Lifestyle Choice

What do the words simplicity, frugal, and recycle all have in common?

These words are all a lifestyle choice. And, making choices are part of our everyday life. The stress that we sometimes feel is due to the choices that we make each and every day. If we choose a stressful job, if we choose to live in a populated area, if we choose to leave little time for ourselves to relax, then we are faced with stress in our lives. But, the important distinction here is that most of our stress is due to our choice.

You may say, "I would love to change my lifestyle but I can't do it. I need my job to pay my bills." We can relate to that feeling. For many years. we lived in a large urban city with very demanding jobs, and we wanted to change our lifestyle, but we had a young family and financial obligations that we had to fulfill.

So, what did we do? We made the choice that we wanted to change. We wanted to work on projects and crafts that we had been putting off for years. So, we sat down and listed our goals for our new lifestyle. We also put time frames to our goals. And, we developed the action plans that we needed to implement today to meet our goals for a lifestyle change. For us, a simpler lifestyle meant one which simplicity played a big role in.

As I mentioned previously, we did have financial obligations, we did have a young family so we could not just quit our jobs and implement our goals. Our goals had a ten year time frame. But, what was critical for us was our goals gave us hope. We could now see where we were going rather than just living in the stress of day to day. When we felt frustrated or stressed, we would visualize how we would feel once we reached our goals and truly, this did help bring us stress relief.

The other thing that we did was that we started to read everything we could on simplicity, on being frugal and on how to recycle properly. We read inspirational quotes and stories that motivated us to keep on going when we felt like our goals were impossible to reach.

I think the most important part of our goal setting was our action plans. Obviously, for us to achieve freedom from the rat race required good financial planning. Our action plans made sure that we would be able to financially support ourselves once we quit our jobs.

To summarize, our lifestyle is now what we once only dreamed of. Our goals we set over 10 years ago are now the life we are living. We have less stress and enjoy every day to the fullest - a good stress management techique. You can do it, but first you have to make a choice!