Live Your Dream Life: Maximising Happiness and Balance

By Andy Marshall

A discovery of what is really important in your life, that examines the key question about how much time you really spend nurturing what it is that makes you, you, to enable the delivery of the dreams you have for the future, for you and for your family.

So if you are stressed out about life and priorities. If you want to focus on what is really important to you. If you are happy with life and want to make sure that you keep your focus and gain even greater success. If you, with your life partner want to form a deep understanding of individual and joint priorities. If you have ever made a New Years Eve resolution. Ever written a list of things you’d like to achieve. Or you just simply need some guidance on how to prioritise your life and get all the elements in balance, then this book is for you!

Live Your Dream Life is a guide to maximising your happiness across key areas of life that are important to you.

Based on research on how people feel about their lives, with practical advice for you to design the life you dream of.

At the end of each chapter readers are asked to assess how they feel (based on an informed view after reading the research on how the chapter topic impacts our well-being as human beings) about the key theme of the chapter and whether, or not it’s a priority for them, and to what extent. The aim to clarify and perhaps change your thinking so you can create real life plans after connecting with what really matters to you.

By identifying, with this book as a guide, what the priorities are in your life, you will have a framework to, live your dream life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781922261007

Book preview

LIVE

YOUR

DREAM

LIFE

Maximising happiness and balance

Andy Marshall

Andy Marshall  

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

PO BOX 147

Hazelbrook NSW 2779

https://www.indiemosh.com.au/

Copyright 2018 © Andy Marshall

All rights reserved

Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher.

Disclaimer

Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

Andy Marshall

One of the things Andy Marshall loves the most, is people watching. The way people interact with each other and with the modern world tells us a lot about who they are. Andy is a pioneer Technoclientologist. He created the term Technoclientology, which he defined as the psychology of how people act and interact in a modern world and so therefore, a technoclientologist looks at interactions, modernity, socialisation (aka Humanology 1.0 coined by Amy Jo Martin[i]) and insights from the field of neuroscience that, when combined, allow us to observe, collate data, analyse and draw conclusions about how people will react and make decisions in a given situation when faced with competing choices.

Andy suggests that a ‘technoclientologist’ uses these insights to enable people to become empowered and make decisions that are in their best interests. What is achieved here is the working towards a greater good.

And this is what this book is about. We, as humans interacting in a modern world, have choices, competing choices. We have areas of our lives that are important to us, that make us who we are. Yet in a modern, fast paced world, we have to make trade-offs. We have to juggle priorities and sometimes we do it to our detriment and at a cost to ourselves, our families, our personal growth and our health.

In this book Andy expertly steers us through how we feel and act when we have to play certain roles in our lives and why balance is much needed. Importantly he guides us towards achieving the balance that is right for us as individuals.

Live Your Dream Life

Acknowledgements

#believeinbetter

When I looked at research into life balance: and specifically, what areas of our lives really matter, and which have priority, and which have we neglected in lieu of others, one of the things that became immediately apparent was the impact of money and its’ influence on our behaviour and well-being. I was alarmed to find that a great number of people in democratic Western economies had effectively ‘given up’. These people believed that nothing they did would make a positive difference to their lot in life. The numbers were confronting. As many as 25% of people believed they would live hand to mouth, pay-check to pay-check. From experience, and research, this feeling of defeat was brought about less from a lack of financial resources, but rather from an inability to plan, to know how to explore financial options and to take stock of where people find themselves in life and to then apply basic concepts to their finances.

My parents were prime examples. On arriving from England and into Australia they became everyday ordinary working-class Australians. They mistrusted banks. They took advice from relatives. For a little while my fathers’ financial strategy was Race 6 Horse 4. To get ahead the only possibility seemed to be with luck. Luck at remarkably long odds.

They worked hard. And they provided a life for their children and opportunities to acquire knowledge through education that would in the long run serve them well. Whilst there was a lot in my childhood that went drastically awry, it was not through a lack of my parents trying the best they could.

I’ve not often expressed an acknowledgement of those efforts. So, for now, and in this moment, thanks Mum and Dad. It certainly wasn’t dull, and I really do respect that at the end of the day, we got there!

My reason for embarking on this project was in one way to celebrate the way people get by. The way they make do and provide for themselves and for their families. To showcase that for most of us we are doing the best we can. We need to applaud that. But we also need to highlight that there is with education and illumination often a better way.

Why can’t we have balance? Why can’t we have it all in a way that suits us and our circumstances? Why can’t we have a life of our choosing, of our design?

I believe that we can. I think it takes work. I think it takes planning. But most of all it takes time for us to set out what is really important to us. Prioritisation in this instance when we are looking for balance really matters.

For me my priority is my family.

Therefore, to my wife Kate, my children Jacque and Serena, you are the absolute reason that I smile every day. Thank you for your unending love and support.

Foreword

What is the most important area of your life?

Do I have the meaning of life here for you? And am I going to divulge it in the foreword?

Sadly no … well I don’t think I am, that’s not the plan anyway. That’s up to you to decide. For many of us we are slaves to certain aspects of our lives. Some people think it is money. My research and experience have shown that for many of us, we are under the control of a master, that master being money. It affects what we do for a living, how we allocate our other life tasks. It impacts our relationships and can determine the quality of our health. It determines where we live, perhaps whether or not we rent or own. It can cause us stress that changes our behaviours. As a result, because this book is about maximising balance and happiness across all areas of our lives, money, is an important element. However, it is more important to put money into context, to not place it unnecessarily as the centrepoint of our discussion. Ironically, though, I want to start the entire discussion with a story about the impact on so many life areas that money can have, to the extent that the influence of money can permeate into and become a detriment to the areas of life that are really important to people.

Let’s go back in time. It’s an early winters night. The sun has set. The sky is clear. And despite being in the suburbs of the city, there is not so much housing density, so the stars are starting to become visible. A mother and her 11-year-old son walk side by side from their home to a telephone box. There’s no phone connected at their home, and this is the age well before smart phones, so every few hundred metres or so there’s a public phone box. They have a mission tonight. At her sons’ pleading, the mother is about to make a phone call to the school music teacher. Specifically, a piano teacher. Mrs Boyle. There are piano lessons that the young boy has his heart set on. He watches the call being made from outside the phone box. He can’t really hear the conversation. His mother is softly spoken at the best of times, but tonight her tone is hushed even more so. The call finishes, the boy watches his mother exit the phone box and looks up expectantly. But there are no words spoken, just a look. A wait till we are home look.

The home is modest, and sparsely furnished. They have been at the address for a year, but still, not only is there no phone connected, but also no dining table, no television, no carpets, no rugs. But it’s home. When they enter the home, the mother breaks the news that piano lessons wouldn’t be starting. Well they could but, what was the point. She had been convinced by Mrs Boyle that to make any good of it, access to a piano at home was in her mind a necessity, and that was a reality that in the circumstances they faced, that was not about to happen.

So, the boys’ mother set out to make it a reality. She worked extra shifts at the car parts factory and put whatever extra money she earned from those shifts towards buying her son a piano. Over the months that followed, it was within reach. That was until other bills, and necessities cropped up. The piano fund was exhausted, and so was she.

That was my mum. I was the 11-year-old boy.

Now, 11 was a tough year for me, lots of reasons that we will explore in the context of guiding you towards better life balance across all the key areas of your life. But if you think not learning the piano adversely affected me and still does some 39 years later, no that’s not the case. So boo-hoo I never got to learn the piano, is not the message here.

What I am more interested in is why my mum had such limited options at hand. Why she and us, her family, were trapped in the cycle we were in. Why it was that money, was the master. And why based on one persons’ opinion there seemingly was only one option (in regard to the piano). I wonder about what she gave up in the desire to provide for and sustain her family both in a monetary, environmental and emotional sense. What about her needs? What did she want in her life? What did she give up? Neglect? Forget? Why couldn’t she have it all? Why couldn’t she have all the elements in her life in balance?

The short answer is, well it depends. It depends on what she wanted out of her life, what dreams she had to achieve, what she understood as being possible, what she needed and how all of this impacted the things in her life that were important to her. And since her focus was purely on money, here we have our first conundrum.

What is and what should be the connection between what’s important to us as individuals (or as a family unit) and the way in which our money is directed, the way we earn it and the way we spend it? When it comes to this single aspect of our lives, most of us haven’t thought about it, about money in that way, in such a detailed way. Some of us like ‘stuff’. We’d like to have more of it. For others it is a means to an end, and what is really important to those people, is family, love and health. Some of us understand that, in order to have the stability of simple things like housing and the associated amenities then, money is important, but we see it as a necessary evil and don’t focus energy on it. Don’t believe me? Here’s a simple example of how disconnected we can be, to money and our day to day life. American consumers spend about 8 hours researching a home loan[ii]. Roughly they look at a range of lenders and the main interest rate and then make a decision. The same consumers spend 11 hours when shopping for a car. Arguably one of the greatest financial commitments for most everyday people (apart from having kids) gets 8 hours of thought. Total.

The stress and focus on money, does have an impact. It affects other areas of our life. It interferes with what arguably is more important than money. Family, relationships, health. It seems to me that we need to think differently and reset.

This is what this book is about.

This book is about redirecting your thoughts.

What I mean by this is getting you to focus on what is really important in your life and getting you to answer questions about how much time you really spend nurturing what it is that makes you, you. And more importantly how much awareness do you have on what it is that will deliver to you the dreams you have for the future, for you and for your family.

In order to do that, we need to understand how we, we humans, think about things. How things, like having a home we are happy with, make us feel and why. And how those feelings impact other areas of our lives. It is only then when we have this sort of clarity that if required we can then deploy the resources we have, be that time, effort and money, towards the fulfillment of those goals and dreams we have. Investigating these lifestyle factors before ‘crunching the numbers’ is really critical. If we don’t have our own definition of success, that may or may not be dependent on how successfully we use our money, then how do we know if we are, in a position, to be happy or not?

For that reason, this book is structured as a workbook of sorts. Don’t groan and roll your eyes, you’re not getting tested on this (not by me anyway). At the end of each chapter I will ask you to assess how you feel (based on an informed view after reading the research on how the chapter topic impacts our well-being as human beings) about the key theme of the chapter and whether, or not it’s a priority for you, and to what extent.

See, it’s not going to be too arduous.

In fact, if anything this book will become as you read it, all about you. By identifying, with this book as a guide, what the priorities are in your life, you will have a framework to, dare I say it, live your dream life.

Introduction

When it comes to our daily lives, there seems to always be one constant that people find stressful. It as we have found, if you’ve read the foreword, money. In fact, close to a third of people, in a study of attitudes and behaviours to all matters financial, found dealing with money stressful and overwhelming.[iii] Now this stress is defined as stress on a continual basis. In other words, there is a group of everyday people, regular folk, in large numbers who avoid dealing with money issues, or when they do they are always overwhelmed by the task. Other studies provide insights into how dramatic this stress can be. The American Psychological Association, in their work on the matter similarly found a chunk of people are consumed by worry to the extent that it caused stress that manifested into sleep problems and at its’ extreme, depression. More disturbing though was that occasionally three quarters of us are stressed about money![iv]

But how are people really feeling about life issues? And how does this relate to money? Are people that stressed about the day to day? Or does money pale into insignificance because when it comes down to it, there are more important things in life that money?

To answer these questions and to gain insights into how people are feeling about a wide range of life issues, Living Your Dream Life conducted a survey[v] asking how people felt about aspects of their life and explored the impact that one of those life aspects, money, had on those life areas.

We assessed key life issues such as; health, and well-being, career