Have you ever felt tempted to hop on a plane to run away from everything and everyone you know?

You dream of running away because the mental grind of checking off endless to-do-lists, dealing with conflicts and playing by someone else’s rules every single day is wearing you down.

You feel like life is happening to you, not for you.

Up until now, you’ve been following the script that other people have written for you: Go to school, hit those grades, work hard, get married, have kids, keep up appearances, retire at 65 … and then what?

From the outside, you look like you have it all together.

Except that instead of feeling whole, happy and accomplished, you feel empty, exhausted and traumatised.

These days, the only thing that sparks joy in you is flying off to a place where nobody knows who you are and everything is new, so you’ve got plane tickets booked every chance you get.

But deep inside, a little voice is asking: Is this all there is to life?

Playing the game of life to someone else’s rules only to feel the need to escape from it every couple of months?

The cold hard truth is that it’s easier (and less intimidating) to walk the well-beaten path than to carve out your own, which is why so many of us take it.

While there’s nothing wrong with it — after all, much of the world needs a well-oiled machine that runs like clockwork to function in the ways we’re used to — years to decades of rinse and repeat by the book can leave you feeling unfulfilled and trapped.

You’re tired of tolerating, appeasing, overlooking, pleasing and repressing.

So how do you want and love the life you have without leaving your authentic self behind?

After decades of ‘going with the flow’, what’s finally clicking for me is this: Gradually shifting the decisions I make to align with my values.

If the idea of being led by what’s important to you feels foreign, here’s what you need to know:

1. You’re not alone. Most of us have been so conditioned to follow the rule book society’s written for us that closing it and writing our own feels strange.

2. It’s about damn time! Life is short, and the one shot you’ve got is getting shorter as you read this.

3. It will take time. You’ve spent decades stifling your needs and wants. Rediscovering and reviving them isn’t going to happen in a day, week or month.

4. It will be uncomfortable. You’ll be swimming upstream while everyone else is headed in the opposite direction. This doesn’t make your journey any less important (or right) than theirs.

5. It’s OK to figure it out as you go. You don’t have to know where you’re going to start taking your first steps forward. What’s important is that you keep moving towards what feels right for you.

Another important detail you need to know is this: Making that value-driven shift is often about the small, every day things.

Things like saying “no” instead of “yes”, letting the wrong people fall away so the right ones have more space in your life, spending your money more mindfully so you have a richer present and future, or simply choosing to remove yourself from a toxic situation that’s been draining your health, wealth or happiness.

At first, it won’t feel good, or even right. You might feel a bit (or a lot) of shame creep in.

You’ll disappoint certain people and enrage others.

Some will push back, guilt-trip or gaslight you, or even say nasty things because you’re finally putting YOU first.

Keep going anyway.

Your wants and needs are no longer up for debate.

Bit by bit, life will start to feel calmer, lighter and less anxiety-ridden.

And when the time comes for you to plan your next vacation, you’ll be doing it for fun, adventure and exploration, not to escape.

✨ Slow down, Forrest, slow down

It’s in our nature to want to run away from pain or discomfort, and towards what feels good.

But if you’re anything like me, you’ll realise that constantly caving into the need to escape just isn’t something you want to get used to.

And we often forget that whatever it is we’re running away from temporarily is what we’ll have to come back to (eventually) anyway.

This is when it hits you that there’s something deeper about how you’re living that needs to change.

What you need is a course correction or redirection so that the life you’re living will finally be a reflection of who you are and who you want to become.

If you’re just getting into the process of reassessing, realigning and redesigning your life, you might find this step-by-step guide that encapsulates the biggest lessons I’ve learned so far on my own (and still on-going) course-correcting journey, useful.

Wishing you all the good things in life,
-Michele

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