Let me paint you a picture. You have a large six-figure salary, you travel the world often first class, and dine in the finest restaurants on your corporate card. You stay in luxurious hotels and take frequent vacations.

 

Sounds pretty amazing right?

Now add this to the pretty amazing life we just described…You work about 12 hours a day, catch 6 AM flights every week to spend the day in meetings only to later have a dinner meeting. And sometimes the people you meet with don’t even really want to meet, but they do out of a sense of obligation. Your email inbox is full of 600 messages you actually need to read. You deliver presentations, read articles and briefs, draft proposals, generate reports, and even work on weekends. Your home is no longer a place of serenity but only a reminder of work left undone.

Oh and I forgot, you just had a baby 8 months ago and a husband who’s tired of playing Mr. Mom. Still amazing?  Sounds exhausting if you ask me.

Despite all that, there is a lot in this example to be grateful for. You have a job that can financially provide for your family. You live in a beautiful home that houses you and friends and family when they come to visit. You have people who clean your house and even freshly prepared food delivered twice a week. There’s a big screen TV in every room, even the 8 month old’s room, fancy clothes in the closet, and racks of shoes you don’t even wear. You even have 3 cars in the garage, one you never drive and one you didn’t even pay for.

You have so much, and you are grateful, but all those material things don’t make up for what you really want.

 

Turns out this amazing life isn’t enough…

You want to be at home with your baby curled up on the couch next to your husband planning what you all will wear for Halloween this year.

You want to know that the work you do has value and impact on actual people and not some line item in a budget.

You want to feel appreciated for your education and experience and your hard work recognized.

You want to be excited about your work and how you show up for the world every day.

Now that sounds amazing!

Tell me, is your amazing life enough? If it’s not, it’s okay to want more. There, you have my permission to live your amazing life, whatever that looks like.

You don’t actually need my permission or anyone else’s for that matter. But that’s what we do, we wait for someone else to tell us it’s okay to want something different than the status quo.

What is your amazing life? What can you do today to start making that life a reality? Let me give you three examples to get you started.

Create experiences when you are home with your family to cultivate special memories even while your children are young and you think they won’t remember. It can be something as simple as dressing up for Halloween as a family. Dress up isn’t just for kids. You kind of do it every day anyway when you play politics at work. 

Plan vacations in advance. Before you put anything else in your calendar for the year, plan around family time instead of “fitting it in.” 

Use your vacation time to just stay home. I like to call it my “mental health” day. Spend it how you want. Maybe live your amazing life that day. You’ll be surprised what that one day can do for you. 

 

Listen to those dreams that lie deep within. Your amazing life is waiting for you.

 

For even more inspiration to follow your dreams here’s a track from my playlist…

 

 

Talk soon,

Photo credit:  Picture by me of Claude Monet’s house during my trip to France and part of making my life amazing!