How would you create a life you don’t need a vacation from?
Vacations are wonderful, you relax you enjoy life and you may catch yourself dreaming that they never ended. Especially when you begin to remember that you’ll soon be at a job you’re not so excited about…
So what if your vacations never ended?
Would you sip cocktail and lay on the beach all day until the end of time?
Well, that might not be such a great idea. You might get bored and need a vacation from that life.
If you don’t believe me ask a multi-gazillionaire why they still work everyday.
That’s enlightening…
This doesn’t mean however that building a life you don’t need a vacation from is a pipe-dream and that you are doomed to hate Mondays forever.
It may just mean that there is more to creating a life you don’t need a vacation from.
Let’s explore that!
Ever dream that the vacations never ended? Here's the ultimate guide on how to create a life you don't need a vacation from. #passion #purpose #career Click To Tweet 
Catching that vacation spirit
To create a life you don’t need a vacation from the first step is to figure out what makes vacations so great.
Is it:
- The cocktails, the travels, the social activities?
- Strolling on the beach?
- Hiking in the mountains?
- Discovering new countries?
- Breaking your routine?
- The freedom?
- Having more time?
- Being less stressed?
- More excitement?
- Slowing down?
Well, not so fast!
What makes a great vacation is a personal thing
The truth is what makes a great vacation is a personal thing.
The 5-year old version of you may have enjoyed playing hide-and-seek all day for weeks on end.
That’ll probably won’t cut it for you these days…
While a bored stay-at-home mum may get a kick out of a week full of fun social outings, a stressed-out executive would probably look forward to something more soothing like a self-care retreat.
The point is there’s no hard-and-fast rule to what makes a great vacation.
A great vacation is the vacation that supports you at the point where you are in your life: it provides you with fun, nourishment, relaxation or whatever you need to feel refreshed and energized.
Going by this rule then, building a life you don’t need a vacation from simply means building a life that keeps you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually engaged, nourished: a life that evolves as you grow and your needs change.
How would you create a life you don’t need a vacation from?
The contrast game
This is powerful process that I have learned from Michael Losier. I have tweaked it and added to it over the years to use in my work, but the gist of it remains the same.
This process comes from the observation that we generally struggle to articulate what we want with great precision. While we probably have an idea of what it is, it’s often vague and generic.
However if we were to be asked what’s bothering us, it would be a lot easier to identify a very intricate list of complaints. (Of course, some people are wired to be more positive than others but this tends to work across the board.
Why?
That’s because we are generally more aware of what causes us pain: it’s easier for us to frame.
what this looks like
Here’s an illustration:
On a normal day, you probably don’t give too much thought to your teeth besides from the usual brushing and flossing. It would probably be hard to describe the feeling of a healthy mouth in a multitude of details.
However, if pain were to develop somewhere in your mouth you would be able to provide force details describing this pain.
It would be more vivid.
Understanding what you dislike will help you create a life you don't need a vacation from. Click To TweetUndertanding this, the idea behind this process is to identify all the things that you dislike to help you define with extreme precision what you would like instead
So just dive in there and look at what’s not working in your life.
And once you have that down, figure out what you’d like instead.
- You hate commuting, it feels like a useless waste of time?
This means that your ideal life probably doesn’t include long commutes. - You get bored easily, you resent repeating tasks?
This means that your ideal life would probably include a lots of different activities. - You get really drained around large crowds?
This means your ideal life would probably allow you plenty of rejuvenating alone time.
By using this method, you can begin to identify the key features of what a perfect life would look like for you.
Learn to appreciate the negative in your life. It will help you design a more positive life.
It’s more authentic
Another advantage of this method is that it’s rooted in your actual needs.
It’s not a random list of wants based on vague ideals of success picked up from your peers, your friends or the media about what a perfect life is.
These are actually features that hold meaning for you.
And this gives you a crucial edge when it comes to translating this vision into a concrete action plan: you will have a powerful why.
This will give you the motivation to push through further down the line when challenges appear on the horizon.
A life you don’t need a vacation from includes many facets
So, we’ve seen that when you create a life you don’t need a vacation from you’ll probably won’t end up sipping fancy cocktails by the pool until the end of time.
And it probably also doesn’t involve a list of ridiculous features pulled from your hat like: ‘I’ll have a sportscar for every day of the week and shower in champagne everyday’.
A life you don’t need a vacation from is actually a life that fuels your soul, a life that’s aligned with your deepest needs, your personal values, your aspirations.
It’s also a life that has the ability to evolve as you grow and as circumstances change.
So far you have some basic features, the non-negotiables extracted from your list of dislikes. It’s a great start but it’s not enough.
Creating a life you don't need a vacation from probably won't entail sipping fancy cocktails by the pool until the end of time Click To TweetA life you don’t need a vacation from is a tapestry that includes many pieces.
Making fantastic money but losing sleep over moral quandaries you find yourself in at work is not an ideal scenario.
Having a envious career that destroys your health is not a desirable situation either.
Having spiritual fulfillment without professional achievements may also leave you unsatisfied in the long run.
You get the point…
Creating life you don’t need a vacation from is like a making a carefully seasoned recipe
The consensus is that a well-balanced life includes many aspects.
- Indigenous americans had established a hierarchy of needs often misattributed to Maslow.
- Hindus use a similar system.
- Coaches often use a tool called the wheel of life.
Basically there are many tools and systems to classify our many needs and identify the key aspects a well-balanced life should feature.
However, our needs remain the same.
A well-balanced life needs to address:
- your basic survival needs
This category relate to every that affects your survival from your shelter (your home), to your finances, to your health.
These are the foundations on which your life is built, what you need to thrive on the most basic level.
- Your social needs
We are wired to be social animals, from the time of our birth our experiences teach us that we need others to survive. Our acceptance in the community is key to our survival.
Therefore we need different forms of social connections from friendships to personal relationships and other types of interactions.
Your dream life must fulfill many types of needs or it will leave you unfulfilled. Click To Tweet- Your emotional needs
We also have needs connected to our emotional well-being: feeling appreciated, respected, proud of ourselves and our achievements…
- Your higher needs
Finally we have needs that tap into higher planes of expression and realization from leaving a legacy to growing and evolving as individuals.
As you can see creating a life you don’t need a vacation from is far more involved than writing a bucket list of dream destinations to visit…
How do you go about identifying them?
I don’t think I am over-generalizing when I state that most of us are disconnected from our true selves.
How could it be any different when we are constantly bombarded from every angle by messages that tell us who to be, how to dress, how to style our hair, what career to have, what to do with our spare time, where to go on vacation…?
In such a society, it’s extremely difficult to identify our true unique needs and be in touch with ourselves.
I often caught clients thinking that they have found their core desires only to make them realize that they only had skimmed the surface.
(This is what it looks, it can have pretty devastating consequences if you don’t catch it early).
Therefore my advice is always to dig deep.
And when you think you’re done, dig deeper!
Having a coach really helps in this process, because they can catch your blind spots and force you to look at things you’ve trained yourself to avoid, or things you had never paid attention to.
This can save you a lot of time and hardship. (If you feel this can help you, I am here for you.)
In any case: take the time to dig, sit in silence, disengage, reconnect with yourself, play, go on a retreat.
Do what you have to do to find yourself.
This is a crucial step, I can’t stress this enough!
Only then will you be able to identify the correct answers for you.
Remove the blocks on your path
At some point after doing all this soul-searching you will get a vision, a success blueprint of sorts. You may be surprised that it looks like nothing that you thought your ideal life would look like.
This happens all the time!
Actually, if you complete the previous step correctly, this is what you should expect.
Your ideal life might not entail a corner office, an endless string of promotions or constant travel around the world.
Instead, you might discover that your success blueprint contains more subtile features that reveal an new idea of success that may only make sense to you.
It might look like:
- Never rushing to start your day again and allocating 3 hours to yourself every morning.
- Taking creative mini-retirement every 6 months to keep yourself refreshed.
- Splitting your time between 2 careers (for instance a lawyer and a musician career)
Now, that’s when the interesting part begins: that’s when the mind-chatter, the questioning (or outright unsupportive) friends and family, and the doubts surface.
Your new success blueprint might seem too strange, too impractical, too uncertain, too risky, too radical, too big…
Too whatever else…
Taming the monsters
The thing is to create a life you don’t need a vacation from you probably have to step way outside of your comfort zone.
And there’s nothing like stepping into the unknow to bring out all the monsters: the self-doubt, the self-esteem issues, the impostor syndrome, the fear of putting yourself out-there, your social programming, the naysayers, your (perceived or real) limitations…
The great thing is once you tackle your mind, you’ll have all tools to handle the naysayers and overcome whatever other obstacle which stands in your way.
There again working with a coach can be useful in identifying and taming your pet-monsters.
Create your action plan
This step is another place where things can go wrong, especially with strong-willed type-A personalities obsessed with action and productivity.
Remember: what we are trying to achieve is to create a life you don’t need a vacation from not to stress you out even further.
So you may want to consider going easy on the goal-setting and action-taking approach, and adopt a more leveraged strategy.
This is not about willpower
First, using willpower to achieve your objectives has limits.
The mind is split in 2 aspects: the conscious and the subconscious. We mostly operates from your subconscious which runs the show with a ration of 95% subconscious processes to 5% conscious ones.
Willpower is a function of your conscious mind.
Therefore, you can surely see how by counting on willpower alone we have all the odds against you.
To go faster and make the whole process of creating your perfect life without need a vacation from building it, I recommend using manifestation.
Manifestation taps into the power of the subconscious mind and a few little-know universal laws.
It’s powerful, it’s leveraged and it delivers mind-blowing results.
That’s the tool I used to create a life I don’t need a vacation from with little effort. You can learn more about that process in this post.
This is not about your ego
Second, you may want to check that your goals are actually tied to actual needs and not ego-based notions.
What I mean by that is that many of us, especially over-achievers get caught up in setting goals in a can do attitude. That’s what I call the ego-based approach.
– ‘I will do x by z.’
X standing for impossible tasks
Z standing for impossible deadline.
The more outlandish the goal, the biggest ego-kick: ‘Yeah, I nailed that! I crushed it!’
You know how it feels: it’s great, but not so useful…
Your ego can side-track your dream-building efforts. Click To TweetInstead, try to set your goals by reverse-engineering your life.
What would the best outcome be 12 months from now?
What are the non-negoticable ‘checkpoints’?
Here’s what I mean
Say, you’ve decided to move to a new country.
For that you may require a special visa.
What are the requirements for this visa? A language test maybe?
Ok, so do you speak the language or do you need to reach a basic fluency level?
You need to reach a basic fluency level.
To summarize:
- You need to reach a certain basic fluency level in this language before being able to apply for your visa.
- The processing of your visa takes 3 months.
- You will need your visa for several other applications you will have to file before arriving.
Your goal:
Therefore to be on the safe side, you would give yourself 6 months to master the basics of this language so you can apply for this visa in time.
There you would have a solid goal based on actual needs. And from there you can adjust your to-do or your end goal and deadline.
I know it can be a bit much, I go over this process step-by-step in this workshop with all the prompts and guidelines.
And then make it happen!
Congratulations, you’re almost there: you’re just one step away from actually living a life you don’t need a vacation from.
At this point, you’re entering the exciting part when things begin to shift in front of your eyes. This is when the adventure truly begins.
Most people tend to miss the fun of the journey as they are so focused on the destination. While it’s true that staying focused on the end result is key (especially when working with manifestation), this should not divert you from savoring the journey.
And while there are certain parts of the process that can seem mundane and outright boring (tracking your goals, updating your habits, revising your plans), making big changes in life always bring its shares of surprises, of unexpected twists and turns that make life quite interesting.
So remember to enjoy the ride!
Finally, this is an on-going process: the truth is this adventure will never really end.
First, as you progress and you wil be exposed to new circumstances which help you identify new likes and dislikes. This will require that you upgrade your life accordingly.
Second (and most importantly!), each new success level you reach contains within itself the seeds for new desires and new challenges.
Do you need a vacation from creating a life you don’t need a vacation from?
So there you have it, the ultimate plan to create a life you don’t need a vacation from.
I have tried to make this guide as detailed as possible so I trust that you should be able to follow along and make the changes you desire.
If however, you feel the need for more support on this journey there are a few ways I can help you:
- First make sure to join my VIP Vault, this is where I share more tips and advanced trainings to help you create a more fulfilling live.
- Second, if you only need a more detailed outline, these workshops are perfect for you.
- Finally, if you’re looking for high-tough, truly done-for-you type of support than these offers are for you.
To your best life!
Creating a life you don't need a vacation from is an on-going process. Click To TweetPin this post for reference!
