Monday Inspiration: Work for a Lifestyle

Do you work for a lifestyle or a living? If you have a job or career, answer that question.

Do you work to pay your bills? Do you work to support your family, or you feel driven to succeed?

Or do you work to create or support the lifestyle you choose or desire?

We tend to work for a lot of reasons, but we forget to do so to create a desired lifestyle. That’s the most important reason to work.

We get stuck in the treadmill of needing to pay bills, support the family, and get ahead, and we forget why we began working in the first place. Why did you enter your particular career or job? You did so to create a life…a great life you love and enjoy and that allows you to live and express fully.

Maybe you don’t view work or your career as a means to create and support a lifestyle. Start seeing it that way.

Work Should Help You Live Fully Now

I know someone who sees work as simply a way to keep a roof over his head, food on the table, insurance coverage for his family, bills paid, and retirement income building. He also works so he can retire.

I suppose working toward retirement constitutes working toward a lifestyle. But he’ll only obtain that lifestyle when old and ready to retire. Most of his life will be spent working to enjoy life and a way of life one day.

That’s not a way to live…or work.

A Better Way to Work and Live

If you don’t want to fall into that trap, focus on how your work, your labor, your job can support the lifestyle you desire…now.

Do you have the lifestyle you want? Do you even know what that lifestyle would be if you could have it?

You can create the lifestyle you desire. And your work…or career…can help you do that.

Change your focus. Stop focusing on just paying the bills or surviving. Start focusing on creating the lifestyle you choose.

The mindset change alone will provide a better way for you to work and live.

4 Steps to Help You work for a Lifestyle

Here are four steps to help you work for a lifestyle.

1. Choose the lifestyle you want. Create a vision of the way of life you desire. Journal about, visualize, think about, feel, see yourself living this lifestyle. Develop a clear vision of the life you want to lead. Decide this is the life you want.

2. Realize you create everything in life. Focus on the lifestyle you want, not on the lifestyle you have. That doesn’t mean you should become all the more unhappy with your current situation. Just decide to create a new situation—a new lifestyle. Change your focus and attitude. If you approach your job as a survival mechanism, that’s what you create. But if you see it as a means to create the lifestyle you want and to sustain that lifestyle, that’s what you will create. Focus on the lifestyle you want and not on the one you don’t want.

3. Determine how you can create the lifestyle of your dreams. Brainstorm the things you could do to help you stop working to work and instead work to create your lifestyle. Do you need to work harder, longer, change jobs, save more money, decrease your expenses, or downsize? Make a list of possible actions, and then prioritize them by the ones you feel will achieve powerful results.

4. Take action. Change either happens to you or you create it. Take the actions you identify as necessary to change your situation. Doing something—changing something–helps you move toward your desired lifestyle now…not later. Do something different. Focus in a more positive way. Behave differently. Create new habits that help you develop and sustain your desired lifestyle. Instead of seeing your work as labor—something you have to do—see it as the means to the end—the end being living your dream life.

View your work or labor—even your career—as something you must do to create and sustain a life or lifestyle you adore. See it as the means to the end.

What’s the end? Living your dream lifestyle.

Do you work for a living or for a lifestyle?

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