The Slow Life Project: A Psychologist’s Guide to Living Your Life with Meaning, Authenticity and Joy

By Lana Hall

Life can be fast, exhausting, crowded and overwhelming.

There never seems to be enough space to take a breath, cut through the noise, prioritise your goals and manage your time.

The Slow Life Project is a manual for living your life with purpose and direction – a gentle guide for clearing the confusion, countering the urge to overthink and easing the sense of impending burnout.

The Slow Life Project helps you develop your unique life map to guide you towards the most satisfying, fulfilling and meaningful life that you can lead; a map you can use regardless of where you are now and where your life may eventually take you.

Author and psychologist Lana Hall shares her expert clinical and personal development knowledge and valuable insights gleaned from working with hundreds of clients over her professional career.

The Slow Life Project is a practical guide to developing your Slow Life map, implementing successful strategies and maintaining momentum.

Packed full of motivational tips, mindset shifts and ‘how-to’ templates, this step-by-step guide will help you:
•Discover what truly lights up your life
•Gain more satisfaction from your life without having to take on anything extra
•Make decisions, set goals and use motivational strategies to achieve true success
•Avoid mindset traps that can leave you unsatisfied, even when you’re living a great life
•Process feelings and get on with your life – goodbye overwhelm and avoidance!

Live your life with confidence, clarity and care.

The Slow Life Project empowers you to let go of doubt and fear, build self-determination and embrace your life authentically and joyously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922628848

Lana Hall

Hi!I'm Lana Hall, and my mission and purpose in writing The Slow Life Project is to empower other women to feel confident - because they are living fun lives as their most authentic self!Outside of my mission and work (below), I'm a wife, mum, and peanut butter addict :)I'm a psychologist by trade, and it's in my psychology practice that I developed the ideas, templates, and strategies for The Slow Life Project.The ideas in my book for increasing your sense of meaning, authenticity and joy in your life were tested on hundreds of people before it ever made it into print, so you can have confidence on the information within :)

Book preview

The Slow Life

Project

A Psychologist’s Guide to Living Your Life with Meaning, Authenticity and Joy

By Lana Hall

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

PO Box 4363

Penrith NSW 2750

https://www.indiemosh.com.au

Copyright 2021 © Lana Hall

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.

Dedication

For Tim, Rose and Cliff.

Tim, you have provided the love and support that has allowed me to grow into a bigger, better me than I would ever have imagined. Thanks for the reminder to get this book out of a drawer and into the world.

Rose and Cliff, you inspire me to live by my values fully and to teach you to do the same.

Introduction

In my career as a practising psychologist I have found that many of my clients struggle with similar issues: stress, anxiety and a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. Underlying these recurring themes are issues that are familiar to so many people – struggling to stand up for yourself, low self-confidence, difficulty making decisions, procrastination and disconnected relationships.

Over the last ten years I’ve been developing a set of tools to help my clients grow their confidence in themselves and their potential, as well as develop meaning, purpose and direction in their lives. As I refined these tools, I began to see that it wasn’t just my clients who were interested in these topics. The ideas I talked about with my clients were also the ones that resonated with my friends and acquaintances. It turns out a lot of us are struggling with stress, anxiety and uncertainty about how to best live our lives, whether or not we ever seek therapeutic help for those concerns. Which is how I came to write this book.

I wanted to share with you the information

and tools that have helped the hundreds of people I’ve worked with over the years, without you needing to show up in my office.

This book will help you find and prioritise what matters most to you in life. It’s not an instruction manual, it’s not just another person’s opinion on what will bring you happiness, it’s a guide to help you reflect on what will bring happiness to you, personally, and a toolkit to help you achieve that happiness once you’ve identified it. It will show you how to trust yourself and make your life work for you, no matter what. It will provide you with information and tools to help you make the best decisions and choices for your life, so you can lead the most confident, resilient, connected, joyous and gratitude-filled life you can.

These tools have also helped me to navigate my own mind and life. They have helped me learn how to get out of my own way so I can live a satisfying, meaningful life, which is what I want for you too. I want you to become more satisfied with your life, experience more moments of joy and feelings of aliveness, and feel that your life is full of meaning and purpose. I call living this way – intentionally, mindfully, with joy and purpose – living a ‘slow life’.

Achieving this slow life involves two key steps. The first is discovering what matters to you in life. If you don’t know what will make you feel satisfied, you won’t know what you need to add in to your life, or what you need to delete. So we start here, developing your personal compass points that will inform the rest of your journey. Once you know the direction you’re headed, then every choice about how to live your life can be guided by these directions. There’s no you must do this or never do that – whatever choices you make about what’s most meaningful for you are the right ones for you.

I call these compass points – the parts of life you decide are meaningful to you – your ‘values’. Although the term values might remind you of moral standards or religion, in this context, the two are not connected. A values-focussed life is as suitable (and satisfying) to someone with a secular outlook as it is to someone with a religious or spiritual connection. I use the term values because value also means worthy, useful and treasured, and this is exactly what you’re aiming to find – those things in life that you can use to feel worthy, and that will help you to treasure your life.

The second step is to use your values to create a conscious, choice-driven life for yourself. A slow life.

Generally, it’s acknowledged that modern life today is fast. Technology connects us and moves information around faster than ever before, we jump from activity to activity focussing on quick fixes, doing what feels urgent at the expense of what’s truly important, and living reactively, driven by whatever or whoever is loudest or most demanding of us. The Slow Life Project aims to flip that – to have you living your life making conscious choices and taking deliberate actions in line with your best version of yourself.

Why switch? Well, activities that bring us instant gratification (meaning they feel good, or easier, in the moment) tend to create poor results for us in the long term. And the opposite is true too: doing what is right for us, though it’s more effortful and challenging, brings better outcomes for us in the long term. It’s called ‘delaying gratification’, a psychological concept that’s been studied in great detail, which has predictive power regarding how successful you’ll be in life. Studies show the better you are at delaying gratification, the better you tend to fare. Think about the kid that puts off playing video games in order to study, or the adult who resists the short-term temptation to engage in a fling to keep their marriage safe in the long run, or ignoring your notifications so you can get an important project finished.

Delaying gratification brings

great results in the long term.

To successfully delay gratification you need to have a clear understanding of why you’d resist the urge to do what’s easiest in the moment, and why living by your values means more to you, even if it’s more effort right now. Once you complete the exercises in the first part of the book, you’ll develop that clarity ­– that bigger picture vision for your life. But it’s equally important to have techniques to help you reduce the chances of giving in to the urge to do what’s easier or feels good now, because humans are biologically wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. These strategies are covered in the second part of the book, along with how to maximise the enjoyment you get when you do act on your values. These are your slow life strategies. These ideas, used consciously, require you to deliberately interact with the world, slowing the pace of living to one where conscious choice is possible, so you can reap the benefits that these considered, value-aligned choices can bring to you. This is the slow life project in action.

A further benefit of living a slow life is an increase in resilience. Resilience is characterised by the ability to remain strong and centred when difficulties, even tragedies, occur. Knowing who you want to be and having the knowledge that no matter what you’re faced with, you have the map for how to cope with it, defines a resilient person. The situation no longer controls you – your actions are determined by your individual slow life map. The sense of control that comes from knowing you can and will choose your responses leads to feeling calm and confident, focussed on solutions rather than problems.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The book is structured in the way I work with my clients throughout their journey. First, in Part 1, a bit of education so you understand what values are in this context and what you’re looking for. Then straight into the good stuff, figuring out your values, your compass points that signal what will bring you energy, joy and contentment in life.

With your map in hand, you can dive straight into learning how to immediately benefit from your new knowledge and bring more satisfaction into the everyday. This starts in Part 2, which has several themes and talks you through how to use your slow life map in a range of situations, so you can improve how you feel about yourself and your life every single day. When I’m working individually with clients during this phase, there’ll usually be a point where my client comes back to me and says, ‘I couldn’t do the homework this week because …’ That’s where we start the trouble shooting.

Part 3 contains a raft of ideas to help you move past the blocks that can stop you from fully living your slow life. I doubt you’ll need all the tools in Part 3, but I’ve included them all because without the privilege of the one-to-one relationship, I haven’t been able to select what will work best for you as an individual. I’ve aimed to cover all bases to ensure this book is useful for as many people as possible.

Ultimately, my goal for this book is to provide you with self-knowledge, strategies and tools that will add to the depth and richness of your life, for your whole life. So that you can live the most energising, exciting and uplifting life you can.

Let’s get started!

Part 1: Your Slow Life Map

Chapter 1:

What is a Value?

Before you can start living your slow life, you need to figure out the direction you’re going. And to do that, you need to know what a value is, because values are the compass points that will guide you towards your slow life. In this chapter, we’re going to discover how to define a value, because these compass points, these directions, need to fulfill a particular set of criteria in order for you to be able to navigate by them.

The general meaning of value is something that is important and worthwhile. In the context of this book, a value is important and worthwhile because it contributes to your overall sense of purpose and wellbeing in the world. It’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning; it makes you feel better when you act on it. You’ll find that life can feel good, but strangely empty, if everything is going well for you but you’re not engaging in activities that give you a chance to engage with your values.

Before we get into what values are, I’d like to clarify that values are not morals. A ‘value judgement’ is often used in our culture to describe a moral judgement about something. While values are your own personal standards, in the context of this book, there is no suggestion that your values should be like mine, or anyone else’s, and certainly not that there is a set of universal values that everyone needs to follow. I strongly disagree with that. A value needs to represent what you truly believe is important, as opposed to what you think should be important to you, or what others think should be important to you. True passion comes only from freely made decisions to do or not do something. Passion and being forced (whether that force is strong or weak, conscious or unconscious) are simply incompatible.

While we have moral codes that help us to live together peacefully (most of the time), that is not what I mean by values either. You are free to be, to value, to act in whatever way is right for you, as long as that doesn’t hurt others. Your values are not something that anyone else can, or should, work out for you (of course they can help).

It’s important to define