Hello beautiful people!
Let’s get real about the ideal.
If you’re the type who can never seem to get through the yearning-wishing-regret stage of dreaming about your ideal life, it’s only because you’re not practiced enough at dreaming with intention. You may let yourself have fleeting thoughts of what you’d like to see happen, what you’d like to have, where you’d like to be… but have you ever sat down and gotten very focused on what your ideal day looks and feels like?
I have. And here’s the story of how that all went down the first time I really did it right.
Listen up!
Now, here’s what’s important to note: This isn’t the day you win the Oscar. This isn’t the day you get married. This isn’t the day they invite you back to your alma mater to give the commencement address. This is just another day… ideal-style. From the moment you wake up (perhaps without an alarm) and luxuriate in that extra couple of minutes in your spectacularly cozy bed all the way to the moment you turn in for the night (perhaps after a walk — holding the hand of a partner who always makes you laugh and think — along the coast just outside your door), with all the meals and meetings and phone calls and emails and moments spent with pets and workouts and shopping and travel from point A to point B (car service? Your sexy car? What kind? And how are you greeted when you approach the studio lot?), I want you to work through these details. Richly.
Today’s work: Do two exercises from Wishcraft by Barbara Sher. Do one paragraph on your ideal environment: What and who surrounds you — as you are — so that you are fully supported for your best life? Next, and most importantly, journal pages of your ideal day, start to finish. Put it in first person, present tense. A line from mine, first made in 1998 on this very cool faint green oddly-margined spiral notebook paper:
The windows are open and a cool breeze flows in off the ocean. Sun streams in and lights up the room, since I have so many windows. Slowly, I stretch, do a sun salutation by the bed, pull the covers up, grab my glass, and baby-talk the kitty as we leave the room together.
That’s what I want from you with this: specificity, rich details, a world of lush descriptors for a present-tense walk-through of your entire day, start to finish. Looking back at mine more than 20 years later, I see so much that describes my world currently (all the way down to the glass of water I take to bed and sip from in the night) — and remember, I was writing from the perspective of a grad student in Athens, casually dating, hanging with friends, not healthy in my relationship with food or drink or dealing with stress in general, having let my dream of an acting career totally live on a shelf (justifying that because I did have an agent in Atlanta and because I did book a lot of hand modeling and voiceover work that I was not totally out of the game), and with no real plan for “where I was headed.”
The reason the “aimlessness” of my actual life at that time is important to note is because I had resistance to doing “ideal day” work because I couldn’t imagine GETTING there; I could only see that dream life as a fantasy. Matters not. I did the work anyway. I had to start by making money no object and killing off everyone I knew, but that new imaginary setpoint allowed me to do the work of this journaling in a truly meaningful way!
And as I journaled about these details of my ideal day, I was meeting with “my team” (but I even wrote, parenthetically, “Are these agents? Accountants? My record label? Don’t know yet!”) because even though in my *general* thinking mind at the time, I was certain “the dream” was a successful acting career, as I got very specific about the details of the ideal day, start to finish, it became clear that I was in the industry but my role was not so well-defined as I’d imagined. I began to suspect that I may have to create it for myself. And at the time I was doing this journaling, I LET THAT BE OKAY.
The act of putting pen to paper, feeling the paper’s texture resist against the tip of the pen, the crossing out and rewriting words… all of this gave my brain time to write details that — when simply thought — were not as defined before.
When you eventually look back at today’s work, be prepared to be astounded by how much specificity you revealed to yourself that ultimately became a part of your life. And let what you write today surprise you! When you’re so sure it was going to be a certain kind of way and then you allow yourself to go on this journey with your imagination — without “fixing” anything about who you are to get there — you may find a path for yourself you never imagined.
Pay close attention when you’re finished writing to how you’re feeling. Honor this. Breathe. Do some tapping if you need to. Then head back to your ideal day and look at the WHAT, WHERE, and WHO of it all. Make separate lists of what’s indispensable, what’s desired but optional, and what’s a frill.
You’re going to begin working into your life those indispensables pretty much right away. Unapologetically. Because your ideal day is pretty damn close to today’s reality as soon as you are ready to lean into it. That’s the important question: How close are you to claiming bits and pieces of your ideal day? Daily?
Extra credit: Commit to doing a new, detailed paragraph of this type of journaling every day. The reinforcement of the specifics, the enhancements that will come over time, the joy of going through your everyday life looking for places to weave in what you call “ideal” while also looking for experiences to journal from the ideal POV will begin changing your life in truly magical ways.
Visual extra credit: Create a screensaver vision board. Sure, you can create an old-school poster-board-and-glue-stick version, and those are great, but consider something more active, portable, and ever-present in your life. I have a folder on my laptop filled with images that represent my ideal life. (Blissfully, over time the folder has gone from 40% images from others’ lives I’ve collected and saved to more like 4% of those. Because as more things happen in my life that dovetail with my ideal day, I’m using images from my life to represent reinforcement of what I want to experience. Because I have… so I know I can.)
Whenever my computer goes into sleep mode, the slideshow begins! I have a vision board that takes shape in front of my eyes while I’m on long phone calls or even watching TV and stop multitasking long enough that the screen goes into energy-saving mode. I also have a folder in my iPhone’s photo albums filled with these same images. These folders are labeled INTENTION.
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
