5 Advanced Strategies for Achieving The Simple Life
5 Advanced Strategies for Achieving The Simple Life
A simple life is one that no longer accepts busy and harried as normal. Intentional living means removing unnecessary conflicts, excessive to-do items, and pointless distractions as a means of experiencing all life has to offer, too.
Have you begun shifting your priorities toward living a simple life? Do you desire to live with intention and need a bit more guidance?
If you Google “how to live slow” or some facsimile thereof, you will likely see the same strategies touted over and over again:
Turn your phone off.
Walk in nature.
Read.
If you are ready to take your commitment to the simple life to the next level, keep reading for 5 advanced intentional living strategies.
Why pursue a simple life?
We only have eighteen years with our children. Just eighteen summers, just eighteen birthdays. I have heard parents say time and time again, “Where does the time go?” and, “It seems like my child was born yesterday.”
Such statements convey lost time and missed opportunity.
Similarly, we only have 7, maybe if we are lucky 8 or 9 decades on this earth. How do we want to spend them?
We each have the unique opportunity to be the CEOs of our lives, yet few realize it. While entrepreneurs spend significant time crafting vision statements and listing core values for their businesses, we often find ourselves so caught up in the daily grind that we cannot visualize the big picture.
Then, as we age, we lament over lost time.
Instead of passively watching the years fly by, it is absolutely possible to be intentional about how you want to live.
5 advanced strategies for achieving the simple life:
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1. Don’t attend every fight you are invited to.
We are invited to dozens of fights every single day. Engaging in all of them will leave us battered, beaten, and oh so very tired.
Drama sucks away your positive life energy. Interpersonal conflicts generate significant inner anxiety, too.
Most of us struggle throughout the duration of out lives with caring too much in situations that don’t deserve our energy.
Have been invited to a fight? Can you simply not attend?
Making the intentional choice to disengage is a sign of strength.
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2. Work smarter, not harder.
Many of us get so caught up in the rhythm of day to day life that we forget to stop and ask ourselves whether we are expending our energy in the right ways.
You have likely internalized the belief that being “good” (a good parent, a good employee, or a good friend) means giving everything at all times. In our culture, intentionally working less can be a sign of weakness, failure, or even laziness.
Working smarter means identifying 2 to-do task that must get done, 2 tasks you would like to get done, and 2 tasks it would be nice to get done each and every day.
Most days, I consider reading with my daughters to be a must-do task.
I place other parenting tasks like playing dress up or coloring in the category of tasks I would like to get done.
Housework, like folding the laundry or organizing bookshelves, falls to the 3rd category – things I’d like to get done.
If after 3 or 4 days that laundry is piling up, I move it up to the first category and it becomes a must-do.
Instead of spending all day working, trim the fat on your daily to do list by prioritizing must-do tasks and relaxing your standards on the others.
Then, at the end of the day, measure your day’s results, not the time it took to achieve those results.
Similarly, avoid multitasking whenever possible. Although we all think we are amazing multitaskers, research says otherwise. In fact, juggling multiple tasks at once reduces productivity as much as 40 percent (source).
[Related: Work Smarter, Not Harder, When Tackling Household Chores.]
3. Make NO your default response.
When an invitation arrives in your mailbox, is Yes your go-to response?
Consider switching your default answer to No.
When we say yes to All. The. Things. we expend energy unnecessarily.
But when your default is No, you empower yourself to accept only the obligations, invitations, and opportunities that you deem worth your energy and your time.
If the thought of making No your default answer sounds unrealistic, look at your weekly schedule and take one thing off of it, every single week.
And in that space? Schedule in a slow activity you love.
4. Make eating a family affair.
When I was 18 I was fortunate to travel to Paris with my father. We dined like the Parisians do, and it was then I realized that Americans don’t do dinner justice.
In other countries, eating together is a cherished social activity that takes hours. Dinners are beautiful, too: How often does life grant us the opportunity to sit in close proximity to our loved ones, look them in the eyes, and connect without a screen as an intermediary?
Consider adopting the slow food mindset in your home as an alternative to the 21st Century hustle and bustle.
First, slow down all the tasks related to creating a family meal. Include the entire family in your preparations. (Don’t do all the work yourself!)
And as you prepare those family dinners? Ask for your child’s input. Cooking with your child teaches the importance of food; it encourages better dietary habits, too (source).
When the meal is over, don’t rush to get up. Linger long after that last bite is eaten, instead.
5. Stand and stare.
I took my daughters to the beach last week. It was a hot day and I was certain they would spend the entire day in the water. I was so surprised, then, to observe them spending hours – literally hours! – beside the rocks, watching barnacles and collecting snails and hermit crabs.
Standing and staring is about reveling in the things that bring you joy. Whereas children have mastered the art of getting lost in awe-inspiring sights and sounds, teenagers and adults tend to have lost the skill.
Slow down as a means of embracing a childlike mindset where everything is wondrous again.
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