Developing an Enlightened Lifestyle takes time and dedication. It is infinite, there is no physical boundary or cut off point, dividing ‘enlightened’ from ‘average’. Only you as a person can know when you have or haven’t achieved this zonal stage, and once you have, you’ll understand that it requires constant maintenance.

However, how do you get there? What is this perilous journey like? Where and what is ‘there’? And why do you want it?

These are all questions that everyone asks themselves, and most begin the journey without answering them first, resulting in a lack of dedication and an early exit after having deemed failure. Without clear intentions, goals and ambitions, it is impossible to achieve. How can you score a goal in football without a goal? You’ll end up playing for ever until one is made.

Yet perhaps the most important, and difficult question to answer is, where do I begin?

At the beginning. Standard, simple answer that gives no guidance what so ever. But it’s true, ask yourself this, what made you want to change in the first place? Why do you want to change your lifestyle? What brought you here? For me, it was a lack of satisfaction with my current lifestyle, brought to light by the lifestylechallenge 2.0. Intelligence, sociability, health and well being, spirituality amongst a whole host of other factors, all of which I knew I could improve. I wasn’t on par.

By answering this, you have already covered many bases. You have your motives (for me it’s improving these areas of my life because I feel unsatisfied), and you have your goals (Increased intelligence…). However this may in fact leave you feeling that this is even more daunting than previously perceived. Problems tend to stack up, almost like in a snowballing effect as your mind links you from one thing to another with effortless ease.

For example, you may have poor health, so people see you as less attractive, which knocks your confidence, leading to pessimism, in turn depression, combined with anger, resulting in monetary instability, giving you stress…

It’s endless. Yet the brilliant thing is, just like how one problem leads to another, it’s exactly the same with solutions. Every improvement and solution has a multiplier effect, benefiting different areas of your life you may never have imagined it too. For example, you might have bad skin. Your doctor tells you to stay outside for 20 minutes a day, so that UV light develops more vitamin D to combat what ever it is. What they don’t tell you is that on the top of your head are sun ‘receptors’ that convert UV into Serotonin, the natural drug that modulates anger and sexuality. In laymen terms: the natural happiness drug. You become happier, less depressed, more optimistic, and more attractive (also resulting from gaining a tan). Transmission Mechanism…

Still, where do you start? What should your first goal be?

Well, why does everyone insist on starting with one thing? Rather than step forward, why not jump? Remember, it’s all about the multiplier effect, and jumping is going to take you much further than stepping. So my advice is this: start with two things.

Make them basic, achievable, goals that can be completed in the short term, but have long term consequences. Now, we’re discussing how to begin to develop an Enlightened Lifestyle. What would be two small goals to get you started on this path?

Mine were as follows:

1) Converse at a greater-than-normal level with everyone I interact with.
2) Greet everyone who makes eye-contact and is within audible range verbally.

My main motive behind this?

To meet new people, converse with them and learn.

Starting at the beginning should be about going down below the surface of things to the core of humanity. To me, this is communication. What sets us most apart from other living things? Our ability to communicate and think consciously. This is one of the first things we learn to do as a child, but yet, arguably, as we grow our skill and learning ability actually decreases. Where did approach anxiety come from? Fear, social and media conditioning.

Saying ‘Hi’ to people isn’t difficult, take a guess at how many times you’ve said the word. Probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. It’s the perceived difficulty that one has to surpass. And that’s why it’s important to keep it simple. Say ‘Hi’ to everyone that makes eye contact.

You can learn and read all you want, be up-to-date on the world economy, cultural views, revolutionary technologies, cures and relationship advice. But all of it is useless until you can communicate. Who’s ever heard of a 100% communication-less relationship? And yes, I did just make up that word, but you still understood me, that’s the power of communication

That’s not to say you shouldn’t do all of those things, but firstly, learn to communicate. Once you have engaged in your first conversation, that’s when you start learning.

People are fascinating, you’ll find that you can learn so much more from conversation in 1 minute than a book in 10 (depending of course on the quality of both the book and conversation). When you converse with others, you learn about yourself, and the more you understand yourself, the more jumps you can take towards an Enlightened Lifestyle as these understandings are your foundations, your building blocks.

Yet, before I conclude this short How-To, I’d like to finish off on something very important: Taking it one day at a time. Making goals 3 years in the future is useless most of the time. You lose sight very quickly and give up. You may find that the method you use isn’t right for you, so live in the present. Take every moment as it comes, and use it to your full potential.

How To Start From Scratch

In one sentence:

Start communicating more.

Words: Tom Church, the creator of marketing website Flabble