Written by: Eszter Zsiray, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
How would your dream life look like if you had the time for everything you just want, even with small kids? Well, if I had lived my dream life, I would start every day with a short yoga sequence to remove the stiffness from my body after my 8 hours long beauty sleep, then I would have breakfast together with my family, prepare ourselves for the day ahead of us and then leave my son at the kindergarten and start working.
I would exercise twice or maybe three times a week, have my daily 10.000 steps (ideally by spending a couple of hours outside in the fresh air) and to take care of my mental wellbeing, I would meditate every day for at least 20 minutes. We would be on top of all necessary house chores so we would live in a moderately clean and tidy apartment and of course, we would be eating always healthy home-made food, even my son would love broccoli, ah, and we would be ticking every day the daily dozen of Dr Greger. Wouldn’t this life just be wonderful, of course by adding the family quality time, couple’s time, friend’s time and last but not least, the time for self-development and growth?
Of course, this all sounds fantastic, but I am a mum of a small kid, I work, I am just like all the other mums, I have no time for half of the things that I want, so there are days, weeks when I am not even close to my ideal life and everything seems to be a mess, but then there are some days, weeks when there is some control over the chaos, when I get surprisingly close to achieving the perfect life and that just feels quite amazing. I immediately see the difference in my mood those days, all that changes in my habits and the time invested into myself pays back, I am way more happy and patient with my family, I go with the flow and play with my son for 20 minutes the game called let’s get dressed in the morning – which is the biggest evidence that improving our time management is worth it.
What is the secret, how can you live the ideal life or at least, something quite close to it?
1. Perfect imperfection
First of all, I am consciously saying that the goal here is to live an almost perfect life, as that is just the reality. There will be always things that you can’t control, kids get sick, work volume gets extremely high, your in-laws come to visit – that is just life happening. The idea here is to create a structure that can be flexible and allows you to adapt to the actual needs, without feeling guilty that you can’t be always fully consistent with your plans.
Coaching tip: it is a very typical mistake to immediately take it as a failure when you don’t follow your plans for a day or a week, and just ignore all the work and the results that you already achieved and call your attempt a failure and sink back into the daily rush. Accept that there is no such thing as perfect, life is about planning, progressing and learning on the go from the challenges and obstacles.
2. The why
For every change, there is always a very important inner drive. Either we are so miserable in our current status that we are ready to do anything to change it, or we are so tempted by the possible rewards of the change that the image of that wonderful future can help us to take the leap of faith. So, what is your drive? Why would you like to live that dream life? What are the answers you are searching for? What is the deep inner motive that makes you wonder about that different lifestyle? Very often mums are simply exhausted, we are so busy with project-managing all our family, the house chores, we are continuously trying to perform well at work and the end of the day there is just no energy left for anything else, especially not for ourselves – but what if we could change that, what if you could be energised again, you could be that creative, funny and vibrant person you used to be?
Coaching tip: we often just want to use our willpower and be strong and determined to make a change, but add there the why-power to get results. Focus on why you want that dream life, what is it that you want to gain, and who you want to be.
3. Imagine it to create it!
To get closer to that dream life, let’s start with visualising it. What does it look like for you? What does it mean for you to be happy and satisfied? What do you need for that? Create a vision board about the desired outcome, and write it down in detail ‒ this is simply the way our subconscious mind works for us and makes things happen. Our conscious mind creates goals and visions, but it is the subconscious mind that makes them come true.
Coaching tip: let’s design that dream life! Get a paper or an Excel and design your perfect week. What does it look like? What time do you wake up, what activities do you have, and what do you do in the afternoons? What are the activities for you to gain energy? Which are the ones that drain your energy level, which you absolutely hate to do? Can you get rid of them? If you struggle to plan enough time for your energy-gaining activities, try to see what could be changed. What are the mandatory tasks, what are the tasks you could be flexible with, where could you ask for help, what could be outsourced to your partner/kid/neighbour/grandparents/etc.? There is always a way to improve your schedule, for example, a typical low-hanging fruit is to remove or reduce the dead time like scrolling through social media posts for an hour or watching 5 episodes of a new series (you could compromise and watch two instead).
You can save a lot of effort by preparing in advance for the obstacles and challenges that might come on the road, and creating a plan to overcome them. For example, if you plan to dedicate some time every week to study something new, it is good to find an accountability buddy to support you. A client of mine found it extremely difficult to stick with her plan and wake up early in the mornings to work on her project, so she dropped me a whatsup every morning for months and it helped her to crawl out of bed.
4. Handle the change as a project
You are an expert at work and you know how to work on immense projects, how to prioritise, and how to set measurable objectives. You know how to be responsible for your performance, and how to take ownership of your results. What if you take one step back and you handle your own life as a work project that needs improvement? What would be your observation after your first analysis, then what change would you present to the impacted stakeholders (husband, kids, in-laws, etc.), how would you communicate effectively, how would the implementation look like and finally, how would you track the progress? This might sound strange, but don’t be afraid to use all that knowledge you obtained at work in these past years to make your personal life better!
Coaching tip: what could you learn from your working self that you could apply to your own life? What is her strength, and how does she communicate at work professionally? The good thing at work is that we are hardly ever as much involved emotionally as we are at home, so what if you can be super professional when it is about a never-ending discussion with our family about the distribution of house chores?
5. Checkpoints and goals
Maybe it sounds exaggerated to define your objectives in a SMART way, but you can still take some time to think about the desired outcome. What sensation are you looking for, how will you know that you are on a good track, how will you consciously notice your successes and your wins? Who do you want to be in that dream life, what person will be looking back at you in the mirror?
Coaching tip: a dream life can’t be created without some level of consciousness. We are brain people, we tend to think and analyse too much, chasing always the actual next thing, and we hardly ever slow down. Still, to get peace and celebrate our successes, we need to stop from time to time and evaluate our lives ‒ what are the things we love and what would we improve? Find your own way to regularly stop and evaluate – it can be journaling, meditating, a good chat with your accountability partner or with your coach!
6. Actions speak louder than words
You can dream and plan the future for a long time, but you will get nowhere without taking action in the end. Go and do what you need to do: talk to your husband to take over the kids every Tuesday so that you can study, get an accountability partner and go for a run every Wednesday, or find a kid-friendly yoga place and recharge your batteries there. Whatever you want into your life, be as creative as you would be at work and find the way to make it happen.
Coaching tip: plan on the long term and don’t expect yourself to achieve everything overnight, focus on consistent work instead and make small improvements to your habits. You might be familiar with the idea of Atomic Habits – if you improve every day just a tiny little thing in your life, let’s say you have a 1 % improvement every day, after a year your life will be 37 times better! What could be your 1 % improvement for today?
Eszter Zsiray, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Eszter Zsiray is a Certified Life Coach, author, blogger, and creator of the program VELL©, supporting her clients on three continents to successfully transform their lives. With 17+ years of leadership experience, she is passionate about human potential and growth. Her research areas are ownership & responsibility, self-sabotaging behaviors, the positive impact of confidence and empowerment, a growth mindset, and healthy habits for mental and physical wellbeing. As a mother herself, she is committed to serving women and mums, and she created a special program for new mothers to adjust to new life challenges and a program for women entrepreneurs to shift into the proper mindset and to thrive in their professional and personal lives.
