By Books Author Denise Turney

Easy shortcuts to a better life are linked to rest, peace and greater satisfaction. These shortcuts help you to live in your natural state, more in tune with how you were created to live. Think about it. As a child who was loved, you may have spent hours, if not entire days, in a cocoon of love, peace and restfulness. Yet, by the time you entered kindergarten, your habit of living in peace, love and restfulness may have started to slip.

Other People’s Expectations

Gone are days spent enjoying being alive. Enter in other people’s expectations of what you “should do” and “ought to be” like. Once this happens, it’s not enough to just be yourself. An invisible “ruler” of what a good kid is like, what your parents or caregivers most want you to mirror and other people’s hopes for the specific personality that you should develop starts to show up and solidify.

Before you know it, you start glancing at other people, monitoring their approval or disapproval of you. Spot someone frowning in your direction, and you might hang your head. Let someone smile at you, and your head and shoulders rise. During those instances of external approval, it’s easy to feel good.

If only this world were filled with nothing except people who appreciate you. Easy shortcuts to a better life might be a snap then.

Key Shortcut

Think about it. Are you more confident while surrounded by friends or while in the company of a crowd who has repeatedly made it clear to you that you are not enough? Furthermore, each instance when you felt insecure, uncertain and uncomfortable were you either recalling an experience when you felt unaccepted and unloved or were you being disapproved of in that present moment?

This brings up one of the easy shortcuts to a better life. To step into your better life, commit right now to consistently give yourself love. It doesn’t matter what another person says. Regardless of how anyone else looks at you, gossips about you or judges you, love yourself. Put your commitment into practice and you’ll always be loved.

Forget dismissing the importance of this act. The love that you give yourself is as valuable as the love that you receive from others. Love covers all, is whole and complete and has no variation. In other words, love that flows through you is as good as love that flows through your best friend, neighbor or anyone. So, love yourself. You’ll be taking a reliable shortcut to a better life.

What Do You Really Want?

Other easy shortcuts to a better life are to consider what you really want. Because you’ve likely received verbal and nonverbal messages from others about what they’d like for you to do with your life, you might think that you know what you really want when, in fact, you might not know. Instead, you might have spent the last 10 years working hard to be what you think someone you admire (or someone who you’re afraid of) wants you to be.

That’s definitely not the path to happiness and inner peace. Should that be the track that you’ve been living on, it’s time to start moving down a different path.

Get clear about what you really want – what you really want, not want someone else wants for you. Also, start to map out specific actions you could take to get what you really want.

Explore What You Really Want

For example, if you want to open a bookstore, start to map out how to find and build relationships with book distributors, wholesalers, publishers and hybrid authors, and identify realtors who have experience locating retail buildings in the areas that attract large numbers of book buyers.

Additionally, you could contact your local chamber of commerce and find out the specific business licenses that you need. That’s just a start. Each action that you take brings you closer to what causes you to experience joy.

More Easy Shortcuts to a Better Life

More easy shortcuts to a better life follow. Check them out. See if they aren’t easy to implement.

• Revisit activities that you loved as a kid. Age and time are no reasons to eliminate daily fun from your life.
• Read a good book, the kind of book that’s so good you can’t help but tell all your friends about it.
• Explore the great outdoors. Get outside and have loads of natural fun! This is a favorite of the easy shortcuts to a better life.
• Schedule time to hang out with friends one or more times a month. Don’t let a busy schedule rob you of opportunities to be with your friends.
• Go for a drive to an area you’ve never been to before. You might be surprised at how being in a new environment picks you up.
• Try your hand at the arts. After all, self-expression is one of the easy shortcuts to a better life.

Keep Seeking Easy Shortcuts to a Better Life

Honesty is a must to get from where you are now to the life that you truly want to live. Keep seeking more ways to tap into your inner peace and joy. Ideas about new actions that you could take to experience an increasingly good and better life might come as you travel.

In this situation, you might see someone living a full life while doing something you’ve yet to do. Exercise enough courage to try the new thing and you might find another way to shorten the time it takes to live a life that finds you feeling better, more vibrant and more alive.

So, get out and explore. Try new things. Meet new people. Laugh. Add a spirit of newness to each day. It’s your life. Make it wonderful!