How To Create the Life You Want

When you look around your life, is it the life you really want to live?

In this episode of Alison Answers, Alison talks about what it really takes to create the life you want, and why so many people stay stuck wanting more without ever stepping into it.

This episode is about identity, honesty, awareness, and the patterns that quietly shape your results.

Because before you can change your life, you have to be willing to look at where you are, get honest about what you want, and ask a deeper question:

Who do I need to become to create the life I say I want?

If you’ve been feeling stuck, repeating the same patterns, or wanting more but not knowing how to move forward, this episode will help you start seeing your life with more clarity and power.

In this episode:
00:00 Intro
01:17 Is this the life you really want?
03:31 The Whole Life Inventory
05:16 Awareness, acceptance, and action
07:27 Getting honest about what you want
13:03 Meeting the part of you that feels stuck
20:10 Finding the program running your life
23:20 Deciding who you are becoming
28:34 Changing the identity keeping you stuck

Connect with Alison:

• Instagram: @alisonanswers | @lagercounseling
• Website: LagerCounseling.com
• YouTube: Alison Answers
• Facebook: Alison Lager Lcsw Casac
• Purchase Alison’s book: “The Wake Up Call”
• Alison Answers Facebook Group: Join HERE
• Women of Excellence FB group: Join HERE

⚠️ Crisis Resources:
Lager Counseling Services
Call: 516-221-2123
Text: (914) 363-0381
Wantagh: 3408 Park Ave. Wantagh, NY 11793

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Call or text 988 | Visit 988lifeline.org

Transcript

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When you look around your life, is it the life that you really want to live? Most people want more money than they have. Most people want better relationships than they have. Most people want a different life than they have, but they spend their whole lives wanting it without ever getting it. And a lot of people are doing that in their life. They're trying to get somewhere without understanding where they are. So how are you supposed to do it if you don't know the steps to get there? We have the power within us to change our entire life for good and forever. And we do not understand the incredible power that we have. So, how would I become the version of myself that has the thing that I want? Hey guys, how are you today? It is Allison from Allison Answers and Lager Counseling Services. I want to talk to you guys about something that's very dear to me, very serious to me, and it really, really matters. And it has a lot to do with our identity and living the life that we want. I took a lot of notes for myself so I would stay on track, but this is really coming from my heart and where I'm coming from and how I do believe that this will help you to change your life and become the version of yourself that you really want to become. You know, I want to ask myself the question, and I'm also asking you like when you look around your life, is it the life that you really want to live? And what very, very often, the majority of people, when they look at different mass studies, um, most people are dreaming and looking forward and looking to the life that they really, really want to live, which is cool because we're growing beings, we're creative beings, and we want to, we have dreams and we have desires and goals. And that's healthy. But the part that's very, very difficult for most human beings is believing that we can achieve the dreams that we want, or just even basic things that we believe we can get to in our life. So this is really a lot of what my book is about. And I'm gonna get into that in a bit. My bit, my book is about creating the life you want, but part of creating the life you want is knowing the life you have and also knowing the life that you actually do want. You know, this isn't like when you look at your life and you say, okay, maybe it's my finances, maybe it's, you know, maybe it's my relationships, maybe it's like the way that I've um how I am socially, emotionally, spiritually. There's so many different avenues. Most people want more money than they have. Most people want better relationships than they have. Most people want a different life than they have, but they spend their whole lives wanting it without ever getting it. And that's something that's my mission is to help people not stay there and to crush mediocrity and to make it so that we don't, we aren't a people who stay in a spot just because of our old childhood wounds and the things that happened in our life. So most people think the answer is to like work harder. I don't think so. I believe in hard work and I do work hard. However, I don't believe that is the solution, the only solution to this. And um, I believe the life that I'm living today is the natural result of everything that I've done in my life up till now. And it's a it has to do also with the identity that I have created up until now, right? So, what I ask people to do is to really take a look at the life that they have and break it down. In my book, I talk about something called the uh whole life inventory. And for me, for me to change, I need steps. I need steps that are very clear. Okay, what do I do to actually get where I want to go? And I love when people like number it out. Do this first, do this next, and do the next thing. So I'm just gonna sort of do that with you. So you have to get really honest with where you are today. So, as I said, we have this thing in my book because it's an interactive read where you do journaling as well. And in that book, it's called, you know, the wake-up call, uh, an interactive guide to helping you create the life you want. And first of all, the first step is being able to stop and take a snapshot and look at all the different areas of your life that are really important to you financially, emotionally, spiritually, socially, relationally, uh, vocationally, uh, spiritually, and leisurely, how you have fun, right? So when you just look at that and you take an honest appraisal of that, what ends up happening? So the thing is that it we have to take a look at all the different areas of our life, but without judgment. And that's the hardest part because if you look and you take a snapshot of your finances and then you immediately judge it, what ends up happening is you cannot change because judgment is the very reason that you have the finances that you have, right? So what we need to do is be able to really truly change is to be able to be in a state of acceptance. First, you're aware. So I've said this to you guys lots and lots of times that it's awareness, acceptance, action, right? So first you understand where you are financially, then you accept it without judgment in order to make the moves and do the things that are necessary in order to redirect and reconfigure that identity. So in my book, I have this whole life inventory, as I mentioned, right? I don't want you to explain it, to to like judge it, to like feel ashamed about it. None of that helps because that's how that's how we got there in the first place. You don't defend it, right? So you just take a snapshot, and awareness is the answer. Awareness is a king. So it's where actually all your power lies. Being awake and aware in the now without judgment is your power. So you can't change anything that you're unwilling to see, that you're unwilling to just identify and say, Yeah, this is the facts. You know, every time I get a certain amount of money, I lose that amount of money. Just own it. That is the biggest part. Honesty, truth is the pathway to all freedom. And then you're not going to get to freedom without truth. It's the only way to get there, right? So the next step is once you've taken a real look at all of these different areas of your life, and you can just choose one. So let's say you know you want a relationship that's different than all the previous relationships that you've ever had in your life. And then you say, okay, here's my snapshot of this. My history, my pattern is blank. You know, so whatever your pattern is, whatever your relationships have been, answer that. Say, okay, that's what it is. Now, what do I want it to be? Right? That's going to be another step along the way. So, number two is you got to get honest about what you actually really want. So you look at what, where you are. The only way to get from from to the where we want to be is to know where we are first. You know, in the mall when they have the little, the little sign, how are you supposed to know how to get to Bloomingdales if you don't know where you're standing at the moment that you're in? And a lot of people are doing that in their life. They're trying to get somewhere without understanding where they are. And what needs so, how are you supposed to do it if you don't know the steps to get there? And you can't if you don't know where you are, right? Okay, so it sounds simple to get honest with what you want, but I have to tell you, that has been my biggest struggle. It is very, very difficult. You ask people, what do you want? And to really, really identify and hone in on what you want can be a challenge. To really, because I do believe that when we have a belief system inside of us that says we're not worthy of the thing that we want, it's very, very hard to say, yeah, actually want it. Or if it seems so far-fetched from something that you're able to have, it is very difficult to identify it. So I'm asking you to almost go outside of your comfort zone. First, number one, look at where you are in all those different areas. Number two, really, really get serious about honing in on the details of what you want. And you can do it in all those different areas if you'd like. You know, what do I really want financially? And like, who doesn't want a billion dollars? A lot of people don't want a billion dollars. And the reason they don't want a billion dollars are they vary, those reasons because of their money mindset, the way they believe about things. So once you do that, you want to ask yourself, what do I want? Not what anyone else wanted for you, not what society wants for you. Because remember, what society wants is a pretty um clear picture of a path that a lot of people just follow because they have not made a decision what they actually want and identify themselves as individuals with a creative power that they co-create with their creator and understanding that we are all unique and that we don't all have to follow the same path. But some of us are very programmed to believe that this is the only path you can follow. Next, what is it? It's not what society expects, not what feels realistic. And that's the tough part too, because if you're programmed and you keep seeing the same outcomes over and over again, clearly you're programmed for those outcomes. So naturally, the thing that you want, you're it's not going to come naturally to you to write down what you want if it is in opposition to what you already have gotten, to what you already know. Because if you only are returning to the way that you think or the things that you've already learned, it is not possible to create something new. We don't create something new out of something that we already know. It's new, so it needs to have outside of the box thinking. Does that make sense? And it may not feel comfortable to identify it, but you want to be bold in this. What is the risk of even just writing it down? You're not going to hurt anyone. No one even has to know about it, except for you, right? So what would my life look like? So we're still getting honest about what we want. What would my life look like if I truly believed I deserved joy, peace, whatever the houses that you want, the relationship that you want? What would it actually look like? What would it feel like? What would the texture of it be? What would it, what would I experience if my life was the way that I really, really dream of it being? What would that be like? You know, what would it be like if I had abundance and connection? Think about it. Ask yourself those questions. Allow yourself to dream without editing anything. Don't edit it. Okay. Because clarity creates. So let me just tell you something really important. I'll tell you from my own experience. I have wanted a lot of things and at the same time haven't wanted them. And it has kept me from getting them. So I'll give you a lot of examples that different people have wanted. So sometimes people want a certain kind of a relationship, but they believe that if they have a relationship just from what they learned in their childhood, just from what they learned, you know, in their own previous experiences, their own disappointments, they might believe that if I have a relationship, I will be hurt. Or if I have a relationship, um, I will lose freedom. Or if I have a relationship, I won't be able to have or do the dreams that I want to have. Or if I have a, you know, if I have this kind of relationship, this thing will happen. So while they're wanting it, they're also not wanting it. So you have these two opposing ideas. So then I think the coolest thing to do is if you want a relationship that you can want a relationship that does not take away your freedom. You can want a relationship that will not produce hurt. So instead of attaching meaning to this thing that you want, or if I want a house on the beach, there'll be a hurricane. How about I want a house close enough to the beach and I know I want a house that's safe from hurricanes, that I can see the ocean. Do you see? So you want you have to take care of your concerns that are keeping you from wanting and really identifying what you want in that way. So that's number two. Number three, hold on. Number three is meet the part of yourself that is still stuck. So this right here is very has been very painful for me as an experience, but it is so worth it. If you don't do it, it you're kind of really missing out on an incredible, incredible life. So many people call this, like I call it inner child work because I've been a therapist for my whole adult life, and that's a lot of what we have always called it. It's when you identify the part and the time of your life where you developed certain beliefs that have continued to run the rest of your life. Other people call it shadow work because the little child becomes disconnected from the rest of your life and is kind of in the shadows and stuck there in a belief that I'm not good enough, in a belief that, you know, I can't have what the other little girls have. I can tell you one of my inner child things that I have had to really continue to um move through is and not stay stuck in is to help to grow that part of myself up that never really got attention from my father. The part of me that just never felt like, wow, like I don't have, I'm I don't have what it takes to be seen as special or beautiful in a man's eyes, right? In a father's eyes. And also another thing, you know, believing that I was different than other children in the neighborhood because I lived in a very, you know, pretty well-off neighborhood, but my parents were hippies. So like my my house was, I thought, just a wreck. And I was always trying, that's a protector part. I'm always trying to like make sure I had a beautiful things were clean and organized, but no one else was doing it. And I was the youngest little girl. So you can imagine then how that would affect. I always believed that no matter how hard I worked, I could get to a certain point, but I'm never gonna have what other girls have. I'm never gonna have the princess bedroom. I'm never gonna have the great, great, great um attention from the right kind of person. So if you think about it, and I have watched that play out in my life in different ways. You know, always, no matter how beautiful my home is, always feeling like it's not clean enough. It's not good enough. And that right there is something that will block you from getting where you want to go in your life. So you want to identify things like that that are keeping you stuck, that are playing over and over and over again every single day of your life in the background. You don't even realize it's influencing and impacting what your outcomes are. And it's really important if you can face this, it's not hard to do, you can do it five minutes at a time. Give that little child a voice. Also, one of the exercises that I give clients to do, and I've done myself, I actually just did some this morning, is I will have them write, dear little Allison, dear big Allison. So whatever your name is, so it can be that you, the little, your younger you writes a letter to your older you. So it's actually a dialogue back and forth. So dear, dear big um Mary, uh, you know, I don't know why you left me here. You um, so it's really talking to the part of yourself that's split off from you, that decided to move on and leave the part of you that doesn't feel good enough, that feels lost and alone, or doesn't can't express themselves. There's so many variables to that. But that have that little girl describe what it feels like to be, you know, nobody loves me, I'm here by myself, no one sees me, I'm, you know, I'm in distress, or how come no one will clean this house, or how come no one will pay attention to me? And then the older you, the can the big you, big Mary, will write back. Sometimes what will happen, I would not suggest immediately writing back something you don't feel. If you don't feel love and warmth toward that younger part of you, don't say it. Initiate with honesty. A lot of therapists will tell you, just, you know, give love. I don't agree with that, unless you feel the love. So if you feel things about that part of you that's like feels neglected or dirty or unseen or whatever, there may be a part of you who's like, just be quiet. You know, the only way you're gonna get it, get attention is if you clean yourself up and if you behave and you clean that room or whatever it is, and you want to be able to identify as the older version of you where there is that self-loathing, where there is that part of you that abandoned another part of you, a younger part of you, and has really nothing but criticism inside for it. And that can it, that can be part of this voice that's in your head that's always like, oh, stop, what did you do that for? Oh my God, that's so stupid. Remember that you want to say the thing, let the child express whatever they feel, and then there's something, it's magical. I've done it, it's really incredible. Because the only context that a little child can grow in is a context of love and acceptance. So if you actually play that out in your mind, in your imagination, that our our body doesn't know if it's real or not, what ends up happening is you can allow an atmosphere for that inner child of yours to um emotionally develop and become more and more and have a sense of feeling loved and all of that. And you can move through um like releasing like stuck, stuck emotions and stuck energy that really needs to get out of your body and stop creating because we're always creating, always, always, always, always, right? Just like our heartbeats, we're creating because we're creators. So here anything that you hear inside of yourself, I'm not enough, I'm I'll be rejected. You know, if you're not doing things because you believe you'll be rejected, you have a some sort of core belief that you'll be rejected, right? So I'll never succeed, or you believe you'll only get to a certain point. We have caps. We believe we can have this amount of money, but not this amount of money. We believe we can have this kind of relationship, but not this kind of relationship. We believe we can have this kind of social life, but not this kind of social life, but then we long for and dream of. So so we need to reconsider that what can I have? And what you believe you can have, you can create. Next, find the program. This is number four, find the program that's been running your life. The patterns, they don't they simply just don't lie. You have to know what the program is that's running your life. It could just be one sentence, right? So if the same disappointments keep showing up and showing up and showing up, you have to ask yourself some questions, right? What belief would someone have to hold in order for this to keep creating itself? What would I, what belief would I have to have in order for me to continue to have this amount of money in my bank account? What would I need to believe in myself in order for this negative thing to keep repeating? You have that's how you identify what your belief is. You know, the question could be, you know, I'll always be abandoned, right? So then that outcome will ensue. You know, I'm I I have to be perfect in order to be loved, can be another belief, right? So then as soon as you're not perfect, right? As soon as like any chink in the armor is there, you're left, or you feel left, or you create it that you're left. You know, there's so many you want to hear what the program is that's running the outcomes of your life. I don't deserve success, I'm too much, I'm not enough, um, you know, our beliefs create our emotions, right? So, well, actually, our beliefs are a combination of the thoughts we think and the emotional um experience we're having with that. And that creates beliefs because the emotional intensity that we experience in our body is very, very impactful in our approach. Programming, right? So our behaviors will create results, but our thoughts and beliefs and emotions that are related to that can make it so that they go away, right? Our results can reinforce our beliefs. So if you continue to, if you believe that you're never enough, and then you end up finding yourself with these disappointments, that will just add to the evidence of what you already believe until you interrupt it. And these are all cycles. We have the power within us right now to change our entire life for good and forever. And we do not understand the incredible power that we have. And that's really what my mission is is for people to stop seeing themselves as medium mediocre and understanding that we have incredible power because we're we are connected to infinite love and infinite intelligence. And we are connected to the bodies that are here through our five senses, we see all of these things, but we also have a lot of unseen components to us that are energetic. So you want to decide who you're becoming. And this can be through steps, incremental changes, right? So how would I become the version of myself that has the thing that I want, right? So I have listed here. To me, a decision is a power move. So many people say, I want this, I want that. I like to say, I've decided to have that. And it doesn't matter, you don't have to know how. The decision is the power move. It is also an intention. I have intended and decided to have this kind of relationship. I have intended and decided to have this amount of money. I've intended and decided to live here. I've intended and decided to have these kinds of friendships. Power is in those two things: intention and decision. So you want to ask yourself, who would I need to become in order to create the life that I say that I want? How would that version of me think? How would that version of me love? How would that version of me give? How would that version of me handle difficulties and setbacks? How would that version of me handle a conflict? How would that version of me handle difficult things that make me think that things aren't working out? How would I spend my time? How would I spend my money? How what would I need to learn? Who would I want to be? How would I need to carry myself? What attitude would I need to convey? Who would I need to be internally? How would I need to think about myself in order to be that person who gets the thing that you really want, the experience, the life that you want, right? You want to make sure you're not like punishing yourself for not being there yet. Life is growth. Wherever you've landed right now, today, it's okay because today is the day that a decision can be made that you will be so surprised that just making the decision is incredibly powerful. Please hear me on this. You don't want to, a decision is not like, okay, I wish. Remember that. Don't say I want. It's I've decided. I tell the story about the guy who would be in my office and he would say, I um I want a house. I want a house, I want a house. And all the different circumstances of his life made it so that there was no way he was going to get a house, right? The circumstances. But we do not allow circumstances to identify us. So I would say to him, Could you just do me a favor? Could you just decide to get a house? He's like, Well, how can I? I can't. I didn't forget about how. Could you just decide? Now, every time he would leave my office, he would say, You know what? I'm buying a house. So he just decided, I'm buying a house. You know what? I'm getting into a good relationship. You know what? I'm gonna go, I'm gonna move over there. You know what? I'm gonna have this kind of job. Instead of, I want this, you know what? I have it. You know what? I want it. Not I want it. I'm gonna have it, right? And do you know what that guy bought a house? And it was not a long time after that. His mind decided it, and then our brain, our body will put the right necessary steps in action in order for that thing to happen. We call to us the forces of whatever you want to call it, external forces or invisible forces of this beautiful world, to attention when we've decided something to happen. Okay, so I want you to remember something. No matter what you see in your inventory, you're definitely not failing. All of us, if I told you the things that I would say, oh my God, I can't handle money. I mean, I remember the majority of my life, I didn't have enough money. The majority of my life and what I recognized, I read a book by uh, it's called The Millionaire Mindset. That's where I started. And I just started changing my mindset. I looked at the way my parents thought about money. I looked at everything I learned about money. I looked at what I believed that I could have and what I believed I couldn't have. And I just started transforming that part of myself. But then another thing that I did is that I said, you know what? In order to have money, you have to be a good steward. You have to know how to manage money and what to do with it. So I felt my whole life that I didn't understand anything about money. So, but when we don't understand something, what do we do? We learn. So, what I did, I would, I would start, I started reading books and I started learning about money. I was afraid to do that before. It felt I believed that it was something that I could never learn. However, I have learned so much about money, and now I'm fascinated by numbers and by, you know, how to allocate things and how to how to increase what I have. I never thought like that. But I consciously I decided that I'm going to be a person of success or definitely somebody who's not going to always be living in the red, never again. Like I made that decision. And then I was going to be a person who was going to exceed that, right? But it's the identity. Remember, the way out of wherever you are that you don't want to be is to identify your identity that's keeping you there and the beliefs that support that. And stop looking at outside circumstances in order to identify where you're going. They are not good predictors. They're actually good predictors if you follow them, because then you'll just keep getting what you've always had in your circumstances. Okay. Be blessed. We'll talk again soon.