14 secrets to a well-lived life

What does it mean to live your best life? It honours your most important values, needs, and glorious complexities. This is the distilled wisdom of what interesting midlife women have learned about creating a life they feel good about:

• 1. Know and act on what is really important to you. Don't put up with a bad situation in any significant area of your life. Things don't get better without conscious awareness, choice, and action. Ask yourself on a weekly basis: Am I happy? Which of my important needs are being met, and which are being neglected? What do I need to do for greater life satisfaction? Your life is not a dress rehearsal.

• 2. Understand what you are really good at. Know and be able to articulate your core skills and the environments in which you are happiest and most productive. Express your talents by ?nding or designing your work to re?ect your strengths and who you are. Your unique talents are gifts which you need to use.

• 3. Be authentic. Refuse to compromise your personality or repress important parts of yourself. Be honest about expressing your feelings and values when the cost of not doing so will be a violation of your own moral code. Do what you know is the right thing. Quite simply, if the cost of doing something is that you will feel that you have sold your soul, don't do it.

• 4. Define yourself independently of your roles -- as mother, daughter, worker, leader, friend, partner. Don't make any one role the centrepiece of your identity. Your life is rich and offers huge opportunity for meaning and satisfaction through many channels. Have diverse interests and seek fulfillment through all of them.

• 5. Make your own decisions. Take your own counsel: throw away the people-pleasing scripts. Maintain an independent stance in regard to received wisdom. Create a life that works for you independent of others' views and expectations.

• 6. Pay attention to the niggling voice that says, "I'm not happy." It's telling you something important. Welcome rather than repress it. Identify the issues. Understand that change takes time and courage -- there is no bromide for dealing with signi?cant life issues. Get support from people who care about you. Seek professional counselling if you need it.

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