How to live your best life - a simple exercise

Live your best life with this simple exercise, done in only a few minutes!

If I gave you a choice today, would you rather live an amazing, awesome life you love? Or would you stick with what you’ve got?

According to Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, if given a choice, we would all want to be living a Level 10 life, fully satisfied in every aspect.

“If we’re measuring our levels of success/satisfaction in any area of our lives, we all want to be living our best lives at a ‘Level 10’ in each area. Creating your ‘Level 10 Life’ begins with creating an honest assessment of where you are.”

Luckily, there are a few ways to achieve your own Level 10 Life. And it starts with a simple assessment.

The Level 10 life assessment

This assessment has also been called the Wheel of Life in many circles. It consists of writing down on a piece of paper 5 to 10 areas of your life that are particularly important to you and rating your level of satisfaction in every area on a scale of 1 to 10.

Life accounts

Michael Hyatt, best-selling author of Living Forward and, more recently, Your Best Year Ever, names the different areas of your life your Life Accounts. Examples are family, contribution, health, finances, marriage, career, hobbies, and so on. For the Level 10 life assessment, select a maximum of 10 life accounts and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 on your current satisfaction in each area.

Ali Abdaal suggests a different take on the assessment. Instead on evaluating your satisfaction, ask yourself how aligned you currently are compared to your ultimate standards.

If you value your health and you’re a couch potato, drinking and smoking, your alignment would be considered poor at best.

Different types of trackers

The way I do it is with a bar tracker, as you can see in the picture below. If you use the Bullet Journal system, you can create a very basic tracker with a pen and ruler.

You can also create a circular tracker using a compass or the very handy Helix Angle and Circle Maker. Here’s my latest spread using the Helix.

I like to journal a few lines for each area, stating what’s working and what’s not, helping me recall my current situation when I look back on my spreads later on.

Reach your level 10

Now that you’ve assessed your current level of satisfaction or alignment in each area, it’s time to act on it.

Select the 3 areas of your life that need the most improvement and create a smart goal for each of them. Setting 3 goals is optimal for me, making sure I can fully concentrate on each of them.

Smart stands for

• S: Specific

• M: Measurable

• A: Attainable

• R: Realistic

• T: Time-bound

Now that you’ve set your new goals, make sure to schedule any actions you need to take to achieve your goals and plan the new habits you will need to implement for your goals to become a reality.

Small steps quickly add up in creating your level 10 life

Quarter planning

Since I’ve read the excellent 12 Week Year book by Brian P. Moran, I’ve been setting quarterly goals. What I like to do is assess my life satisfaction with a Level 10 life spread in my Bullet Journal at the end of every quarter and set my new goals accordingly.

I like to compare my current assessment to the previous one and notice every improvement or lag and celebrate my wins. If you’d like to know more about my quarter-planning process, you can read this blog post.

Review your goals regularly

First, keep your goals list handy and refer to it regularly to make sure that you are putting in the work to achieve them. Make sure you incorporate at least one action for each goal in your weekly planning.

You can use a habit tracker to track the daily habits you will need to take to make progress.

At the end of the quarter, review your goals. Have you accomplished what you’ve set up to do? If so, how satisfied are you now? If not, what could have you done better? Where did you fall short? What will you improve on in the next quarter? Write down all those things and reassess your Level 10 life.

Have you tried this exercise? What did you get from it? Let me know in the comments below.