My Ideal Life is a visualization exercise I learned from Marie Kondo. In 2014, I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up to find the inspiration to continue my decluttering journey. Up until that point, I had decluttered year after year after year without much success. This book ended up changing my life.
The KonMari method made sense to me and her tips were certainly effective, but the most important part of my experience happened when I visualized my ideal life. I initially felt a ton of resistance to this exercise. It was difficult to admit to myself that there were aspects of my life that were making me deeply unhappy and that I desperately wanted to change. The process was visceral, painful, and eye-opening. I identified so many gaps between my current life and my ideal life. I felt overwhelmed and powerless at the time, but I knew at my core that I would never become my best self in my current life.
This exercise can provide you with clarity and a sense of purpose, not only in terms of decluttering, but also for any big change you want to make in your life. Before you start, please have a listen as I read an excerpt from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This clip provides some context around this exercise and contains an example of how much detail you should go into when visualizing your ideal life.
Step 1: Ask yourself, “What does my ideal life look like?” or “What is my ideal lifestyle?” Try to encapsulate that in one sentence. For example, when I completed this exercise on November 30, 2014, I encapsulated my ideal life as:
I want to life a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
Step 2: Visualize yourself living your ideal life and write out the details. Try to tune into exactly what it is you want in your very core and be as descriptive as you can. In my example, I ended up with two pargraphs describing exactly what a “healthy, balanced lifestyle” looked like to me. Interestingly, one of the components in these paragraphs was:
I want to have the right attitude to go to work and be a productive employee.
Step 3: Go deeper by asking yourself why. For each item you identified in your ideal life, ask yourself why you want that for yourself. Do this three to five times for each component of your ideal life. For example, under the component I shared above, I wrote:
Because I work for 8 hours a day and I don’t want to be unhappy for such a huge part of my life. Because I don’t want to be angry all the time. Because I don’t want to let my colleagues down. Because I feel good when I’ve had a productive day at work. Because work pays me well and I like to use the money to go on vacation and buy beautiful things.
You’ll get the most out of this exercise by being honest with yourself and digging deep. My life has changed so much since 2014. As we know, I ended up leaving my full-time job in 2018, so I never ended up developing “the right attitude to go to work and be a productive employee,” in that role anyway! But I managed to do better. Incrementally, bit by bit, I found that I not only moved towards my ideal life, but my idea of my ideal life started to evolve.
ANOTHER OPTION for you.
My Ideal Day is an exercise that involves visualizing or writing out answers to a series of questions. Be honest with yourself when imagining your ideal day, and try to answer the questions in as much detail as possible. Try not to let your responses be influenced by the current blockages in your life. We all have them. In this exercise, we want to visualize an ideal day that would bring us the most joy.
This exercise was inspired by Sahara Rose. I’ve made a bunch of changes to the questions and added a few of my own. I recommend going through this exercise by playing the audio clip below. I read the questions and leave some time between each question for you to visualize and write out your response. It’s interesting to revisit your responses in a year or two to see if you’ve moved closer to your ideal day. You can also answer these questions again, and perhaps you’ll find that the details of your ideal day have changed.
What time do you wake up?
How do you spend the first 2–3 hours of your day?
What time do you have breakfast and what do you eat?
Where do you live and what is your home like?
At what time of day do you leave your home and where do you go?
What time do you have lunch and what do you eat?
When do you exercise and what kind of exercise do you do?
What do you do for work and how many hours a day do you work?
Who are the people you see during the day?
What do you do for fun?
What hobbies do you have?
Are you working on any personal projects?
What time do you have dinner and what do you eat?
How do you spend the last 2–3 hours of your day?
What time do you go to bed and how many hours of sleep do you get?
What is your favourite part of the day?