Life can throw us curveballs and sometimes we lose momentum and fall off track from our goals. However, with some simple adjustments, you can get back in the driver’s seat of your life. Follow these 7 steps to get your life back on the path to happiness and success.
Outline
1. Respect Your Momentum – When you build positive momentum through wins and progress, don’t get complacent. Keep up what’s working to sustain growth.
2. Cut Out Toxic Friends – Evaluate your friendships. Let go of friends who enable negative habits or gossip. Distance yourself from bad influences.
3. Get Morning Sunlight – Even a little bit of morning sun is powerful. It boosts mood, energy, and health. Make it a non-negotiable daily habit.
4. Clean Your Desk – A clean, clutter-free workspace helps you feel in control and primed to do your best work. A quick tidy up sets the tone.
5. No Music Before 1pm – Protect your mornings. Music can influence mood and mindset, so opt for quiet reflection early in the day instead.
6. Unfollow Insta-Baddies – Limit mindless social media scrolling, especially sexualized content from strangers. Stay focused on your real-life goals.
7. Try Fasting – Occasional fasts challenge and reset your body while strengthening mental resilience. Treat it as a spiritual cleansing ritual.
1. Respect Your Wins to Maintain Momentum
Life can be like hiking up a steep mountain trail – it takes consistent, strenuous effort to reach to the summit. You slog uphill inch by inch. Your legs burn. You’re out breath. Just when you think you can’t take another step, you round a corner and are rewarded with an incredible view.
In that euphoric moment at the overlook, it’s easy to get complacent. You kick off your boots and relax, soaking in your success. But the thing is – you still have more climbing left to do. If you lounge there too long, your muscles get stiff. Your adrenaline fades. Inertia sets in. Suddenly you’ve lost all the momentum that carried you up this far to begin with.
Restarting once you’ve stopped is TOUGH. Your packs feels heavier. Your legs feel weaker. You struggle to get back the rhythm you had going.
This hiking analogy translates directly to making progress in business and life. When you’re hustling everyday, up early grinding away, you build powerful momentum. But the moment you pause that momentum, it can stall out fast. Resuming progress requires extra effort to fire up your momentum again.
I see this happen all the time with entrepreneurs. They work hard for a few weeks or months, land some big wins, start seeing real traction and results… And then they unplug.
They think they’ve “made it’ and can afford to slack off now. So they sleep in late. Stop doing the work. Get distracted by leisure. Only to look up and realize they’ve lost all headway and have to scramble to get back on track.
2. Prune Problem “Friends” Who Hold You Back
They say we are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time around. Our friends shape our mindsets, habits, behaviors, and results more than we realize. It’s important to carefully evaluate if the company you keep serves your growth and goals – or holds you back.
For example, ask yourself these questions about your core friend group:
- Do we enable each other’s bad habits like excessive partying, gossiping, gambling or isolating?
- If we didn’t share these vices, would we still consider each other close friends?
- Do they support, encourage and elevate me or do they triggers my fears, drag me down or sabotage my progress?
Your answers reveal a lot about the true nature of your closest bonds. Everyone outgrows friendships sometimes. Personal evolution means changing needs and priorities. Still, conscious pruning is often required so thriving new growth can emerge.
This doesn’t mean dramatic, hostile breakups necessarily. More gradual, compassionate, conscious untangling. Be straightforward rather than reactive. Uncouple slowly, not combust violently. Send off old friends with genuine warmth rooted in your positive memories together.
Then refocus time and energy you used to spend with problem friends on nurturing new, elevating connections instead. Seek out mentors, collaborators and motivators who inspire your days. The company you keep is critical, so choose it carefully.
3. Soak Up The Sun’s Powerful Rays
Rainbows wouldn’t exist without sunlight. Neither would spring flowers, lush forests, thriving vegetable gardens and productive farms across the globe. Our entire ecosystem relies on the sun’s vibrant rays.
Like plants, we humans also require regular sunlight for optimal health and performance. Light truly fuels life. The sun’s multifaceted effects include:
Mood enhancement – Sunshine boosts serotonin production which elevates mood and focus. This is why dreary winter days can drain joy and gloomy rainstorms depress us.
Vitamin D synthesis – The “sunshine vitamin” regulates over 1,000 bodily processes from bone health to immune function. Deficiencies correlate with depression, pain and illness.
Circadian rhythm alignment – Light and dark signals calibrate our 24 hour bio clock which guides wake/sleep cycles. Morning light stabilizes rhythms.
The takeaway is simple – strive to get some sunlight every single day, especially first thing when you rise. My ritual is a morning beach walk in swim trunks to soak up sun, sand, sea and gratitude. But even just 10 minutes on your patio with coffee or a quick midday round the block works wonders too.
If you live somewhere with long, extreme winters, invest in a sunlight therapy lamp. Use it upon waking and through the day to boost energy and mood until summer sun returns. Think of radiant rays as rocket fuel propelling you to your highest potential.
4. Clear Physical Clutter to Declutter Mental Space
External chaos sabotages internal calm. Physical mess manifests as mental mess.
There’s a prevailing productivity myth that certain creative geniuses thrive in cluttered offices overflowing with precariously tall stacks of paper, walls plastered with sticky notes, miscellaneous books and supplies strewn everywhere haphazardly. Perhaps your desk looks similar?
But neuroscience reveals our brains simply operate optimally with order not chaos. Surrounding mess distracts our focus, drains mental bandwidth and demotivates meaningful action.
So if you genuinely want to maximize your thinking and output, your first step is simply tidying your workspace. Here’s an easy formula:
- Remove everything non-essential off your desk surface.
- Sort remaining items into organized categories like technology, office supplies, tools etc.
- Maintain this clean, structured setup daily so chaos can’t creep back in.
This quick restore may seem trivial on the surface. But an organized habitat primes you for productivity, not inhibits it. Think of it like clearing weeds in a garden bed before planting – sweating the small stuff makes way for bigger blossoms later.
5. Shield Yourself with “Quiet Time”
In today’s unrelenting digital din, one of our most precious commodities is silence to hear our own thoughts. Yet we readily relinquish this rejuvenating gift without blinking, letting our devices commandeer our consciousness.
My plea is protect your mental space early in the day when willpower is vulnerable. Safeguard the fresh clarity and calm of dawn. Say no to input, persuasion or noise pollution first thing upon waking.
Music and podcasts often dominate morning routines. However, these hypnotic mediums imprint beliefs, anchor assumptions and manifest mindsets – subconsciously swaying you while your defenses are down. Don’t let someone else’s agenda influence your first thoughts.
Instead, greet each new day on your terms only. Sit quietly. Stretch consciously. Sip tea or water slowly. Journal privately. Ponder personal priorities undistracted for an hour or two if possible.
Establish this sacred ritual of independence. Resist outside voices or vehicles hijacking your attention, especially early when intake filters haven’t engaged. You alone determine the trajectory of your hours. And your morning mindset steers your whole day’s direction. So point it where YOU want to go, not where someone else prescribes.
6. Limit Social Media Scrolling
Another willpower vortex to avoid swirling down first thing is indulgent Instagram scrolling. Call it “harmless entertainment” but lusting after strangers sexualizes your psyche, sinks self-esteem and steals precious time.
You surely have bigger dreams to build in the real world than being a peeping Tom in someone else’s carefully curated, disconnected digital facade. So why give them that power over you?
Unfollow all the sexy swimsuit models, influencers and random eye candy clogging up your feed. Seek stimulation from real potential partners you actually know instead. Use Instagram primarily to expand your social circles, business contacts and positive connections.
Your feed’s content comprises your daily “digital diet” feeding your mind. Make sure it nourishes, not toxifies. Garbage-in-garbage-out still applies, even if the trash tastes tantalizing. Treat yourself better than some creeper addicted to chasing empty attention highs. You’re made for so much more. Go create it.
7. Purify Your Body and Soul Through Fasting
Ancient religions and cultures spanning generations extol the profound mind-body-soul benefits of ritual cleansing fasts. Yet somehow modern society now associates voluntary self-denial with extremism or eating disorders. What a sadly misguided assumption.
Reasonable bouts of scheduled abstinence offer profound boosts including:
Detoxification – Fasting triggers “cellular autophagy” allowing cells to eliminate waste debris and self-digest malfunctioning parts. This reduces systemic inflammation underlying chronic disease.
Insulin reset – Periodic complete digestive rest restores insulin sensitivity reversing “diabesity” driving obesity and diabetes epidemics today.
Immune regulation – Breaks from constant caloric overload gives overburdened organs a chance to recover normal functions. This enhances disease defenses long-term.
Willpower training – Practicing self-restraint strengthens impulse control circuitry combatting addictive drives towards junk food, drugs, social media, shopping and other dopamine traps..
Spiritual connection – By quieting our loud appetites and distractions even briefly, we open capacity to connect with subtle aspects of ourselves often overlooked and neglected.
Conclusion
Progress and happiness rely on vigilant daily upkeep through ups and downs. Apply these 7 basic life maintenance principles – protecting momentum, pruning problems, absorbing sunlight, organizing environments, shielding attention, limiting empty input and fasting for clarity.
Sweat the small stuff and revel as large gains follow. Now boldly get back out there and continue your exciting life journey with crisp restored vision and empowered purpose. The future awaits your wildest dreams…
