live the life of your dreams

When you blaze a new path for yourself after 60, you are charting a course to where the life of your dreams lives.

How do you go about this in a way that is practical, accessible, and fun?

By changing your perspective of what you believe is possible for yourself.

In this fourth article of a five-part series for Sixty and Me readers, we’re going to focus on the third step of the 4 Steps to Blaze a New Path for Yourself After 60.

STEP 3: Change Your Perspective On What Is Possible.

Fixed Beliefs Be Gone

The road to becoming a trailblazer after 60 can get a little bumpy. To make it a smoother journey, you will want to recognize and release fixed beliefs and behaviors that disempower you.

Fixed beliefs are your internal perceptions about who you are, what is possible for you, and how things are supposed to work in the outer world.

This includes fixed beliefs such as:

  • How life should be.
  • What you can be, do, and have.
  • Behaviors required to get your desires met.
  • How your desired outcomes must turn out.

Whatever your beliefs are in these and other important areas of your life, how are they serving you today?

For example, early on in life working long, hard hours to get ahead or sacrificing your fun and well-being to take care of other’s needs may have seemed sensible.

But is that true today?

If you still place other people’s needs and wants before your own, this can prevent you from exploring more of your own personal desires, wants, and needs after 60.

For instance, what if you desire to take more leisure time for yourself but don’t because you feel that is being unproductive and lazy? Or maybe you do take time for yourself but feel guilty about it because you feel you should be doing something for someone else.

If you can relate, but don’t take the time to challenge these fixed beliefs, you are building up a tolerance to being stressed.

This causes you to overlook the root cause of feeling physically and mentally exhausted. All of which leads to an unbalanced emotional state.

Removing Unseen Obstacles on Your Path

Fixed beliefs are often the unseen obstacles on your new path in life after 60.

That is why the third step in blazing a new path for yourself involves developing a growth mindset.

A simple way of developing a growth mindset is to shift from fixating on what you believe you have to be or do to realize your desires. Instead, take time to tap into your feelings and emotions as if your desires were already accomplished.

One effective way of doing this is using your childhood imagination to play with your desires through daydreaming.

This is about spending less time lamenting about what you don’t have, or focusing on what is not going well. This frees up your mind to focus on what lights you up.

When you engage in this shift of perception, do so with an open mind by not placing limits on how your desires unfold. For this reason, developing a growth mindset after 60 requires doing something most of us were told was unproductive and unrealistic.

Daydreaming.

Allow Your Imagination to Lead the Way

Author Earl Nightingale wrote many years ago, “Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.”

This is where daydreaming comes in.

Daydreaming nourishes your desires and dreams, while uplifting your emotional state. It is not a waste of time or some guilty pleasure. It is a necessity if you want to walk the path to where the life of your dreams lives.

How do you go about doing this?

  1. Shift from an overly busy lifestyle, and quiet an overly active mind by daydreaming about your desires being fulfilled. You do this by slowing down and going inward at least three times a day, for 10 to 20 minutes.
  2. When’s an ideal time to do this? Preferably in the morning, mid-afternoon, and before going to bed. Another ideal time is whenever you feel stressed, overwhelmed, or anxious.
  3. If you are experiencing racing thoughts, give yourself a prompt, such as focusing on a personal desire that really excites you.
  4. Feel into this desire as if you are literally living it in the moment. Allow your childhood imagination to lead the way.
  5. Journal your thoughts and how you are feeling so you can track your progress.

Whether you call this meditating, daydreaming, or playtime with your imagination, the outcome is the same. You feel better about yourself, you are rejuvenated, relaxed, and much more open to receiving your desires than repelling them.

All of this might be a challenge at first.

But if you are to begin blazing a new path for yourself after 60, changing your perspective on what is possible is how you go from where you are to where the life of your dreams lives.

Join me in the video where I will share additional insights, along with guiding you through three journal prompts to help you integrate what you are learning.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you use daydreaming as a mindset reset tool? What kinds of things do you daydream about? Is it a different kind of life? A hobby? A fun activity? What is hindering your daydreaming?