When you feel off-track . . .

[SoSimple]

I could have put this a number of places (so mods, feel free to move it if need be), but it touches on several areas (finances, family, workplace, health . . .)

Has anyone ever felt like their life has gotten off-track? Like your life is not matching up to your values or is not how you had hoped, but various factors are preventing you from changing it?

How have you handled it? What steps did you take to change things?

I do have a plan, but there are no guarantees and things seem to keep conspiring to make it difficult to act on the plan. But there are things about my life right now that are so far off where I want to be that I really need to find some way to get things back on track.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Has anyone ever felt like their life has gotten off-track? Like your life is not matching up to your values or is not how you had hoped, but various factors are preventing you from changing it?

To some extent I feel my life has always been off track, there have always been a lot of things I wanted that I have never been able to achieve. On such things are shrinks made rich, I suppose. OTOH I've never had a very specific image of one preordained track my life should follow. But a lot of what I want has always been just out of reach.

I do find actually finding a way to change careers to be harder than I ever imagined possible (but I am impatient! What can't be achieved in a year can perhaps be achieved in 5 years etc.).

[early morning]

Yes yes yes! But it can't really be changed - since much of it all involves immediate family. Can't control or always help others; can't abandon them just because they are the way they are. Change what you can, find a way to make peace with the rest, and be grateful for any/all of the positives you have. Most of what I have to change is me - my perceptions, my expectations, and my tendency to be a control freak!

[Bronxboy]

When I get off-track, I usually deal with it by sitting down and planning the next 3 to 6 months. Everything is in the picture, from personal relationships to home repairs and careers.

One of the more fortunate things I did through this planning was to decide to emulate a co-worker who called his mother daily. For the last two years of my mother's life, I rarely missed calling her on a weekday.

[Anne Lee]

I'm living in an area that is dealing with a natural disaster (flooding) and it makes me realize just how little of our lives we actually can control. When things feel off track, I find the best solution for me is to set some achievable short term goals in different areas: family, personal, professional, financial. It helps to keep the goals SMART i.e simple, measurable, achievable, relevant and time sensitive and few in number. Also, staying on top of the dailies - tracking the finances, the laundry, the picking up, etc. - helps too. I feel less reactive and more proactive, though I suppose on the grand scale of things I'm not, really. But I feel I am and perception is important.

[Fawn]

Yes. I divorced him.

Things are much better now. :)

[flowerseverywhere]

many times my life has gotten off track. Like many here, there are times when I drank too much, ate too much, spent too much time complaining, wasted time on worthless things, didn't exercise enough, wasted money, wasn't attentive enough to the people I loved, etc. When I find myself in a bad place I take small steps to going where I want to.

Do you have time to go for a walk every day alone and think about where you are and where you want to go? If you work, can you walk at lunchtime or in the morning for example?
What about making a list of where you want to be in one month, one year, five years ten years then making plans on how to get there?
I find it helpful to stick with the basics. Tracking money, tracking food, keeping a journal are all great suggestions to figure out where you are now.

for instance my list a few years ago was to get my health in order. My cubicle soul sucking job was killing me and I was letting it. I felt like I was going to die from a twenty minute walk on a treadmill. Now I can bike 30 miles, do an hour run, and I feel great. It took a long time but I stuck with it a step at a time.

My current goals include eating closer to the bottom of the food chain and making more mindful choices about what I do and what effect it has on the planet and the poorest of the poor. I am examining every aspect of my life to figure out what I can do better and what I can do to help as I see the gap between the rich and the poor widen. I recently read a book by Peter Singer "the life you can save" that had a profound impact on me. Also reading about our food supply and the impact on meat eating for the planet is making me change my diet as well.

Through this journey I have had to deal with family who was not always supportive or understanding, which makes it harder but not impossible.

I am trying to live my life according to Ghandi's words "You must be the change you want to see in the world."

[leslieann]

Wow, flowerseverywhere, what an inspiring post! I am in that "twenty minutes on the treadmill death throes" place at the moment, though I used to run long distance. You inspire me to stop whining and berating myself and just get out there and DO SOMETHING!

In response to the OP, though, I have had the broader sense of my values being out of line with my behaviour. I think I have reached the far end of a change process that was initiated (by me) in 2001; I ended up with a change of partner, country, career....and yet now that I see my landing place, I am aware of a tendency to return to the direction I thought I had left behind. That is, circumstances change but unless WE change, we can recreate our circumstances pretty quickly (and unconsciously).

Clarifying and setting an intention, and then thinking in terms of tiny steps, baby steps really, seems like the most humane way to move toward a new way of being. Remember that old saying attributed to Confucius, "The journey of a million miles begins with a single step." You don't have to make that first step a leap off the Grand Canyon.

Peace...

[Kestra]

I've recently been trying to change my life as well. I just want to start doing what I am interested in sooner rather than later. I got so tired of feeling disorganized about what I did and what I thought about. So just recently I decided to start a spreadsheet to keep track of things I do, why I did them, comment on it's affect on my life and a ranking about how beneficial or enjoyable it was. I've pretty much hated journaling since they forced it upon us in elementary school, but at certain points in my life I've wanted to write things down. Journaling also feels too "artsy" for my mathematical brain. So the spreadsheet works out great. It only takes a minute or two to type in any significant things I've done that day. And now I have some kind of record to look back on and it also helps me analyze what things I should do more or less of.