By Books Writer Denise Turney

New beginnings are disguised as challenges, setbacks, hardships and, surprisingly, boredom. Feeling bored with the routines in your life? You could be ready to make a change. Does life feel like one hardship, setback or challenge after another?

Somewhere within yourself there could be an ongoing request for you to make a life shift. Sounds great. If only it were easy. One way to make shifting into new beginnings easier is to do the work to get clear about what you truly want.

Do You Really Know What You Want?

Here are a few steps that could help you discover what you really want. Try taking these steps at the same time each day, as this could help you to spot consistency in your thinking. Taking these steps at the same time each day can also help to reveal when and how slight routine changes (i.e., getting out of bed earlier or later, working three extra hours in a single day, hiking for the first time in 10 years) impact your overall convictions, mood, insights and desires.

• Sit still for three to five minutes when you wake. Pay attention to the first thoughts that enter your awareness.
• Write your early thoughts in a journal. Another option is to type your early thoughts in a spreadsheet. This technique can make it easy to spot consistencies and shifts in thoughts that cross your mind.
• Talk with a licensed counselor or a trustworthy friend about areas of your life that concern you. After a month of conversation ask the counselor or friend to tell you about trends in your day-to-day life that they’ve noticed based on what you shared.
• Should you be experiencing an emotion predominantly (i.e., sadness, anger, excitement, fear, hope, peace), sit with a blank journal and ask yourself why this emotion keeps surfacing, sticking to you like glue. Don’t worry. It’s possible to work through any emotion. For now, find out why your mind is functioning the way that it is.
• Before you retire to bed, draw two pictures – one that describes your day and the other that describes how you feel about the day. At the end of the month, look at the pictures with an open mind. Again, see if you spot consistent patterns. Also, take note of changes in the pictures.

How to See Beneath the Surface to Enter New Beginnings

Meditating may prove effective when it comes to surfacing thoughts and beliefs buried in your subconscious. Regardless of the action you choose the biggest investment you will make is time. When it comes to discovering what you truly want, it’s a wise investment.

Give yourself a month. See what you find. As a tip, you might unbury core erroneous beliefs if you practice two or more steps a day.

Another tip is to seek professional support should you feel or think that you need it. Each person is different, and you might need deep subconscious work, the type of work that you need a professionally licensed and experienced therapist to work through.

After you discover what you’re focusing on daily, which emotions are currently dominant in your life and why these emotions keep showing up in your life, it’s time to consider exactly what you want now. Play, becoming a student who’s learning for the first time, and exploration can work wonders with this.

Steps to Shift into New Beginnings

For starters, give yourself 10 minutes a day to play. That’s right. Even adults can play. Pay attention to what you gravitate toward. These following explorative activities could also help you discover what you want:

• Look through different types of magazines (i.e., arts, music, home and garden, fishing, archeology, cooking, education). See if you can spot magazine articles or pictures that capture your attention. Set these pictures and articles aside with journal writings, pictures you drew in the daily practices, etc. Together they could provide strong clues to what you most want to do now.
• Search college course catalogs and see if you’re drawn to a specific course. No need to enroll in a course; for now, you’re simply exploring.
• Ask yourself what you would do if you could do anything that you wanted, considering that the goal is to find work that pays a good income and work that causes you to feel happiness.
• Attend several networking group events, asking attendees what they do and how they enjoy it. Something someone shares might give you insight into what you want to do now.

Stay Open – More New Beginnings are Coming

Throughout the process, keep an open mind. Be open to trying different things too. Keep exploring until you make your life’s new big discovery – surfacing what you most want to do now.

Believe it or not, exploration, asking questions, talking with other people, etc. is how you got to where you currently are. In other words, you’ve already done what you’re trying to do. Because of that, you know you can do it again.

Be patient with yourself. After all, you’re the best friend you have. Make sure you’re a real good friend to yourself. Care enough about yourself to get clear about what you want to do now, to discover how you want your life to change, move and flow.

It might not look like it, but what you’re going through is ongoing. Why? Life in this world is constant motion above and below the surface. Things are always changing in this world.

Ways to Stay Motivated as You Fulfill New Starts

Motivate yourself by celebrating each daily practice, each explorative step, and each action you take to step into new beginnings. Fortunately, there are many ways to celebrate stepping into new beginnings. For example, you could:

• Leave work an hour early, with your manager’s approval if you work for an employer, to celebrate a significant career move, starting a healthy exercise routine, leaving an abusive relationship or seeking help to end an addiction.
• Spend a Saturday simply relaxing, doing no chores – nothing you don’t want to do
• Sleep an hour later the day after you make a change
• Treat yourself to a bowl of fresh fruit or a delicious vegetable smoothie
• Take an out-of-town trip to a town you’ve wanted to visit for months, perhaps years

The list goes on. In fact, for fun – see how many additional ways to celebrate stepping into new beginnings you can add to the list.

Continue until you step all the way inside newness. Journal writings, spreadsheets and other documents you use to record your progress may prove profoundly helpful when you face your next life shift. So, consider keeping those documents. And treasure the change you’re moving through. Stay positive and expect the best.