We believe that there are three steps to creating your best life. Foundation, Maintenance, Growth.

It is very easy to get excited by step three. Growth has the allure of promising new experiences, new ways of doing things, the promise of unlocking your potential. This allure often pushes us into that stage only to find ourselves lost, unfulfilled or unable to keep the momentum.

Before trying to get to our new, highly productive, exciting future we need to take a couple of steps backwards. Our foundations need to be solid for us to build on if we want to create our best life.

There are five pillars to the Optima Vita foundations. To work through these can be tough going. We will be adding a reference bibliography to the site in the next couple of weeks with specific recommendations to help through the foundation stages and we will add to this in coming months. We will also be publishing posts with practical advice in each area.

Over the next few days, we will be working through the five pillars of our foundation: Philosophy/Spirituality; Purpose; Curation; Journaling; and Presence.

Philosophy and/or spirituality

This heading may put some people off. To be clear, we are not talking about religion. We are also not talking about a referenced and recognised philosophy.

For some, however, it can be their religion or it can be that they have a strong connection with or even follow a recognised philosophy. For others, it is just about setting out the principles of how they approach life, how they engage with others, how they react to things that happen to them and around them.

The important element is that we create an anchor for ourselves. Something that we can contemplate when reviewing our personal circumstances, things to consider when making decisions. It becomes both a personal reference point when we need one and a source of pride when we behave with consistency and clarity.

To get this pillar right, we need to be honest. If we can’t embrace our chosen approach and know that our behaviours in the most part our going to align to it, then wee should consider what is holding us back. Do we really believe in our chosen philosophy? Do we need to deal with something from our past?

No-one always behaves in a consistent way. Don’t expect too much. We need to be honest with ourselves and know that we are trying though. This can mean understanding and working through our past. It can mean addressing historic trauma. It can also mean making more time to develop our own self control or even to make decisions to avoid triggering situations.

Working through the barriers that are pushing us away from our chosen philosophies is, in itself, the starting point in crafting your best life.

How to establish your philosophy to life

For those that do not have an affiliation to any movement, there are some questions that you can ask yourself to help you define your own philosophy to life. We suggest working through these and writing down your answers. We recommend answering these questions even if you do belong to a recognised religion or philosophical movement.

1. What behaviours to you value in others? Generally speaking, what you value in others is a basis for how you value yourself. Test your thinking here by considering the people you most admire and ensure that their behaviours align with what you value.
2. What material things do you most value? Firstly, it is okay to like things. Many work hard for some of the things that they own. The test here is do you often use or spend time with the thing you value?
3. How do you expect to be treated? This should give you clarity on exactly how you should expect yourself to treat others.
4. What is humankind’s greatest achievement? This will give you a sense of what you expect to aspire to.
5. What is humankind’s biggest mistake? Consider how you avoid being part of that.
6. What do you believe happens when you die? The dozens of possible answers to this question is something which binds hundreds of millions of people together, both religious and non-religious.
7. Do you believe that humankind has a purpose? Something else with many answers that also can drive people’s behaviour.
8. How many people would want to spend time with if you could choose? Don’t consider specific people but think about how many people you would want to see regularly and why you want to see them.
9. What would someone need to do if you decided to cut them from your life? List all of the things that come to mind. This helps understand your personal limits on acceptable behaviour.
10. How long do you expect to live? To be clear this is “expect” and not “hope”. Some say that this is a crazy question. But really you would be amazed how this changes peoples approach to life. It is also amazing how many people haven’t even considered this question.

Wherever you have written these answers, keep it handy and review it once a week of around six weeks. You can edit and change this as you go along. After six weeks you should have your final answers and they should be fairly stable.

From then on, keep these answers in or close to your journal. We shall be referring to these when we move to the Journaling pillar.