Eps 001: Why you don’t have the life you want yet

And that is a scary thing, because it’s your life at the end of the day, and if you are leaving it up to the universe, or just anything that could happen to you, then it’s probably not necessarily gonna turn out the way that you want unless you take it by the horns and you design it in the way that you intend it to be and how you truly want to live your life.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why it’s up to you to visualise your ideal life daily
• The Perfect Day Exercise and why it works
• How to use this for yourself
• How to download the free Perfect Day Exercise Template

Transcript

So why don’t you have the life you want yet? It’s a pretty provocative question. I know, and maybe you were sitting there saying, Natalie, I already do. But this episode of the Life Pilot podcast, the first episode of many more to come is all about really tuning into do you actually have the life that you want?

And if not, how can we help you get it? Now on my journey as both an entrepreneur, a student of life, a mother, over the years, I have found that one of the things that I’ve always done, even since being a kid, has been really intentional about my life, and I’ve always filled it with things that I really want to do.

I have designed it with intention. I have filled it with people I love, experiences that excite me, things that challenge and stretch me, and I don’t know where I got this from, but just from a very young age, I figured that if I wanted the life that I wanted, I needed to be the person to design it and go after it.

The thing is, I’ve spoken to so many friends, clients over the years that really don’t actually know the first thing about what they want out of life. And if I ask them what their perfect day looks like or their ideal life, 95% of people can’t actually explain that to me with any clarity or specific.

And that is kind of a scary thing because it’s your life at the end of the day, and if you are leaving it up to the universe, or just anything that could happen to you, then it’s probably not necessarily gonna turn out the way that you want unless you take it by the horns and you design it in the way that you intend it to be and how you truly want to live your life.

So I appreciate that for a lot of people, this can be a daunting thing to do, like dream up your perfect life and then figure out and reverse engineer how to start living it today. But it is actually entirely possible and I have this beautiful exercise that I wanna share with you today to make sure that you can do this for yourself.

And it surprises me how few people have actually often spent the time do this. So I know a lot of people who will spend a whole year designing their dream home down to the exact specifications, like every single colour and fit out and material and the view and the  aspect, and every single piece of that house, even if it’s like three or 400 decisions they need to make.

Or they might design their perfect trip, right? The trip that they’ve always wanted to do around the world, and they will take months, if not a whole year or more, to plan out every single detail of their itinerary. So it kind of begs the question, why don’t we do that with our life? Sure, it’s a lot bigger.

There are a lot of aspects to it, but why don’t we pay the same attention to our lives as we do to some of these projects that excite us? Why can’t we treat our lifestyle design as a project that excites us and continually work on tweaking it and making it even better.

So this is where a really cool exercise comes in that I have been doing myself for over a decade called the Perfect Day Exercise.

And why I like it is it brings this big juicy vision that you may or may not have for your life yet, and which I will definitely be discussing in future episodes on the Life Pilot podcast. But it brings everything into just one thing that you can work on today.

The perfect day that if you could wake up tomorrow morning and be anywhere in the world with any people or person in the world doing whatever you loved and wanted, what would that day look like?

It just starts with you shutting your eyes and just allowing your imagination to take over for a minute. That if you could wake up anywhere tomorrow morning, where would you. Maybe you’d be in your own bed, in your own house. Maybe you love that.  Maybe you’d be on a Greek island or sailing on a yacht or somewhere absolutely awesome.

Like the Amazon rainforest and a tree house. I don’t know.  And would you be waking up early and doing some morning yoga?  Would you have fresh breakfast bought to you by a personal chef?

Would you go out and exercise with your dog or spend time with your family?  First thing, go for a swim, whatever it maybe. And why this exercise is so damn powerful is that what it gets you to do is you write out your dream perfect day, and this can actually just take 20 or 30 minutes.

Once you get the ideas flowing, you’ll be surprised what comes up for you.  So you write this out on a piece of paper or in a Word document, whatever floats your boat.  And at the end of this exercise, you get to look at it and go, I didn’t know that I actually wanted those things in my perfect day.

Remember, this isn’t a day you’re gonna have every single day of your life, but if you could have it 60- 70% of the time, how much more awesome would your life be?

And you detail it out really specifically how things smell, how things sound, how you feel, all those emotions, all those sensory experiences, as much as you can. Like do you wake up with the smell of frangipanis? Maybe you hate frangipanis and you love the smell of coffee, whatever it may be. Maybe there’s sunshine on your face.

Maybe you love the autumnal season and the chill in the air, whatever it may and what it shows you over the space of writing this out is what’s important to you more than anything else.   What actually would really light you up and make your life just amazing and dreamy and wonderful and you deserve it.

It also shows you what you might already have that is either closer to your fingertips than you ever thought, or reasonably easy to get. Let me give you an example.  I’ve had lots of my clients do this exercise and they would really love to wake up by the ocean, right? But maybe they live in the country or they live in a, very busy high dense city and being by the ocean just isn’t even a possibility. But could they go to the local swimming pool or could they go to a friend’s house who has an indoor swimming pool or something to that effect and get in a daily swim, or at least a couple of swims a week and get at least the feel of what you love about being next to the ocean.

Sure, you’re not getting the ocean breeze and all the salt and the sea air, but you are getting to dive into that silky water, which is one of my favourite experiences, and just experience that weightlessness of when you’re  swimming.

And the relaxation that comes from it, that is a good enough start. Maybe it’s that you would really love a  personal chef to make you breakfast every morning, but the start that you start putting into your everyday experience  is getting up 15-20 minutes earlier to prepare a beautiful breakfast for you, your loved one, your family, and just that act in itself is starting to put more of what is important to you into your day with very little real.

And the thing that becomes clearer and clearer, as I said, is what is really important to you? What are your priorities? What do you already have at your fingertips that you could just expand on? And how can you create more time and space to do the things that you love?

It becomes a pretty beautiful thing because once you start focusing on this and you see what is available to you, you actually will intentionally start putting more of those things into your day.

You’ll start scheduling it in. It’ll become a ritual, a habit. And before you. You might have 20 or 30% of your ideal perfect day happening for you, and then you get to expand a little bit bigger, and then maybe you will make a move so that you’re living closer to the ocean, or you actually have three months a year living on a boat.

The thing is that what you start to create, happening in your life then expands and more of these experiences become available to you. So the perfect day exercise is just a beautiful exercise to allow your imagination and creativity to go to town and figure out what is really, really important to you and what you’d love more of in your life.

And the minute you start introducing that, more of it shows up in your. Believe me, and I can talk about some examples in future episodes, especially when we’re talking about a big three year vision for your life. But the perfect day exercise is so simple, yet powerful, and it will start to manifest.

Manifest simply means to make happen sooner than you know it. So be careful what you wish for because you might wake up with way more of these things than you ever thought, and then you might go actually, Is what I’ve always wanted.

Or you might think, huh, this isn’t the thing that I thought I wanted. Maybe I’ll replace it with something else. And the next step of the perfect day exercise is to share it with somebody that you love, your friends, your family, even publicly. Because the minute you do that, you are calling into your world, all the people who can support and help you make it come true. So perhaps you’ve always wanted.

Write a book, and in your perfect day you have  journaling time for half an hour every day, and maybe there’s a friend of yours who wants to do the same thing  and you agree to meet up every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 9:00 AM to journal or write together, and suddenly you have a support system. You have somebody who’s.

On your side, who wants to see your book written as much as they want their book written. And you actually have accountability baked in, which is the key. And suddenly your perfect day includes you being a writer.  You might not have written the book yet, but you are in the actor writing every day.  The other thing that just putting it out there publicly is it gives you quite a lot of skin in the game, right?

So if you’re saying, this is what I’d love my perfect day to be and you put it out publicly, then people are gonna be like, Hey, how’s that perfect day going? You know, how are you working towards that? And they’ll want to see you win. They’ll want to see you succeed, and you will also not wanna let yourself down or them down in the process.

So it just gives you more skin in the game and makes you more, in many ways, committed to living your best life. There it is. The perfect day exercise is actually really simple, but hugely powerful. And normally people just haven’t even taken the time out to commit to doing this for themselves.

So my next little bonus of this episode is that I have a template for you that you can download for free and start on this.

It gives you prompts and it gives you examples of perfect days .It’ll just give you the impetus to start on this for yourself.  Then put aside 30 to 60 minutes over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or a mocktail.

Go to your favorite cafe or park wherever you wish to be in a space that’s gonna bring your senses to life and just let rip and have fun with it. And I would love for you to share with me either in the comments of this podcast, which you’ll find across at https://lifepilot.co/001, the first episode. Or on Instagram, @mylifepilot share a comment, DM me there and say, Natalie, I’d love to share with you my perfect day.

Or just even what the experience was like for you, what moments you had, a little bit of fear or hesitation or thought, I can’t possibly bring this into my life. Or can I, also just share how it felt for you to be able to finally just really clear the decks and say, this is what I think I’d love in my life.

And even if it feels so freaking far away for you right now, what can you actually embrace right now and bring in or invest in to have more of those magical moments in your day? So I so look forward to seeing what your perfect day exercise brings up for you, what comes out of it, and then of course, revisiting this episode and coming back to it in two or three or four months time and revisiting your perfect.

Is gonna be an important part of this because it will change and morph over time, and as you get more of those perfect moments in your life, you’ll need to add more in or take some stuff out. Simplicity is also the key to a beautiful life.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this. If you have, please subscribe to this podcast on any platform that you’re on, or give this a like or thumbs up, whatever way, or share it with a friend who you think could really do with creating more of that perfect life in their everyday life, starting.