8 Practical Ways to Get Your Life Together

Get everything together now…. at least the best way we can!

I’ll admit, we can never fully get our life together BUT we can always find ways to be as organised as possible.

This blog post is all about the practical ways to get your life together. It is important to be organised with your time, be intentional with what we are doing, and be aware of the direction that we are going.

All the practical ways that are mentioned will outline different ways to help us grow ourselves and improve our personal growth.

This blog post is also really exciting, because it draws inspiration from nine different books! After each point mentioned, you will see the inspiration that the point had come from. Those are books that I’ve read myself and I’ve absolutely loved!

That’s why, I do think that this blog post will add value to you, especially since those books that are mentioned have added value to me.

Now, let’s get into it, and read the 8 practical ways to get your life together!

1 – Use Goals to Help You Grow

From: The Magic of Thinking Big & The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I know that you’re probably sick of hearing “have goals, have goals, have goals”.

However, just think about this – everything that we are using right now was a result of an invention that was made. Our computer is a invention, our phone is a invention, our car… was an invention!

And they were not just invented on the spot, they were visualised, planned, and carried out. And what do you need first? A goal.

What about when you’re working on any sort of project or assignment that is extremely important. What do you need? You need a goal.

You need a goal to give you direction on what you need to do. You can’t take any steps or go through any process unless you have a goal that you are going to work towards. If you have no goal, you’re just going to be taking random steps, not knowing where you are going, and even not getting anywhere.

To add on, goals can also give us a strong vision of what we want and use that vision to guide us in the decisions that we make. Maybe every single person is busy working hard to get the promotions and achieve more accomplishments, but what is their underlying reason why they want that?

That’s why goals are essential. Because you do need to have a good idea on where you want to go and what you want to accomplish, having a goal is essential.

Yes, you need to focus on your systems more than your goals, however you need a goal first to know what system you are going to use to achieve that goal. You have to begin with the end of mind, because that goal will provide direction.

2 – Know Your Priorities

From the book: Developing the Leader Within You & 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Something that I had to learn very early on was that having too may priorities does more harm than good.

The truth is, you can’t do them all. I remember when someone told me that for the first time, it felt harsh…. but it was true. When you have too many priorities, there are going to be more challenges. This is because every priority comes with its set of challenges. The more priorities we have, the more challenges that we get.

We don’t want to get to the point where we realise that it’s too late to see what is really important, that’s why it’s best to start now, figuring out what really is our priorities.

So if you’ve read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the habits was Put First Things First, and it included this matrix that is a very effective tool when it comes to prioritising. It goes like this:

• High Importance & High Urgency – these include those projects or tasks that have deadlines, and obviously emergencies. These are the things that we do first.
• High Importance & Low Urgency – these are responsibilities in our life that are non-negotiable and we do need to include them in our schedule, however they don’t feel urgent. This is actually the most important sort of tasks! These include taking care of our health (exercise), relationships, and relationship building. We can do them at any time of the day, as long as we prioritise them.
• Low Importance & High Urgency – these include urgent matters such as some meetings, calls, any sort of interruption. They seem urgent but it’s really the urgency of other people.While those things are urgent, they are not as important compared to your more important priorities such as your health and projects with deadlines.

If you spend too much time doing the tasks in this category, you don’t make the time for the important tasks in the second category (high importance, low urgency)

• Low Importance & Low Urgency – obviously, these are the things that are just useless, and don’t really add value to our life whatsoever. As much as we can, we avoid getting to those things in this category. These things include watching TV, going on social media, surfing the internet.

Like the previous point, if you spend too much time doing the tasks in this category, you don’t get enough time to do the important tasks in the second category (high importance, low urgency).

I’ve gone back to using this a few times whenever I felt that my priorities were out of order. It’s a really good starting point to reflect on what’s actually important to you. Sometimes we may not even know that we’re focusing on the wrong thing!

You may spend hours a day going through emails and then figure out that you don’t make time for your exercise or your health commitments. Or the more obvious one is you spend too much time watching TV and going on social media, that you don’t have time for your more important & urgent tasks.

That’s why self-awareness is really important, it’s a good first step to get everything together.

3 – Start Adding Value to Yourself

From the book: The Go-Giver

The book where the inspiration for this point came from was The Go-Giver, where they mentioned the Law of Value. However, we revised this a bit for this blog post, and turned it into adding value to yourself. Here’s what I mean.

This is what the Law of Value described in The Go-Giver:

“Your real worth is defined by how much more value you give than how much you get paid”.

When it comes to adding value to yourself, your real worth is not going to be defined by the income you make, but by how much value that you give to yourself, and others.

I’ve watched many TV shows, and you probably have also heard of many people as well, who only thought about money. They only thought about how much profit that they could make. While is nothing wrong with that, you’ve got to think of a bigger reason behind why we want more profits and more money.

That’s why, like what the book said, it’s more important to define how much value we are going to give. When it comes to adding value to ourselves, we’re not going to define our worth by how much money we make, but we are going to add value to ourselves instead.

How do we add value to ourselves? Well, we focus on taking care of ourselves obviously. We add value to ourselves by investing in ourselves, and aiming for productivity in every area of our life, and do self-care in every area of our life.

Adding value to ourselves first makes us feel better. Imagine making all the money in the world, but because we didn’t take care of ourselves in the process, it’s going to be hard to enjoy. That’s why it’s essential to look at the bigger picture and look at the bigger why.

4 – Get in the Habit of Taking Action

From the book: The Magic of Thinking Big

Here’s something else I’ve learned early on – taking action is one of the more efficient ways to cure your fear of doing it. Let me expand on what I mean.

I used to have a fear of public speaking. How did I get over that fear? By doing public speaking. It wasn’t by reading books, attending workshops, or watching YouTube videos. It was by actually doing public speaking.

I used to have a fear of dogs. How did I get over that fear? I stayed over at someone’s house, where there were two dogs that were in my vicinity. I got closer to those dogs, and they sat next to me. I pet it and I realised that they aren’t scary after all.

I used to have a fear of scuba diving. How did I get over that fear? I actually did scuba diving.

As you can can probably tell, the one way that I got over my fear of doing anything was actually doing that thing I was fearful of.

When it comes to accomplishing goals and overcoming fear, we fall into one of two categories.

The first category is a “passivationist”. This is where we postpone things until we had proven that we shouldn’t do them, or we can’t do them. We postpone them until “next year” but it never happens.

We find reasons to not do something, we debate ourselves out of those things. We don’t do the things we want done because we never take action. As a result of all this, we lose our confidence and self-esteem.

The most famous line is that we are going to do it, but we never do it.

The second category is an “activationist” the one that we want to be in. We take action, get things done, and follow through on what we say we are going to do. We don’t postpone things, we just do it.

We overcome our excuses on why we shouldn’t do something, we talk ourselves into doing what we don’t really want to do. We get things done and we take action. We let go of the fear and procrastination, and just take action.

We want to get in the habit of taking action rather than postponing things. The moment we decide that we are going to postpone it, the harder it is that we’re going to get started on it.

For example, the longer we postpone working on an assignment, the harder it is going to be to start it. The longer we procrastinate our health, the harder it is going to be to start it.

It’s going to be hard either way, so you rather just start now, and make it easier on yourself for the long run. Whatever it is that you’re procrastinating on right now, make the decision today to just start.

5 – Work on Your Self-Talk

From the book: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself

Now what is exactly self-talk? Self-talk is all the directions that we give to our mind, regardless on whether we say it out loud or just thinking it in our mind.

It’s like telling a lie to yourself over and over again that’d you’d eventually believe it. It’s the same with our self-talk, whatever we say to our mind, positive or negative, we’ll eventually believe it as well.

Self-talk is really important because they lead to our actions and have an effect on our mindset. If our self-talk is filled with negative statements, it would of course lead to a negative mindset. That wouldn’t lead to the most beneficial actions.

If our self-talk is filled with positive statements, it would lead to a more positive mindset, and would lead to more beneficial actions.

If we have the former, then it’s time to make a change. Since our self-talk is automatic, if we want to change it, we’re going to need to become more self-aware of it, and change the self-talk. We do this until the self-talk becomes conditioned and automated.

The self-talk and the things we say to ourselves are either going to work for us, or against us. We want the self-talk to work for us, we want the correct kind of self-talk that are going to bring us up, rather than put us down.

Here’s a way that you can change that negative self-talk to more positive and beneficial ones:

1. Be Self-Aware and Accept the Negative Self-talk – you need to first become aware on what negative self-talk you have, and accept that it’s something that’s not doing you any favors. Recognise that it needs to be something that you need to change.
2. Change the Self-Talk by replacing it – whatever negative self-talk you have, change it by replacing it with something more positive.
3. Practice makes perfect – Because it’s true, practice makes perfect. You have to keep saying this new self-talk to yourself until it becomes automatic, and it’s something you do without even thinking about it. Just like how you would eventually believe a lie you tell yourself over and over, the more times you say the new self-talk, the more you believe it.

Read more on how to change your self-talk in this blog post where everything just mentioned here will be expanded!

6 – Build New Habits & Break Bad Ones

From the book: The Compound Effect & Atomic Habits

This is a pretty obvious one. Habits make up your life. They are automatic, you do them without even thinking about it.

You either have good habits that are bringing you closer to where you want to be, or habits that are bringing you further away.

Regardless, managing our habits is an extremely practical way to get your life together. Because when you think about it, when your habits are all over the place, it’s hard to get everything together.

For instance, if your eating habits are all over the place, it’s hard to get our health together.

If our study habits are all over the place, it’s hard to get our studies in order.

If our work habits are all over the place, it’s hard to get our work in order.

As you can see, habits are a key part in our life, and they either work for us or against us.

If you want to build good habits, you need to remember that it’s going to take time for you to see the results. Whether you start building good study habits, eating habits, or exercise habits, it’s going to take time to see results. Don’t fall into the instant gratification trap and give up when you don’t see anything in a short time. Read more about how to keep up with your good habits in this blog post.

If you want to break your bad habits, you need to really reflect on why you do that habit. You have to think about why you do those bad habits. Are you more into doing the habit, or you just like the feeling you get from doing that habit? Either way, if it’s not doing you any good, it’s something that you want to change. Hence, you can break your bad habits by finding a replacement habit, or make sure that you set yourself up for success through your environment.

I have heaps of blog posts on habits that you can read, and how to start habits.

Definitely read those blog posts to help you get started in developing better habits and breaking bad habits to get your life together!

7 – Start Finding Your Passion

From the book: Delusion of Passion

I can picture people doing some eye rolls on here.

I know that if I was reading this blog post two years ago, I probably would’ve rolled my eyes. Growing up, I’ve heard “find your passion” over and over again. I grew up with the idea that finding my passion means that I’ll live every day doing what I love, and make every single day exciting because I’m doing my passion.

However, I was dead wrong on that, along with many other delusions of passion. Yes, passion is extremely important, but it’s not the whole picture.

Yes, you need passion, but there are so many things that you need to succeed other than just your passion.

You may have probably thought that finding your passion means that you’re never going to experience pain – no it’s not true. Find your passion means pushing through the challenges and obstacles that get in the way. Because you’re passionate about what you do, it’s your driver to keep on going.

You may have thought that find your passion means that there are never going to be any problems – dead wrong. Finding your passion means giving you the spark to navigate the storm of those problems.

You may have thought that before you commit to something, you need to be passionate about it. The truth is, you need to commit to it, do that something, then decide that you’re passionate about it.

For example, I’m passionate for creating content for this blog, but it doesn’t mean that I never experience pain. There are many challenges that come with creating content, but because I am passionate about it, it gives me motivation to keep on going, despite how hard it is.

Being passionate for content creating doesn’t mean that there are no problems… there are so many problems that happen along the way when it comes to this blog! But because I’m passionate about creating content, it gives me the spark to storm through those problems.

And I didn’t decide that I was passionate for creating content until I spent over a few months doing it! The truth is, I didn’t like writing that much, but I discovered that I was passionate for creating content that I love doing. Passion comes at the end of the process.

So you want to find that passion to give you that spark and motivation. You want to find that passion to one day help inspire you and others. Read my blog post on the habits you need to find your passion, so that you can find your passion in an easy way!

8 – Sharpen the Saw

From the book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The ultimate practical way to get your life together is to sharpen the saw. This concept came from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where it mentions to devote time to renewing ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially.

This is extremely important because it’s one thing to start doing habits that are going to improve your life, but it’s another to keep maintaining them.

You are your best investment. You are your greatest asset, that’s why this is an extremely important way to get your life together. Here is one example on how you can implement all the practical ways mentioned so far, into any area of your life.

Physical Health

• Have goals to help you remember why you need to take care of your health. Always think about the end in mind, the end result of what would happen if you continue with your habits. (from #1 – Have Goals Help You Grow)
• Make your health a priority! Health is wealth. If it declines, it’s going to be hard to do everything else in our life. (from #2 – Set Your priorities)
• Add value to yourself – invest in your health! Invest time in exercise and preparing healthier meals. Invest money in helping you improve your health. (from #3 – Add Value to Yourself)
• Get the action habit – obviously, you need to take action to improve your health. (from #4 – Get the Action Habit)
• Have good self-talk when it comes to taking care of your health. Avoid negative statements and replace it with uplifting statements (from #5 – Work on Your Self-Talk)
• Develop better health habits, break the bad ones. (from #6 – Build & Break Habits)
• Become passionate for taking care of your health. Yes, there may be challenges along the way when doing those habits, but remember your end result. Remember what you want and don’t want. (from #7 – Find Your Passion)
• Sharpen that Saw (from obviously #8 – Sharpen that Saw) – work on maintaining all your habits to continue to consistently improve your health.

By going through the 8 practical ways that we mentioned so far, you think about how you can best invest the time to improve and maintain those other areas of your life. You can do this same thing for all the others areas.

Develop Yourself Daily

From the Book: 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

Last but not least, I’ll leave you with one more book inspiration.

When it comes to improving your life, you always want to develop yourself daily.

Personal growth requires consistency and patience. If you want growth, you have to work for it. You have to be willing to go through those challenges along the way to have that growth.

That’s why, it’s so important to make it a daily priority to implement different ways to get yourself together. We mentioned these 8 practical ways to get your life together, from nine different books so that you can always take steps in moving closer to the goals that you want to achieve, and the person that you want to become.

Develop yourself daily, grow yourself daily, be kind to yourself daily. You can do it!

-Lauren 😊

Books this post was inspired by:

(not sponsored in any way!)

• The Magic of Thinking Big – David Schwartz
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
• Developing the Leader Within You – John Maxwell
• What to Say When You Talk to Yourself – Shad Helmstetter
• The Go-Giver – Bob Burg
• The Compound Effect – Darren Hardy
• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – John Maxwell

Disclaimer: These are not affiliate links in any way! These are just links to lead you to the books if you’re interested in reading a summary of it, or getting it yourself. There’s no profit or commission that I’ll receive, they’re just links that I think could help you know more about the books.

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