Living Life to the Fullest: Expert Steps

1. 1

   Embrace where you are in life's journey.If you want to live life to the fullest, start by loving yourself for exactly who you are. Every stage of life comes with its own unique excitement and adventure. Living life to its fullest is a process that takes your whole life to develop, with new things to learn and discover at each step of the way.^[1]

   1. Try this: Stay active and by joining a recreational sports league or fitness class with people who are close to you either in age or life stage. Talk to them about the aging process.

   2. For life coach Kamal Ravikant, this means "you live life as the hero of your own story from a deep sense of confidence and love, as purely about you, for you, has nothing to do with others."^[2]

   3. Life coach Rachel Clissold emphasizes that "the first step is acceptance. We've all got a path and things to work out, and I think it's just accepting what happened rather than potentially judging it."^[3]

2. 2

   Step out of your comfort zone.Your comfort zone is just the routine parts of your daily life that are familiar to you. Your comfort zone triggers feelings of safety and security, but it also keeps you from growing and changing. Over time, your comfort zone can feel more like it's restricting you and holding you back. That's why it's important to shake things up every now and again.^[4]

   1. Try this: Make a commitment to yourself to do something a little differently every day, even if it's something as basic as putting your left sock on first instead of your right. Does it make you feel weird or uncomfortable to make that change? You might journal about it.

   2. Clissold notes that "it could be as simple as taking a five-minute longer journey to work and going the scenic route or going to a different café, trying a different food, or joining the gym. Simple tweaks shift everything."^[5]

   3. Reader Poll: We asked 247 wikiHow readers how they prefer to get out of their comfort zone, and 56% of them said doing something they’ve never done every single day. [Take Poll]

3. 3

   Seek out new experiences to broaden your horizons.The biggest enemy to living life to the fullest is the infamous rut. Luckily, it's pretty easy to get out of a rut—just try something new! Trying something new and different almost forces you to grow and expand, taking in the entirety of the experience. As you encounter something different with a beginner's mind, you'll find it a lot easier to keep your mind focused on the present, so you can definitely say that you're living life to the fullest in that moment.^[6]

   1. Try this: Open up a portion of your neighborhood on your GPS app. Close your eyes and put your fingertip on a spot on the screen. Open your eyes, and travel to the spot under your finger.

   2. If you're having a hard time coming up with things to do, licensed counselor and psychotherapist Ira Israel recommends that you "write a list of things that fill your heart from your soul, whether it's going to a museum, planting, or playing baseball—the things that nourish you and put you into the zone where you feel fulfilled."^[7]

   3. Clissold says "it's almost like embracing that inner child that just wants to play… there's something inside of us that wants to come out."^[8]

4. 4

   Practice radical self-acceptance.According to clinical psychologist Elisha Goldstein, "acceptance… implies understanding and caring."^[9] By accepting yourself, you demonstrate that you understand and care about yourself.

   1. Try this: Make lists of your accomplishments, your strengths, and the things you love about yourself. Refer to these lists whenever you're starting to feel down about yourself.

   2. While we tend to shy away from, hide, or ignore the parts of us that we don't like, Goldstein advises that "these parts of ourselves that feel defective or deficient really need to feel supported."^[10]

   3. Goldstein recommends a technique called "opposite action," where you locate the emotion you're feeling somewhere in your body and make contact with it—moving towards it, rather than away from it.^[11]

   4. "Everything's like a muscle," Goldstein adds. "Through intentional practice and repetition [you'll] move towards greater self-acceptance.^[12]