Welcome to the self care with Marissa Radar podcast. I'm your host, Marissa and I am a certified life coach and self care expert. I'm making it my mission to help busy women build a self care centered lifestyle because self care is so much more than just pampering yourself. Society leads us to believe that basic rights like taking a warm bath or having our hair done is self care. But I'm here to change that narrative. I'm going to teach you how I went from overwhelmed, stressed to the max and burned out on life to thriving and loving the life I'm building and it all started with making a commitment to myself. So what do you say? Are you ready to commit to your own personal development journey? Let me lead you to the path of happiness and contentment. That's right. The one that leads you to a life you truly love. Let's get started. Welcome. Welcome today. I want to talk to you all about how to build your dream life because I think there is this misconception when we use terms like dream life that it means you have multiple vacation homes and need to have millions of dollars and that's just not the case.

I mean there's no question that we all want to lead happy, fulfilling lives, but what does that look like for each of us individually? For many women entrepreneurs, the dream life includes plenty of flex flexibility, creativity and financial independence and that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be bringing in millions of dollars a year in revenue. It might mean that you can use your business to pay for the activities that your kids are in or a simple vacation once a year. But that is up to you. So the first thing that you need to do is to figure out what does your dream life look like? This is your dream life. My dream life is going to look different from every single one of yours. Some people's dream life is to retire their husband and my husband. And I laugh when we hear that because he goes why the heck would I want you to retire me? What am I going to do then? I want to be a farmer. I want to do what I'm doing every day.

So do I need to make enough money every year to retire my husband so he never needs to work again. No do I need to grow a business that he's going to come on and work for me so that we can jet set across the country, nope that's not what our dream life looks like either what it does look like is me getting to help him bring in a hired man so that we can go on vacations or maybe he can start having Saturdays off so we can spend it together as a family. Those are simple smaller things that really our our dream life but we don't need to spend six months in Arizona every year or travel to different countries every other month. That's just not the kind of lifestyle that we want to live. I want to travel a lot, but that's not necessarily what he wants to do. And so we need to make that decision together because we have a collective dream life and so you need to sit down and figure out what yours looks like. What are the things that you most want to achieve, What makes you feel happy and fulfilled, spend some time thinking about this and be just as specific as you possibly can.

The second step in living your dream life is that once you have a general idea of what your life looks like, it's time to make a plan for how to actually achieve it. This might include specific goals or steps that you need to take in order to get there. But it's important to be realistic and give yourself enough time to achieve your goals. For me, I gave myself five years to be able to leave my teaching job. That was realistic to me. I could have ample time to replace my income. I could make sure that I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I left teaching. It didn't feel chaotic to me. It gave me time to have a formulated plan. Now God laughed and I only made it three years in that five year plan before I left teaching. But the key there was that I had a general idea of what my dream life looked like, I knew it didn't include teaching and so I was able to slowly put into place the pieces that I needed to to be able to leave that profession and continue to work with women in the way that I wanted to on my own terms.

Step number three to building your dream life here is to just get started, start taking action towards your dream life. This doesn't mean you have to do everything all at once. In fact, it's often better to take things just one step at a time, just make sure that you're moving in the right direction and taking steps towards your goals, make a list of everything that you're going to need to get there. Once you have your list, you might look at it and say overwhelmed anxiety, inducing panic attack. Any of those feelings are completely valid when you are looking at overhauling your current life to start building your dream life, but I want you to start with the easiest thing and work your way up, don't quit your job and then figure out tomorrow what you're gonna do to replace that income, start with the easiest things and work your way up.

So the best way to start achieving your dream life is to start small and grow bigger. This might include breaking down your goals into smaller steps or starting with something that's relatively easy for you, just make sure that you're moving in the right direction and taking the steps towards your goal. Try not to be stagnant or standing still. There are times in life where it's inevitable, where you're not going to be making huge progress and that is okay. That's part of having realistic goals and a realistic timeline. But when you are taking small steps, it gives you lots of things to celebrate. You decide that you want to grow a business outside of your current job, you want to start a side hustle, celebrate that decision. You decide what you want to do for that business, celebrate again. You buy the domain for the website that you need celebrate again, celebrate even the tiniest accomplishments because guess what?

That celebrating does. It tells yourself that it's important that those steps that you're taking are important and that you should do more of them. So when I first started out, I bought the course, I needed to learn my craft of building teaching resources online because that's where this whole journey started for me, what I laugh now because that seems like years in the past, but it really wasn't that long ago, but I celebrated every tiny win because I bought that course. I celebrated it sat on the shelf, but the day that I picked it back up six months later and took that little action of watching that first video lead me to watch the next video that led me to the next step that led me on to the next step and celebrating those accomplishments. It compounded on itself, it became something bigger than just taking a tiny step, it became a bigger piece of that larger picture that I was trying to build for my life and for my family, even if it seems like the smallest, most insignificant thing, take time to celebrate it, even if It's just giving your spells or your partner or your kid a high five and saying I did it, the next step is that you need to take action every day towards your goal every day.

one of the best ways to achieve your dream life is to take tiny actions every day. This doesn't mean you have to do it all at once. Just take a little bits and pieces of it, string It all together into one big dream life. You also need to keep track of your progress. It's important to stay motivated when you're working towards your goals. And one way to do that is to track your progress. It's as simple as writing down what you've accomplished each week or month. But seeing your progress in black and white can be so inspiring to help keep you motivated inside my weekly planner. I do not use a planner, like a planner is meant to be used. I use the monthly view all of the boxes and I write in my tasks for each day, all my meetings, all my appointments, all those kind of things. use that portion of it, but when it gets to the daily part, I don't write down my to do list there. I write down my affirmations and then down in the bottom little corner, I track what my goals are for that week, based on what my affirmations are, based on what my goal is for the month.

So my wellness goal for the month is that I want to start working Out five days a week, Not just three or 4 like that happened, I want to push my limits, I want to hit five. So what is my goal? My information is, I am capable of working out five days a week. My body needs me to work Out five days a week, whatever my affirmation is, that's going to motivate me to reach that goal and then I track it down below, get to check that little check box every single day that I do it and I feel accomplished and I feel productive and it allows me to celebrate the small wins, make sure that you have some way to track your progress, even if it's just a tiny little spot in your daily planner. The next disclaimer that I want to give you is that you need to be patient with this. It won't happen overnight. And those people that seemed like overnight success stories because they have laid that foundation and they have been patient and they have done the work to get there. So achieving your dream life is definitely not going to happen overnight, It's going to take a lot of hard work and dedication, but if you stay motivated and keep moving forward, you're going to get there, you're going to but you have to believe in yourself and you can't be afraid to ask for help, which is the next little tidbit I have for you do not be afraid to ask for help because this could change the trajectory of your dream life like that.

The minute I allowed myself to ask for help, other things fell into place. I started off seriously by hiring a housekeeper to come in and clean my House two times a month and that was enough to free up enough time for me to work my side hustle to build the business that I needed to eventually leave my teaching job. It started with a tiny decision to ask for help and to say okay that my time was worth that amount of money I was investing in having someone else clean my house twice a month and it became so much easier every single time I went to ask for help, I no longer felt like because I wasn't working a traditional job that I should be able to be a stay at home mom and run my business, it was okay to ask for help. It was okay to send my kids to daycare while I worked so that when they came home we could all be present and live our best lives together. That goes back to that very first step, what do you want your best life to look like? It's completely okay if you want to be a stay at home mom who only works in the hours that you're not with your kids when they're sleeping or when they are doing activities or things like that.

But for me I had to send him to daycare. I had to ask for the help. I needed to create that village for us to be able to do all the other things that were important that were a priority to us. And that, that was Okay. The 9th step into building your dream life is that you need to enjoy the journey. It's hard, it's hard not to keep looking forward, especially when you're setting goals and you're adapting them and you're pivoting and you're making progress. It's easy to live in the future and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, but you have to enjoy where you're at in every stage because if you don't, you're missing out on those experiences of the highs and the lows and everything in between. And that's what you build your dream life out of. Without those highs, you don't have anything to look forward to when the lows happen. But without those lows, you would not appreciate the highs nearly as much as you do be present in the moment, Take it all in and enjoy the process and my last tip for you this week is to keep a positive attitude, even when things don't go your way and just be grateful for what you have.

A positive attitude is truly key. When you're working towards your dream life, this means staying positive, even when things don't go your way and I'm not talking about toxic positivity, you know, the people that are just like, ah this really sucks but I'm gonna tell everybody that it's great and it's positive and it's fantastic because you need to feel the fields and you need to feel the lows because that makes the highs that much better. But you have to change your mindset so that when those lows happen, you don't ask yourself why is this happening to me? You're asking yourself what am I learning from this? And then remember that cliche cliche alert Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is your dream life, it's important to be patient and to be grateful for what you have and finally just be proud of yourself for all the hard work that you've put in to achieve your dream life, it's definitely not gonna be easy, but it's so, so worth it. So keep up the good work. Don't give up and I'm gonna be right here, cheering you on.

Like always that's it for this week's episode of self care with Marissa raider, Thank you for joining me and listen, if you enjoyed it and thank your BFF or any other woman, you know, might benefit from it, send them a link, share this episode or screenshot it and share it on instagram and tag me at marisa dot raider and hey, if you haven't already, come, hang out with me on the gram where I share all things building a life you truly love in order to help you be the best version of yourself Until next week, I will be here cheering you on.