Many people feel a bit of downtime after the holidays. To avoid becoming demotivated as the new year begins, April Shprintz shares three questions to ask yourself to avoid missing those magic moments in your life, making your seemingly ordinary days a lot more meaningful.
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Are You Missing Magic Moments In Your Life? 3 Ways To Know & Get Them Back!
I am glad you’re here. One of the things I’ve been talking about with people over the past couple of weeks is there can be a little bit of a calm down after the holidays and all the exciting things that have happened. You’re getting into the New Year, but you’re a few weeks into the New Year. You might not be as excited and motivated about things as you like to be. Part of the reason for that can be that you’re missing those magic moments in the day-to-day. There are three questions I have for you that will help you figure out if you’re one of the people who do this. I’m also going to tell you a way to make sure that you don’t miss those moments and allow yourself to have more fun doing all the regular ordinary things of life and still get a lot out of those things that you find big and exciting.
The first question is, are you super goal-oriented and always planning for your future? Don’t get me wrong, this is a great thing. It’s a great attribute. It can be very helpful to you, but if that’s an aspect of your personality, then it’s likely that you could be missing out on the fun parts of being present in the day-to-day. One example from many years ago for me is when I was in the service and I wanted to go to Germany. My big goal was to go to Germany and anchor the news there. The quickest way to get there was to volunteer to do a remote assignment in South Korea. I spent an entire year in South Korea where all I was doing was, “What are the things that I need to do to be a good news anchor for when I get to Germany? Where are the places that I want to visit? What do I want to do?”
Magic Moments: If you are always planning for your future, you could be missing out on the fun parts of your day-to-day life.
Korea itself was this amazing place that I didn’t experience that much because I was constantly fast-forwarding to where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do later, and I missed a lot of it. Think about that. If you find yourself doing that in your day-to-day, or do you often say, “I can’t wait until we’re on vacation? I’ll be excited when the kids are a little older. I’m looking forward to having this role or making more money?” If you find yourself doing that a lot, saying, “I can’t wait until,” you might be missing a lot of wonderful things that are happening right now that you’re going to want to experience. When you look back on them, you’re going to say, “I wished that away.”
If you are constantly fast-forwarding through life, you will surely miss a lot of it. Share on XAn example here with me is when Cowboy was a puppy. I can remember him being crazy and such a little maniac, which I could have enjoyed because puppyhood is short. What I kept saying over and over was, “I can’t wait until he’s two. They say he’ll settle down when he is two.” That came pretty quickly. What’s interesting to me is I don’t remember as much about his puppyhood as I do the rest of his life because as he got older, I was also working on my mindset, being better about being present and enjoying the little moments. Candidly, Cowboy helped me with that because dogs are good at being in the moment. I missed that time because I was focused so much on when it’ll be even better.
Third question. Do you sometimes achieve goals that you’ve been working on and not experience a big rush of happiness, or not even be that excited about the goal at all and feel let down and like, “That isn’t what I thought it would be?” All of these are signs that you are missing the day-to-day magic in your life. The great thing is these are easy to fix and improve and make even better. The first one is to focus on your wins of the day.
We’ve talked about this before, especially if you’ve been tuning in for a long time. If you don’t know a lot about wins of the day, there is a free gift that talks about them and some other mindset exercises on the website, WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com. Go and download it for free there. Having that win-of-the-day list of three things that you’re grateful for and appreciate about your life does a lot to slow you down and focus you on exactly where you are today in your journey.
Magic Moments: Be grateful for your daily wins. Slow down and focus on exactly where you are today in your journey.
The second one is to be present. We do that by focusing on what we’re doing without distractions, whether that’s without multitasking or without your phone, without thinking about all the other things that you have to do next. I know this is hard. This is something that even though at times I feel like I’ve mastered it, other times, I feel like I’ve never learned it. It is something that I’m constantly focusing on myself. One thing that I’ve found that helps with that is trying meditation and allowing yourself to focus your thoughts. If meditation feels a little daunting, try guided meditation because that’s easier for me.
Magic Moments: Meditation is one of the best ways to focus on your thoughts.
That free gift that I mentioned earlier, there’s also a guided meditation with that, and there are lots of places where you can find those so that you can learn to be present in that moment. There’s another one that I have gotten a lot of mileage out of, and this is one I completely made up on my own. When I find that I’m not enjoying the day-to-day moments of my life, I focus on, “What would I want to remember about today, this week, or this month ten years from now? What would be the thing that I would be excited to think about or would make me laugh or would make me smile?”
That can help me bring myself in and be present. The reason that’s important is because the magic of life isn’t so much in those achievements and those exciting times. Those are great but the real magic is when you find a way to have those ordinary everyday experiences be so much fun that you don’t even need those exciting experiences to carry you along like, “At least I’ll have this in February. At least I’ll have this in May. Every day seems fun and exciting.” That means that those big experiences feel even better. Here’s to your success.
