How often do you engage in activities that you truly love?
I remember a story about a conference for medical professionals. One of the presenters was a researcher who was concerned about the low quality of health for many doctors (and related health workers).
She asked those attending to think of their very favorite activity. It could be skiing or a vacation in a cabin in the mountains. Then she asked them to raise their hand if they had engaged in their favorite activity in the last year. Surprisingly, less than half raised their hand! And this was with people who (mostly) could certainly afford what they wanted to do.
How about you?
Do you regularly engage in your favorite activities, the ones that you love?
I’ll tell you four easy ways that you can increase the amount of time doing what you love to do.
- The first tip is to identify what you love to do. This may sound obvious, but many people really don’t know. But anyone can think about it, with focus, and come up with a short (or long) list.
One way to identify what you love is to think about activities that truly keep you “engaged”. This is when you lose track of time (or time seems to speed by), and you don’t want to be doing anything else. You are totally immersed in the activity – your “self” kind of disappears and you may often be in a state of “flow”.
In fact, it is the “engagement” in the activity that you truly love.
2. Learn to develop “engagement” in more activities. You can expand your list of things you truly love. I’ve learned over the years that any activity I can become “immersed” in will be enjoyable to me.
Someone else might “do” the same activities, but not be engaged or immersed, and thus NOT be enjoying the time spent. In fact, I can sometimes do this, if I’m distracted (not focused or present) and think that I don’t have time for this enjoyable activity.
So by understanding about engagement, you can make sure and be focused and immersed in your activities. This will make your enjoyable activities even more so. And, you can actually learn to engage in more activities, even those you must do as a part of life and that you may not enjoy now.
The “engagement” also helps you to understand why you can enjoy activities that others do not (and vice versa). I am deeply engaged when I go trail running, but many others are not. I know lots of people who enjoy river running or waterskiing, whereas when I have done those activities I can’t wait to be done.
3. Choose some activities to enjoy, that you can enjoy daily (or nearly so). A trip to a cabin in the mountains is wonderful, but you can’t do it every week. It takes a lot of effort setting up, and it takes quite a bit of time. The same can be true of any activity that requires a lot of equipment, or the cooperation of many people. I truly love playing Ultimate Frisbee (Frisbee Football), but it’s not something I can do on the spur of the moment. It requires at least ten other people.
It’s fine to have those enjoyable activities, but ALSO have some you can do often and easily. Trail running takes a commitment of a few hours (and at my age, some recovery days), but I also enjoy playing Word Streak on my iPad, which takes two minutes.
4. The final tip to enjoying more activities in life is to try more activities. Sometimes we get in our comfort zones and refuse to try something new.
Do you know the difference between a rut and a groove?
The difference is in how hard it is to get out of it. We all get into grooves of doing things that work for us, but sometimes they may develop into ruts if we let them go for too long.
Try a new app, or a card game, or snowshoeing, or mountain biking, or yoga, or Tai Chi. One good way to try new activities is to see what activities your friends and family really love to do. Give some a real try!
You won’t like everything, and that’s fine. I’ve been golfing twice, and that will suffice. I really don’t like it. But I DID try it.
To sum up, you’ll enjoy life more if you identify what you love, truly engage in your activities, find some quick and easy activities you can do daily, and always try some new activities each month.
Christopher
Bio: Christopher is the author of “I Create Reality: How to Use Holographic Creation to Manifest Your Desires”. He loves to read, write, create websites, and run up mountains for fun. Click here for a video on Nine Manifesting Secrets and Tools
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