If you’ve reached a point where you’re wondering how to turn your life around, then you’ve come to the right place. I feel you. It’s easy to get to a point where you look around and think, “ How did I get here?” 

The good news is that no matter how difficult or impossible it might seem right now, it is possible to turn your life around at any stage.

If you want to know to turn your life around, here are the 10 most important steps you need to take.

1. Start With Self Love 

The most important thing to remember if you’re in a place where you’re wanting to turn your life around is that you must love yourself through the process. Often when we’re in this place of wanting to turn our life around, we start to only see the bad things. We see all our past mistakes, or we see all the missed chances and opportunities and we start you beat ourselves up. 

But you must be kind to yourself. Every decision that you’ve made up until this point has been for a reason. While you might not remember those reasons now, and some of your past decisions may feel like big mistakes, practicing self-love, forgiveness, and self-care are essential throughout the process of life transformation. Because that’s what we’re talking about here. You want to transform your life for the better, and self-love is what will help you to do that. 

2. Define Your Values 

One of the reasons that you might get lost along this journey called life is that you’ve forgotten your values. Or perhaps you never really knew what they were. So, you made decisions based on what was important to someone else at the time, until eventually, you felt like you’d completely lost yourself. 

This is a common thing. Especially for people who want to change careers as part of the process of turning their life around. And that’s most people. 

Now is the time to think about who you are on a deeper level. What’s important to you and what do you value? 

Your values are important, and living in alignment means living according to your values, not someone else’s. You can only do that when you are crystal clear on what your values are. 

Although figuring out what your values are might seem like a strange and difficult exercise or process, if you want to know how to turn your life around then this is one of the most important steps you need to take.

3. Have a Clear Vision 

After your values, your vision is what’s important. 

many times people jump right into thinking about their goals, but this is a big mistake. The likelihood of you achieving your goals is connected to the power and strength of your vision. 

Your vision is like your north star. Along the way of working towards your goals, obstacles and challenges are likely to appear and without a clear vision, you’ll lose focus, motivation, and even lose hope. You’ll start believing that it’s not possible to turn your life around. 

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, take the time to reflect on a vision. Create a vision board. Visualize your vision and write about your vision in great detail. 

Your vision is the overarching picture of what you’re trying to achieve. It answers these questions: If everything in your life was exactly how you wanted it to be, what would be different? What would your life look and feel like? What would you be doing? Where would you be and who would you be with?

Paint a clear picture in your mind’s eye of this vision so that once you start to set goals, they will be goals that are taking you to your desired destination. 

4. Identify Your (Vision) Goals 

Based on what your vision is, you will be able to identify your big vision goals. I call these vision goals because they are likely to be big goals like:

  • Change careers
  • Start my own business 
  • Lose 20lb and get in the best shape of my life 
  • Move house to a nicer area or buy my first house 
  • Meet my soulmate or even…
  • Figure out who I am and what I want

As you can see, these are some big goals. That doesn’t mean to say they aren’t possible, but if you try to work towards one of these goals as it is, it would be very difficult. That’s because these goals have many different pieces to them. 

For example, there are many steps involved in changing careers. You might need to retrain, save money to finance your career change, save money to finance the start of your business or even change jobs and take on an intermediary/ segue job to gain the experience you need or to reduce your commute and free up more time for your evening studies. 

The ultimate goal remains to change careers, but there are many steps in between. 

5. Take It One Step or vision Goal at a Time 

Before we talk about goals any further, at this point it’s critical to remember that focusing on one thing at a time is the best approach. 

If you’re asking yourself how to turn your life around, the chances are that you want to change everything, or several big things, and being the impatient people we are, we often want things to change fast.

But if you start working on too many big goals at once, then you will not give yourself the best chance for success, because you’re likely to get overwhelmed. 

This doesn’t mean that you must complete one big goal before you start working on the next, but at least allow yourself time to gain some traction and good momentum on one thing first before adding the next big change to your plan. 

6. Create A SMART Action Plan 

You know who are, what’s important to you and you have a clear vision for the life you want to create for yourself. 

It’s time to pick one of the areas that you want to work on so that you can create a SMART action plan. 

This means that you will pick one vision goal, decide when you would like to achieve it, and then break it down into all its component steps. 

Then you will need to have a clear action plan, including dates and milestones for completing each of those steps. 

What you are doing at this stage is creating a step-by-step action plan. 

If you want to know how to turn your life around successfully, it’s this, make each action step as small and manageable as possible. 

You will be more likely to stay motivated and on track as you see yourself completing each small action step. 

Some steps may take time but resist the urge to rush ahead. 

7. Give Yourself Time 

This leads me to one of the most important points of how to turn your life around. Giving yourself time sounds simple enough. But I can assure you that on this journey, you will look around and be tempted to compare your journey to other people’s. 

This is one of the most unhelpful things that you can do when you’re in the process of a transformation and trying to turn your life around. 

No one is you. They have not lived your life, had the experiences that you’ve had, or had to make the decisions that you’ve made to this point. 

Don’t compare your situation to anybody else. At best it will make you feel horrible and in the worst-case scenario, it will derail you, demotivate you, and stop you from making progress. 

So, give yourself the time you need. However long that happens to be.

Making progress is key. 

8. Build a Support Network 

When things become difficult, whether you’re struggling to stay motivated or feeling overwhelmed with how much you have to do to turn your life around, having a support network will make the world of difference. 

This could be family or close friends, but it could also be a coach.

It’s definitely worth considering investing in a coach at this time. The level of support that a life coach will be able to provide you can’t be overestimated. 

From helping you to set realistic, yet motivating and effective goals, to helping you create a clear plan of action, to helping you to stay the course by holding you accountable. A coach can support you with all these things and more. 

In short, if you want to know how to turn your life around then investing in a coach to help you to do it is the way to go, especially if you want to achieve your goals sooner rather than later.

[Read this to find out more details about what coaches do and how the right coach can help you to turn your life around more quickly easily]

9. Build & Stack Good Daily Habits & Practices

I already talked about self-love, and here I want to talk about self-care among other good daily habits and practices that will help you to turn your life around.

Firstly, habits are great because they take away the need for thought. let’s face it, you already have enough on your mind, without having to think about lots of new things. 

Implementing certain daily practices, rituals, or habits ( call them what you will) will support you mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as you move through the process of transforming yourself and turning your life around. 

Sone of the daily habits and practices I would highly recommend from my own experience include:

  1. Journalling – If you’re not sure where to start with journalling then check out these 29 Most Powerful Journaling Methods
  2. Meditating 
  3. Daily affirmations

And if you’re wondering what affirmations you can use, then try these  10 Powerful Positive Words of Affirmation To Say Every Day 

or these 50 Powerful Daily Affirmations For Confidence And Self-Esteem 

10. Make Time For Fun 

Finally, you may have a lot of work to do, but you need to have fun along the way. Make time to do things that make you happy, because you deserve to be happy now, and not just when you’ve finally reached your destination and not only figured out how to turn your life around but accomplished it as well.