Episode 120. Creating Your Dream Life & Business… Today

In this episode, I want to talk about taking control over creating your dream life, today, this week.

I want to dive into four specific areas of your life that you could exert more agency over and how you can make small tweaks today to ultimately create your dream life in 2023.

I’ll also share some of my own examples of what I’ll be focusing on in the next few months to create my dream life this year.

In This Episode:

Our amazing dream lives

How the inspiration for this episode came about was because I recently went for an in-person meeting with an organization in Singapore where we discussed potential ways we might collaborate together in the future.

During the conversation, I was able to share with them one of my big, big dreams in my lifetime, beyond just building my own coaching business and personal brand.

I shared with them that one day, I’d love to work towards creating a world class, world renown video podcast show (or some sort of show) where I get to:

1) Interview the brilliant brains of the world, all of whom are doing work they’re absolutely proud of

2) Showcase stories of courageous decisions that ultimately led the awesome individual to now create their dream life and career. Essentially, the show would be an embodiment or celebration of something I really believe in, which is creating a career and business that you’re proud of.

Another super fun thing. I then asked on my Instagram stories about what are your dreams, and several people actually responded to my question!

Here are the dreams of those who responded:

1) starting my YouTube channel, performing at music festivals, and creating content

2) making my art BIGGGGG

3) build a music-based business

4) become a singer songwriter

5) live in Bali

6) start my own pottery studio

7) open a rooster sanctuary

8) to coach famous people or leaders who need support

WOW. How beautiful and powerful.

To those who responded to this question on my Instagram stories, thank you for sharing your dreams with me.

I hope to be able to support you either directly or indirectly with my work, such as this podcast, or to be able to cheer you on from the side lines as all of us make big waves in this world and make our big dreams a reality. 

Alright, with that, let’s talk about how you can start making decisions today to build your dream life in 2023.

We always have control and agency over our life, our decisions, and ultimately, our business

We can always take action steps to create our dream life, today. We always have control and agency over our life, our decisions, and ultimately, our business.

Oftentimes, it’s the small, simple, or daily decisions that will actually compound overtime into our dream life. So let’s take a look at several parts of our life and business that are within our control, right now.

Do note that this is not a definitive list, but rather, these are just areas I’ve explored for myself and I believe we can exert control over each of these areas little by little to ultimately compound those small decisions into larger ripples and waves in our lives.

I’ll also share some of the ways I’ll be changing up my own life in the next few months in these areas.

Small daily lifestyle decisions and changes you could implement on to create your dream life, today

Creating an on brand aesthetic lifestyle and turning up the energy in your external surroundings

Let’s start by talking about how to make your life more ‘on brand’. Essentially, similar to how we often create an ‘aesthetic’ for our content and Instagram feeds or website. I want us to think about how you can create an aesthetic for your day-to-day lifestyle. 

Let’s start by talking about clothing. Clothing has been an integral part of the way we express ourselves and we can leverage it to help us feel like we’re living our dream life, right now.

Because a lot of our confidence can oftentimes stem from our personal style, being mindful of your choice of clothes for the day can shape how you feel for the rest of the day.

Think about it, when we think of different specific articles of clothing, different thoughts or images come to mind. Think about: Athleisure or a stylish not stuffy blaze, or a white lab coat that scientists wear or even a crisp apron worn by professional chefs. 

Literally, every piece of clothing carries its own energy and hence can shape what we think and how we feel. So you bet we can use clothing as a tool to start tapping into our dream life, right now.

So what are small tweaks you can make, right now? For example, could it be putting on smokey eye makeup? Or wearing big bright earrings? Or getting properly fitted underwear that doesn’t suffocate you or make you feel sloppy? Just some examples to think about.

Let’s also talk about your work space. As entrepreneurs, we spend a lot of time on our laptops and creating amazingness at some sort of dedicated workspace.

Whether it’s outside at a cafe, a coworking space or at home, your work space shapes how you feel during your work session. Let’s zone in specifically to your work space at home, since we are more likely to have control over our home work space compared to an aesthetic coffee shop. 

How can you make small shifts in your work environment that makes you excited to open your laptop or take out pen and paper to create? Because when you’re not feeling your work environment, it’s easy to get distracted with your phone and start comparing yourself with others online.

Let’s create a work environment that makes you feel awesome and doesn’t make you want to look elsewhere and end up spending hours looking at other people’s lifestyles.

What small changes can you make that will create major ripples in the way you feel when you work? 

  • For example, could it be changing the color of your room’s lightbulb from a white light to a warmer, yellowish light, or vice versa? 
  • Could it be getting a cute fake plant to put on your desk? 
  • Could it be making a vision board to continuously anchor you into your dreams and goals? 
  • Could it be literally wiping the dust and dirt off of your laptop screen and keyboard? 
  • Switching out your digital planning tools for pen and paper? 
  • Buying a nice set of colored pens or markers or sharpies that you could use instead of that super old pen that’s almost running out of ink? 
  • Buying a digital print from Etsy, printing it out yourself, framing it and hanging it above your workspace? 
  • Creating a color theme for your work space? 
  • Getting an ergonomic cushion to support your back when you sit on your office chair?  
  • Or DIY paint one wall of your room and create a featured wall. 

There are soooooo many options available to us. Each of these are tools we could leverage to influence how we feel and the energy in which we create.

And remember: what you surround yourself with matters. So let’s start by playing around with our workspace and start paving the way for our dream life, today.

Curating your Internal energy levels

Likewise, how you feel on the inside also matters. Because we all have big dreams and goals for ourselves, but we do need a vehicle, i.e. a body and mind, that is optimized to help us work towards those big dreams and goals.

What are the daily practices, in terms of physical, mental or emotional, that you can have in place to help you stay at your “optimal” energy levels so you can continue to take action and show up for your goals?

  • For example, do you need to drink more water and be more hydrated? Is it cold water that helps energize you the most? Or is it boiling hot water? Or do different temperatures of water help you tap into different energetic states that help you do different types of tasks? 
  • Are you sleeping enough?
  • Are you moving your body? 
  • Are you feeding your body foods that nourish and energize you, or foods that make you feel so sluggish to the point where you can’t work and you just need to crash ASAP?
  • Are you aware of your breathing when you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, anxious, and so on? Are you using tools to help you regulate your nervous system or when you’re in a stress cycle?
  • Could you create different music playlists that match the different energetic states or state of mind you want to activate? For example, a bad ass playlist for when you want to tap into thought leadership vibes, or a lower paced music playlist for when you want to feel more grounded and calm, or maybe a specific playlist you listen to before your coaching calls with clients.
  • Do you have regular daily or weekly mindset practices scheduled in your calendar for things like self coaching or thinking time? 

Overall, having awareness of how you’re taking care of your internal states, and how these decisions influence how you feel both physically, mentally, and energetically, are literally going to shape your capacity to create and take action on your dream life.

This matters and there are small adjustments you can make that will have a big impact on your energy levels. 

Also, even if there are certain particular circumstances that you may not have full control over, let’s say you didn’t get enough sleep for the past week, please always choose to recognize that there’s always something that you do have control over.

There are always small decisions you could implement. From a mindset perspective, you could release the expectation or attachment to how you think things are supposed to look like or how you’re supposed to implement these decisions.

Because there will be times when things don’t go exactly the way we planned, and that’s okay.

Always choose to see the situation from a different light and be highly attuned to what you do have control over.

Cheryl’s examples

I’d love to share some of the examples of how I’m currently making aligned day to day decisions:

First, I get my lashes done once a month. I’ve decided that because I am someone who appreciates visuals, for example, I’m a sucker for beautiful websites. Like if you have a website, I’ll actually go look at it and just admire how it looks, how it’s organized, how it feels, and so on.

Because I genuinely love how things look and feel, I decided to make more effort to genuinely like how I look and feel.

A simple tweak I’ve committed to for the past 6 or 7 months now is getting my lashes done once a month. For me, I find that lashes make me feel more confident, even if I don’t do my makeup that day.

So for me, false lashes really boost my confidence and it’s something I’m able to invest in on a monthly basis.

Second, likewise, because I really love how things look and feel, I’m also now scheduling time every week, particularly on weekends, to simply draw using my colored pencils.

Last week, I drew this beautiful fish. Well, to me it’s a beautiful fish. To the pro artists listening, you may think my drawing is so-so. But either way, I had so much fun creating something out of nothing.

I LOVE the feeling of creating something out of nothing. This is why drawing regularly is something that lets me feel like I’m living my dream life right now.

Third, another really simple and practical thing I’ve done is that I take pictures of every single cat I chance upon here in Singapore, and I post it on Instagram stories.

Because my dream life 1000% has cats. But since moving to Singapore in December 2021, I’ve been separated from my two cats, who are currently still in Hong Kong with my parents and I haven’t had a cat in my life since then. Until recently in April 2023, where I started cat sitting for my friend for the next 5-6 weeks.

And by the way, I’ll actually be going back to Hong Kong super soon to bring my cats from Hong Kong to Singapore. I’ll definitely update you all when they’re in Singapore.

So to create my dream life EVEN WITHOUT CATS, I’ve literally taken a photo of every single cat I come across in Singapore. Even cats roaming the streets or a friend’s pet cat. I’ll always be sure to take a photo of the cat and it makes me feel like I’m immersed in my dream life where I’m always surrounded by cats.

So yes! That’s the first way we can all create our dream life right now, through our day to day life decisions, and this could come in the form of all shapes and sizes!

Some of them might require a small investment, while others can be totally free. Some can be super planned and scheduled in your calendar, while others are totally spontaneous and random.

The key point here is that there’s always ways we can create magic in our day-to-day life, no matter what, starting today.

Evaluating your business and being willing to make decisions that are aligned with how you want to grow a business you’re proud of

My observations about the industry

The next area I want to talk about is the decisions you make within the scope of your business. That includes any decisions you make about what you want to do within the context of your business, such as which platform to post on, how often you post, what you say, how you say it, and so on.

For many of you listening, creating a successful online business is part of the vision you have for your dream life, which is why I want to talk about this as part of this episode.

Here’s what I’ve been observing. For a lot of coaches and entrepreneurs, they start their business on a very high note. There’s so much excitement and possibility.

Overtime, your business feels stifling, discouraging and repetitive. It feels boring. It makes you feel invalidated because oftentimes, you’re questioning whether things are working.

A trap that many often fall into is that we’re so used to doing things a certain way or seeing others around us doing things a certain way, that we constantly try to squeeze ourselves into these boxes even if we may have outgrown that box,

Or maybe it was never the box meant for us in the first place. That’s why we often see a lot of coaches feeling ‘out of alignment’ or burning out in their business because they are trying really hard to build a business in a way that doesn’t feel energizing or ‘aligned’.

Or they no longer like who they are while they’re building their business. 

Or perhaps, your lifestyle, life circumstances or personal priorities might have evolved and changed. The way you were previously building your business may no longer align with who you are today or the circumstances you have at the moment.

The common thread between all of these potential scenarios is that the more we try to continue pushing forward and doing what used to work, the more we fall out of touch with the magic of building a business.

In order to stay in the magic of what you’re doing, it often requires us to be willing to put everything on the table. Meaning, put your “old ways” on the table and be open to evaluating what about it is no longer working for your business and your lifestyle.

I personally believe that it is very common to go through seasons of business where we will get a breakthrough about the direction we want to take our business, and then we enter a season of implementation and go all in on the vision. 

Then we come back to a point where we reflect and reevaluate what we really want. This seems to be cyclical, meaning, we will always loop back to this point where often it feels like we just wanna burn our business to the  ground and make big pivots and transitions.

But more often than not, our decisions don’t have to be super drastic. These moments of wanting to regain alignment can actually lead to sustainable business growth, in my opinion,

That’s why in order to create your business that will stand the test of time, I personally believe it is necessary to regularly take time to reflect and evaluate whether you even like your business and how you’re building it, as well as who you are while building it.

This will involve making decisions every now and then to make sure that your business is “aligned” with how you want to grow it so you can ultimately pave the way for the long term growth and trajectory of your dream business.

Cheryl’s examples

Personally,  I’m currently in a season of reflection and slowing down in my business where I’m being super open about putting everything on the table.

What parts of my business no longer bring me joy and which parts absolutely fire me up and I’m ready to keep doing more of them? Which parts simply require small tweaks and which parts require big overhauls?

Our business is always a work in progress, and I personally believe that it’s an ongoing pursuit of doing work that is meaningful for us, making decisions even if things were already working really well in order for us to align our business to doing work we’re most proud of, and ultimately building our business in a way that is joyful, light, meaningful, impactful, profitable, and also makes us proud of the work that we do. 

One thing I noticed for myself when I was leaning into the “I should” do in my business is I was finding myself getting deeper and deeper into this hole of needing to sell a monetary program promise in order to sign clients and grow my business.

But right now, honestly, I feel really, really called to shift my messaging and zone in on talking about how I believe we should all create a business and career that we’re proud of. So I’m redefining what marketing and messaging looks like in this next phase of my business.

This is why in the coming months, you may notice a shift in how I present my coaching program, where I shift away from putting emphasis on only the monetary results of working with me.

Instead, I’m tapping into the longer term, larger vision I have for my clients and our community – which is, to build careers that we are proud of, not just signing clients and hitting business income goals. And our clients are still doing these things inside my coaching program.

But in terms of my own marketing and messaging, I’m in a season of my business where focusing primarily on the monetary income wins of my own business or that of my clients no longer feels… exciting. 

To be honest, it has felt a bit dull and repetitive for me. So in a conscientious effort to reignite my own spark for my business and to deepen the message I want to be known for, you will see me create even more content and share my perspectives on what it means to create a career and business that you are truly proud of. And hey, one that also makes your Asian parents proud, right?

What’s one small, simple decision you could make this week that is very within your control, which would ultimately compound?

I hope that today’s conversation gave you something to start percolating on and it has given you a starting point to thinking about decisions you can start to make right now.

Because irrespective of whether it’s your dream lifestyle or your dream business, the same principle or thought process applies. What’s one small, simple decision you could make this week that is very well within your control, which would ultimately compound if you continue to implement that decision and ultimately make waves in your life or business?

Let’s start there. You don’t need to go from 0 to 100 right now. 0 to 1, 0 to 2 is what’s required before you go from 0 to 50, 0 to 75, and 0 to 100. These small steps matter, so please start today and start creating your dream life and business, right now. 

For those of you whose dream is to build a body of work that lets you become known for your unique thought leadership, story, and how amazing you are at what you do, I’d love to coach you and support you in making this dream happen.

We’re currently enrolling clients inside our program, The Thought Leader Club, focused on helping you build a body of work that not only lets you become known for something but also magnetizes clients and opportunities to you. The next cohort of the Thought Leader Club will take place from March to July 2024. We kick off on March 1st, 2024. 👀 For all of the details and to apply, you can head on over to cheryltheory.com/program to send in your application. I cannot wait to see you on the inside.

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