Your Magical Summer of Intentional Living
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’m building a life that I love, and very little excites me more than partnering with others to do the same. As part of Thought Drop Thursday this summer, I’m inviting you to join me on a journey: not just to dream about a life you love, but to start shaping it… one choice at a time.
If you’ve read my book, The Stories We Tell, you already know the belief at the center of everything I do: the stories we believe shape the lives we create. Most of us are walking around with narratives we never chose and never examined, stories about who we are, what we’re capable of, what’s “too late” or “not for us.” Those stories quietly write our calendars, our careers, our relationships, and our summers. And suddenly, we find we’re living life on autopilot.
So this year, instead of letting summer just happen to me…and to you, I wanted to do something different. In this weekly summer series, I’ll drop one idea, one tool, or one shift in perspective designed to help you move from drifting to designing.
Real change rarely comes from a massive overhaul. It comes from small shifts made consistently. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to walk through what it actually means to intentionally design each area of your life, not in the abstract, but in the specific, practical, Tuesday-afternoon way real life requires.
This isn’t about chasing a “better summer.” It’s about practicing a different way of moving through your days, one where you’re authoring the story instead of just living inside someone else’s draft of it.
This Week’s Tool: The Wheel of Life
To kick things off, I want to give you a tool I use often with my coaching clients: the Wheel of Life.
It’s a simple visual, a circle divided into key areas of life (career, health, relationships, personal growth, finances, fun, and more) – where you rate your current sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in each one. It sounds simple because it is. But simple isn’t the same as surface-level. Most of us are so busy living our lives that we rarely stop to actually look at them, area by area, with any honesty.
The Wheel of Life isn’t here to make you feel behind. It’s here to make you aware. And awareness, as anyone who’s read my book knows, is always step one. You can’t intentionally redesign a part of your life you haven’t honestly looked at yet.
This week’s Wheel of Life, including space to set your one intention for the week, is just for subscribers. It’s the only way to get it, so if you haven’t yet, subscribe below and I’ll send it your way.
Take ten quiet minutes once you’ve got it. Fill it in honestly, not how you wish things looked, but how they actually feel right now. Notice which areas feel solid. Notice which ones you’ve been avoiding. Then, set just one small intention from what you see. Don’t try to fix everything. Just look, and choose one thing.
You don’t need a different life to feel more fulfilled. Often, you need a different relationship with the one you already have. It’s built one honest look, one small intention, and one Thursday at a time.
I’ll be back next Thursday with the next thought drop. Until then: watch for your wheel, notice what you notice, and let’s start crafting your magical life, one circle at a time.
— Liz
P.S. – Know someone who’s also feeling like their life deserves to be more than just “survived”? Forward this along.