Describe your ideal life, then see how close you already are

The ideal life exercise asks you to describe the life you want in real, everyday detail, and then to rate how close your life today feels to it on a single scale. It draws on Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius's work on "possible selves", which found that the futures we picture vividly shape what we actually try to do. The rating gives you a baseline, so you have something to come back to in six months and see how far you've come.

Why does "I'd like a better life" so rarely go anywhere?

Wanting a better life is a bit like being in a fog. You can feel that something needs to change, but it's very hard to steer by a feeling, and it's even harder to know which way to turn first.

If you ask someone what their ideal life looks like, you'll often get something that resembles a holiday brochure: a beach, a big house, a summer that never quite ends. It's a lovely picture, and there's nothing wrong with wanting any of it.

The trouble is that it doesn't tell you what to do on Monday morning. It also doesn't tell you what you'd need to stop doing, and that's often the most useful thing to know. A clear, honest description of an ordinary day, on the other hand, gives you something you can actually start moving towards.

What is the ideal life exercise based on?

In 1986 Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius argued that the selves we can imagine becoming act as incentives. They help explain why we take one job and turn down another, or start something at forty that we'd shelved at twenty-five.

The research since then points the same way. Laura King's 2001 study asked people to write about their best possible future self, and found it brought benefits to their wellbeing. Then in 2011 Hal Hershfield and his colleagues showed people digitally aged images of themselves, and those people put more money into a hypothetical retirement fund than those who hadn't seen their older face. Seeing the future you, it seems, makes it a great deal easier to do something kind for them.

The thread running through all of this is that a vivid picture of your future tends to pull you towards it, while a vague one tends to leave you exactly where you are.

How does My Ideal Life work in PiViva?

My Ideal Life is a blank page and one question: what does your ideal life actually look like?

It's worth writing it properly and taking your time. What are you doing, and who's there with you? What does an average Tuesday look like, from the moment you wake up? Where are you living, what can you hear, and what are you no longer doing? The detail is the exercise, so the more you can see, the better.

Then you rate how close your life today feels to what you've written, as a single number.

A ten is rare, and a lower number is completely fine, since it simply gives you a starting point. What really matters is whether the gap begins to close over the following year, and which parts of your description start coming true first. They're quite often not the parts you'd have expected, which is one of the more delightful surprises of doing this.

What if your ideal life feels miles away?

Then you've found something genuinely useful, and there's real hope in that. A big gap with a clear description is far easier to work on than a small gap you can't quite see.

Pick one line from your description and ask yourself what the very first step towards it might be, then take that into Goal Setting. If the gap seems spread across several parts of your life, the Wheel of Life and Yearly Vision will help you decide where to begin.

It's worth coming back to My Ideal Life every six months or so and rewriting the whole thing from scratch each time. What you leave out the second time can tell you as much as what you add.

If you'd like to imagine it before you write, there's a guided audio called "Your ideal life, five years from now", narrated by Jo Whitfield, on the Latte shelf in Listen. Many people find that hearing it first makes the writing flow far more easily.