Are you barely dragging through the days, feeling more tired and trashed than fulfilled and fabulous? Is your mind swirling with decisions to be made with no resolution in sight? Read on as I share with you some sure fire methods for making choices that ensure that your life is lived with spring in your step and a smile on your face.

Each Spring and Fall, I facilitate Barbara Sher’s Success Teams. This Spring, six mid-life women have gathered together to support each other, for eight weeks, in going after a cherished dream. As I write this column we are about to have our third meeting. The anxiety is rising as week number three is flow chart week. This is the time for the rubber to meet the road, as each woman must “choose” a goal to focus on for the rest of the eight weeks of our Success Team.

After six, highly satisfying, years of facilitating Success Teams, I have come to recognize that choosing a goal, that is all our own, is particularly difficult for women. Elizabeth, who is on the team, reminds us that women are often in the role to support and accommodate others. It can be seen as a luxury to have time to examine our choices in life. Elizabeth has seen this over accommodating of others all too often, even when it comes to something as simple as choosing what we would like to order for dinner. We may ask others what they will order, offer to split etc., rather than choosing a meal that we would really enjoy for ourselves.

Moving on from menu choicing, let’s begin building the life choice muscle, it is time to: 

Listen to the voice of your life choices

Sometimes we need to set up a quiet environment so that the life choices can have their say. For me, it is imperative to set a weekly date with my choice making self. I love to sit out on my sun filled deck, with a cup of tea, a notebook and first ask myself the following questions, mostly courtesy of Barbara Sher of “Wishcraft” fame:

Ask yourself:  What does my Ideal Day look like?

Begin writing about your day starting with when you wake up and end with going to bed. Write about everything your ideal day would entail. This is an average day, not a vacation day. You can have it be any way you want Write it in the present tense ie “I wake up at 7am… and include what you would be doing, who you would spend time with and what your environment would look like..

Choose your top three life priorities:

After you are finished writing about your Ideal Day, read it over and look for the top three most important elements-the three aspects that you must have in your life for it to be fulfilling. By the way, I repeat this exercise every time I facilitate a group, as my choices may change and I can be a cranky lady if I am not listening to my choice voices.

From my most recent Ideal Day exercise, I found that what is most important to me is exercise to recover from my back injury, facilitating my coaching groups/ providing individual coaching, and spending quality time with my husband. As you can see, this can be a great exercise for quickly identifying your top three life priorities and have some fun while doing it.

Once you have chosen your top three priorities it is time to:

Choose a primary focus:

Ask yourself: What element of your ideal life: don’t you have in your life right now?

Lynn, who is also a member of my women’s Success Team told me that after completing the Ideal Day exercise and determining the top three elements, she asked herself, “Of the top elements, what don’t I have that I really want in my life? She realized that while she would like a more fulfilling work, her job is okay for now. She chose her primary focus from what she does not have in her life at this time: a meaningful relationship with a significant other.

Choose the next step:

Ask yourself what you can you do can most easily, quickly and cheaply to put you on the road to your primary focus?

You will feel the most fulfilled if you can get the gist of your primary focus into your life right away. For me the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to begin exercising was to find different friends to walk with. I immediately emailed five different girlfriends, one for each day of the week. We are thoroughly enjoying exercising together and having a blast brainstorming our next set of exciting choices!