. I have images that fit the statements and I flip through them saying the statement nearly every morning.
Each month I create a new list of gemstones with affirmations relating to a main theme. This month the theme is gems to make me feel grounded. I read the affirmations associated with the gems and I play with making some gemstone bracelets or earrings to fit the theme.
I have my project planner pages set up for June and the second half of each week has a place to write something in a box at the top of the page. I have been writing affirmations. This page is for next week.
There is a similar space on my time block planner pages.
Each month I have a page where I write my goals for the month then I do a second page where I make sure that my goals are creating pathways to my future identity by matching my goals to specific parts of my future identity statement.
This is how I create my ideal life. I am always thinking of ways to grow and improve. I don’t want to stay the same. I don’t want to follow the default pathway to a default future that someone else is trying to push onto me. I don’t want to take random pathways. That is not being spontaneous. That is being careless.
So when you read a newsletter that links saying affirmations to a more joyful and purposeful and creative life you can say to yourself that I can have that life by writing affirmations in my planner and saying them every morning, or I can have that life by finding and writing the affirmations that go with my favourite gemstone.
This is how I take charge of my life.
I’ve been doing that very deliberately for close on 10 years now and each new ‘present’ that I live in is better than the ‘past’ and not as good as the new ‘future’ I am dreaming of. Life is always getting better because I am practicing what I learn about taking charge of my life. I have taken the theory and turned it into action.
There aren’t many ways to write and say affirmations. You just write and say the affirmations. The hard part is doing it consistently. I have described several ways that I work affirmations into my everyday routines. It’s the ways that you include them in your life that you have to work out for yourself, but once you start looking for them you will see suggestions everywhere.
The science is out there.
I decided to act on it.
Cheers,
Val
In the following sections, I provide paid subscribers with:
How I use ChatGPT to create a list of affirmations.
A set of affirmations for self confidence and also for quartz.
Prompt ideas for customising your list of affirmations.
I don’t use AI to solve problems that I don’t know the answer to.
I use AI to create solutions that it would take me a long time to research or write up or perfect.
AI is perfect for making lists of affirmations.
AI is so real feeling! I feel like I have to provide a warning.
These are things that essentially you know the answers to but you just want a few more ideas. You decide what it is you want to know more about. If you have no idea what the answer should look like then you are giving up control of your decisions. Do not take advice from artificial intelligence. It is just a sophisticated tool.