Finding Meaning In Your Life – Focus On Legacy

Hello and welcome to a five part series on how to combat stress at the source. If you feel trapped, lost or fed up of the daily grind of life this series is for you. This article focuses on finding meaning in your life to combat your stress using the legacy CBT coaching exercise. Just reading it won’t make a difference, you need to give it a try. Get your pen and paper at the ready.

• Today we will find out what matters to you in life
• Last week – Take The Stress Quiz
• Next week – Conflict between your stress and your meaning
• Week 4 – Pulling it together with a plan
• Week 5 – Action and review.

I hope you will get a lot out of this series. Please get in touch with any comments.

Are you living a meaningful life?

The better you know yourself and what matters to you, the better able you are to make decisions. You will be better able to judge if something is for you or not worth your time. It will be easier to plan, set goals and stay focused on how you want to live your life. In addition, you will be more likely to have a greater sense of identity, direction and self-worth and have less stress.

You are an individual so what is meaningful for you isn’t necessarily meaningful to all. It is therefore important to ask yourself what is meaningful to you. But how do we know what is meaning for us? There is a powerful coaching technique that can help us to identify what matters most to us in this world and I am pleased to share it with you in this article.

Write your Legacy

Let’s do an exercise to get you really thinking about what is important to you. Now this might sound a bit morbid but it is a great exercise to get you thinking about what matters to you. Imagine years have passed and you have died, or you are coming to the end of your very long lived life. A newspaper is doing an article about your life. What do you want the article to say? How do you want to be remembered? Who will be interviewed to write this article? What do you want them to say about you and your contribution to their lives? What achievements, strengths and talents do you want to be listed? What do you want your legacy to be? Think about your work, family, friends, community and the world. Remember don’t write what you think people will say. Write down what you want people to say about you.

Read back your writing. What have you learnt about yourself and your desires for your life? Have you identified what matters most to you in life? Continue to think about what you have written over the coming week. Ask yourself how are you living now? Are you living by  what matters to you?

Next week we are going to look at the stress (revealed by last week’s Take The Stress Quiz). We will identify any conflict between your stress areas and what is meaningful to you. Until then have a great one. If you want help managing your stress now, please look at my past articles including Reducing stress in your body by tuning into your heart. And get in touch for sessions if you want to work on finding out what is meaning in life to you with a qualified coaching therapist.

With thanks to Luke Bennett Photography for this week’s feature image.