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    The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It
    The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It
    The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It
    Ebook147 pages2 hours

    The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It

    By Debbie Ford

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    About this ebook

    No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Ford's The Best Year of Your Life is a call to action to stop pretending that the future will bring you the life of your dreams and to instead start living your dreams in this moment and for the rest of your life.

    Many of us spend our days thinking, talking and dreaming about what our lives could be like 'if only ...'. We make resolutions, we follow a new diet, we start exercise routines – we begin working on our lifelong goals and then we give up, get too busy and forget about what's truly important to us. Another year passes by and our dreams remain out of reach. But what if today you discovered that the life you've always wanted is right in front of you, well within your grasp? Are you ready to live it?

    Debbie Ford not only answers these questions but offers a proven, practical blueprint for making today – this moment – the beginning of the best year of your life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061738982
    The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It
    Author

    Debbie Ford

    DEBBIE FORD (October 1, 1955 - February 17, 2013) is the national bestselling author of Dark Side of the Light Chasers, Secret of the Shadow, Spiritual Divorce, The Right Questions, The Best Year of Your Life, Why Good People Do Bad Things, and The 21-Day Consciousness Cleanse.

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    Book preview

    The Best Year of Your Life - Debbie Ford

    INTRODUCTION

    Creating the Best Year of Your Life

    Every year around the world, most of us participate in the same New Year’s ritual. This ritual does not involve celebrating, dancing, drinking, or being with loved ones. It’s not about reflecting on our past or even being grateful for what we have in our lives. This New Year’s tradition is simply the ritual of making a resolution to change, a promise to ourselves to do something new or different. Whether we’re pledging to improve our finances, our relationships, our appearance, or our employment, what we all share is one common desire—to make this year better than our last.

    So what happens? Why does our resolve fade so quickly? Why do most of us fail to achieve our desired goals? Why are they mostly forgotten or abandoned by February? Is it that we no longer want the things we thought were so important on January 1? Have our goals and objectives changed? Have we thrown in the towel and given up? Or do we fail simply because we never put into place the plans, structure, and tools we need to succeed?

    But what if this year is different? What if you live each day of the coming year with the rock-solid intent to make it the best year of your life—no matter what happens, no matter what uncontrollable forces intervene, no matter what changes around you take place? What if you discover that having the best year of your life is something that is completely within your own control, something that you can actually shape, create, and achieve? What if today you realize that the choice is really yours?

    The possibility of making this your best year ever exists in every moment, because having the best year of your life depends not on some outside accomplishment but on allowing the greatest expression of yourself to be unveiled. Having the best year of your life is about becoming the person you always wanted to be. It’s about embracing a vision of yourself at your best and developing the qualities that will take you there.

    In the same way an artist reveals the beautiful sculpture that is hidden within a block of marble, each of us must chip away at the outer layers that prevent us from seeing and becoming our true selves. With the passion of a world class sculptor, we each must make a commitment to chip away at our self-imposed limitations and take the time to discover the ways we have hidden our talents and covered up our deepest desires. To create the best year of our lives, we must challenge our self-defeating behaviors and find new ways of reacting to the everyday events that shape our experience. We must first digest and embrace all the limiting beliefs we’ve collected throughout the years, and then, ultimately, summon the courage to let go of them all—everything that is covering our true masterpiece. To live our best year, we must take the time to explore the thought process that has shaped our ability to succeed or fail, to rise to our finest self or sink into mediocrity.

    Most of us have put some kind of limitations on what we can and cannot have, what we can and cannot do, and who we can and cannot be. We resign ourselves to the fact that each year will be either the same or only slightly better than our last, rather than letting ourselves get excited about a limitless future. We construct boundaries around our ambitions, our goals, and our imaginations. And we forfeit total self-expression in favor of fitting in with the masses. As adults, most of us have shut off the child in us, giving up fun-loving pranks and repressing our tireless imaginations. We’ve traded in our roller skates and times of skipping in the streets for more serious tasks. Our state of curiosity has been replaced by righteous thinking that restricts what we hear and what we see. Our open and loving nature has been replaced by a guarded and defended heart. And, instead of joyfully going about the task of making the lives we are living great, we daydream about the life we wish we were living.

    Maybe you have slipped into the pattern of waiting for the day when your fantasy life will arrive. You might be hoping that the day is coming when you will finally have more success, money, love, or happiness. Like so many, you may be waiting for something to happen tomorrow that will make you feel better about your life today. But I ask you, has that tomorrow shown up yet?

    It’s time to break through the illusion that the best year of your life exists somewhere out there, in the future, when the reality is that it exists right here and now. Don’t get fooled into thinking for one more minute that the best year of your life will just happen…if you are lucky. Don’t believe that you lack what it takes to make this a great year, no matter what you are doing or what is happening in your life. Don’t wait for everything to be done, for your schedule to get cleared, or for your dream man or woman to appear before you take on the task of creating a life you love. Don’t let the fantasy of One day… or Next year… or When I have more time… or When I have more money… trick you into believing that the best year of your life exists somewhere off in the future.

    It is your choice, here and now. Just think about it: This life is available to you whether you are alone, sick, fat, poor, busy, depressed, or addicted. It can be yours even if you don’t have a proper education, even if you’ve done some bad things in the past, even if you have flaws in your personality, even if you were abandoned by someone you loved or beaten as a child, even if you feel unsupported by your loved ones, and even if things around you appear to be out of your control. Your best year is not about getting all the things you think you need to be happy. It’s not about finishing that project or finding the love of your life or losing those twenty pounds. It’s not about getting out of debt or landing that new job. In fact, in the year to come you could lose a loved one or a job. You could get divorced or run into obstacles in your career. But what I hope to show you is that having the best year of your life does not require that every day be a rosy land of paradise or that everything go your way. What it does require is for you to develop those parts of yourself that are yearning to be expressed. The best year of your life is about becoming inspired by yourself, loving who you are and the choices you’re making. It’s about making peace with your past so that you can create a future that is unlike anything you have ever experienced. It’s about living each day grounded in reality, with passion and excitement for life, and inspiring others to do the same.

    The best year of your life is possible no matter what is going on around you. It is yours for the taking. This year, you get to choose what actions you will take and what behaviors you will engage in. You get to choose, in response to the issues you are dealing with, whether you will give up your right to have everything you desire, settling for the illusion of ease that comes from blindly repeating the past—or whether you will tread a new path.

    Although at first glance this process might seem daunting, it is really much simpler than you might think, because it is one of surrender. It’s the process of letting go of your stories, excuses, and self-imposed limitations. Living your best year calls on you to surrender your outdated beliefs about what you are capable of being or doing and to replace them with the belief that your job is to be the greatest expression of yourself, knowing that there is no finer contribution you can make to this world than fulfilling your highest potential.

    The Best Year of Your Life is a call to action. It’s a step-by-step guide to making this year so special that you can’t wait to jump out of bed in the morning and begin your day. The intent of this book is to inspire, nurture, and support you in attaining a level of joy that you may not even know is possible for you and to leave you, at the end of the year, wanting more of what you have already created. The Best Year of Your Life is your personal guide to living your greatest life, no matter what is going on around you. Its job is to support you in defining what the best year of your life means to you—what it will look and feel like—and to support you in creating it. Once you are in the presence of your best life, this book will show you how to design a powerful plan to ensure your success and gather the skills you need to fulfill your long-awaited dreams.

    We will begin in the Dream It section, where we will reawaken to our deepest desires and use them to discover the persons we have always wanted to be. We will learn what it means to live inside an intent to create the best year of our lives and to open up to the possibility of living a year beyond our wildest dreams. We will create a future grounded in reality rather than fantasy and reclaim the power to give ourselves everything we have been chasing, whether it’s success, importance, validation, love, or happiness. We will come to the startling and life-changing realization that what we have been chasing in the outer world can be generated within ourselves, giving us immediate access to that which we desire. Then we will allow a vision of ourselves at our highest to unfold and propel us to the life we long to lead.

    In the Plan It section, we will clean our slates and prepare the fertile ground in which we will plant and nurture our new and inspiring futures. We’ll break down our visions for our best year into attainable goals and design a detailed map that, when followed step-by-step, will ensure that we will arrive at our desired destination.

    Finally, in the Live It section, we gain the courage to create and seize all the days of the coming year and claim them as the best days of our lives. We will learn a special technique for capturing the priceless moments that give our lives meaning and for basking in the joy of what we already have. We’ll learn the exciting process of how to live inside our personal

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