Do you want your life to be better in 2022 than it was in 2021? And better the year after that?
This time of year, lots of people are making resolutions, setting goals, and changing habits. But for many of us, there is a better way we can improve our life.
This way takes less effort, and it has a higher upside for leap-ahead progress. It’s actually fun, and it can add a sense of adventure to our day-to-day life.
There’s nothing wrong with resolutions, goals, or habits. But those approaches are at best incomplete, and this contributes to them often being ineffective. Sometimes, they are limiting by keeping us so focused on the details that we miss the big picture of how life really works.
Because we miss the breakthroughs we can experience.
What is a “breakthrough?” It is a dramatic discovery or development that changes our life significantly for the better. Sometimes they come upon us unexpectedly, but we can find them more readily if we choose to look for them.
Too often in our heads-down pursuit of self-help and do-it-yourself improvement, we lose sight of the sense that life is meant to be an adventure. We can reclaim that sense of wonder by searching for epiphanies—as well as treasures and miracles—and recognizing them as breakthroughs that can change our life in a way we would not have experienced otherwise.
We all want life to be better. It can be, and it is meant to be. And we can help make it so by embarking on a journey of discovery to find and enjoy breakthroughs along the way.
We All Yearn for Something More
Has this thought ever crossed your mind: “Isn’t life supposed to be better than this?”
At times, all of us become aware that there is something—maybe multiple somethings—missing from our life. It almost feels like there are holes in our life, gaps where it seems that something important is supposed to be instead of what’s there now.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are all yearning for something more.
If we pause to think about it, we may notice that there are things we deeply desire or dream about, and we may not know how to go about finding them. Or, we can choose to disregard that desire, get by with the angst of that yearning, and cover it up with busy-ness.
I’ve been there.
As a teenager, I didn’t develop healthy coping mechanisms to deal with the insecurities of my youth. In my 20s, my view of the world was largely selfish, temporal, and short-sighted. Even into my 30s and beyond, I didn’t understand important concepts like community, meaning, purpose, identity, and contribution. In other words: “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
I had lived what seemed from the outside to be a successful, productive life, and I had lots of fun along the way. But in the most important areas of life, I was barely at the starting line.
But life-changing breakthroughs were waiting for me in the future.
I’ll pause here to make an important observation: Many of us do not experience life to the fullest because we don’t learn from the experiences of others. That’s something recovery taught me well, that we can learn a great deal from hearing how other people have gone through life, from their successes and perhaps even more from their troubles and tough times.
I also believe that there are many similarities in our life journeys. The circumstances are often much different, and we each choose our own worldview and mindset for how we perceive the world to be. But there are common things we all yearn for, and we can learn from the experiences of others how to go about discovering breakthroughs along our journey.
In this article and those to come in this series, I’ll share some stories of what we yearn for in life and the breakthroughs that can change everything. We can benefit from the experiences of others, and we can learn how we can discover breakthroughs in our life.
John’s Story (Part 1: The “Before”)
John is an “average guy.” He is a 43 year-old businessman who lives in Birmingham, Alabama. He is married and has 2 kids, plays golf and hunts with buddies, and attends church regularly. He is successful at work, lives in a nice house, and seems to have it all together.
John’s life is pretty normal, and he stays busy with work, family, hobbies, and other activities. Even though he has friends, there are none that he is vulnerable with, and he is not comfortable thinking about “feelings.” Because his life has moved forward at a positive and predictable pace, he has never taken the time to identify a set of values or set many goals other than financially.
John doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Although he is unaware of it, there are constricting beliefs (“inner voices”) that have been in his head since he was a teenager, and he has never thought much about his worldview. He has only rarely considered concepts such as meaning, purpose, and identity, and his spiritual life is marked more by routine than worship.
When faced with trials, he has tended to grit his teeth and get through. He is not conscious of how much of his energy is consumed by busy-ness, distraction, and pursuit of comfort. Deep inside, John feels frustration and discouragement more than he admits. He is not deeply aware of his short-comings and is in denial about how his drinking has escalated over the last decade.
Recognizing Breakthroughs In Our Life
A good approach to life is to ensure we’re heading in the right direction and keep taking small steps forward. That is an effective way to handle each day, and we can live happy, satisfying lives by making positive progress, one step and one day at a time.
But sometimes we can also achieve breakthroughs in our life.
As a reminder, a breakthrough is a dramatic discovery or development that changes our life for the better. They often happen unexpectedly, but we can discover them more readily if we only choose to look for them.
Our discovery of breakthroughs often begins when we become aware that something is missing from our life and that we are yearning for more. That is actually a good thing, because now: ”We know what we don’t know.”
It is a healthy process when we begin to ask important questions such as:
- How do I develop community so it’s not all about me anymore?
- Where do I find meaning in my life, and what is my purpose?
- What is my identity, and what is my contribution meant to be?
Along the way, we may experience an occasional epiphany that allows us to understand something important in a new and clear way. Some occur as small “Aha!” moments of clarity, while others present the opportunity to transform our entire life.
Which leads us to a crisis.
A “crisis” is a time when an important decision must be made. Our epiphanies present us with a choice: do we accept this new insight and integrate it into our life, or do we set it aside and go on with business as usual. Those moments are critical points in our life, one way or the other.
It gets even better, because we can also find treasures and experience miracles along our journey.
A “treasure” is when we find joy in the little things in life, such as a sunset, a kind comment, a task we find pleasant, or something nice we do for someone else. We can find pleasure and gratitude almost anywhere if we choose to look for it.
A “miracle” is an extraordinary event that brings welcome consequences. More often than we imagine, they happen when God directly and supernaturally intervenes in our life. Think about that some more: We can experience miracles in our life, once we know to look for them!
Let’s summarize: Along our life journey, we will face occasional epiphanies that give us insight we didn’t have before. In that moment, we are presented with an opportunity to change our life for the better and achieve a breakthrough. Day to day, if we keep our eyes open, we can recognize these epiphanies, and we can find treasures and experience miracles as well. Wow!
Life can be a wonderful adventure of discovery, and we can find breakthroughs along the way.
When We Settle for Something Less
Again, there’s nothing wrong with resolutions, goals, and habits. Using those approaches as tools or means-to-a-bigger-end can lead to positive results if approached the right way.
But on their own and in the long run, these approaches are incomplete and limiting. They can keep us so focused on controlling our results on our own that we lose sight that life is meant to be a wonderful adventure of discovery. We limit the upside opportunities we are meant to experience in life if we forget to search for leap-ahead breakthroughs along the way.
Because we are designed to yearn and strive for something more, not settle for something less.
Resolutions – A “resolution” is a firm decision to do or not do something, and they’re popular at New Year’s. The problem is that they often don’t work. Research from the University of Scranton reports that only 8% of people achieve their New Year’s goals. Why is that? Because they’re often negatively motivated by will power or guilt. And we can become so focused on what we ought to do that we may miss opportunities to live life better that appear along the way.
Goals – Generally, a “goal” is seen as a measurable outcome we define as success. A problem with goals is that we don’t control outcomes. Declaring victory by hitting a pre-set number can be misleading, and achieving goals often creates only a temporary change in our behavior. Sometimes, goals limit our happiness if we postpone gratification rather than finding purpose and joy along the way, and they restrict leap-ahead potential by focusing our attention only on the goal we chose.
Habits – A “habit” is something we do often in a regular and repeated way. Experts like James Clear, BJ Fogg, and Dr. Caroline Leaf say the best way to build good habits is by taking a series of small steps, which is great advice that I heartily endorse. Because we can control our choices, which are the steps we take. But it’s a problem if habits limit our focus on important areas, artificially satisfy us with the mundane, or blind us to epiphanies and breakthroughs.
Are you settling for something less in life? In addition to the daily tasks you need to accomplish, do you have a sense of wonder and anticipation? Are you open to discovering breakthroughs?
Here are 10 questions to help you see how your perspective on breakthroughs is affecting your life:
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- Are you open to changes that could lead to leap-ahead improvement?
- Are you positively motivated to make the most out of opportunities?
- Do you find excitement and joy in how you go about living each day?
- When you go to bed, are you content with how you lived that day?
- Is “success” defined as performance and perfection or progress?
- Do you focus on the most important things or the most urgent?
- Do you deal with problems you face in a positive, effective way?
- Are you constantly learning and growing to be all you can be?
- Do you want life to go your own way or for it to go God’s way?
- Do you see life as a chore or an exciting journey of adventure?
Life can be an adventure of discovery if you search for breakthroughs versus settling for less.
(… this story to be continued in Part 2 coming next week!)
Question: Do you want to discover breakthroughs in your life?
Action: See Part 2 of this story, and “Get the Blog“ if you don’t now.
