Creating a soft lifestyle is about more than following some rules made up by a celebrity or salesperson. Although it would be easier to follow some diet, exercise or plan for life balance, it would not bring the required joy and freedom to do what lights up your soul. Too often women just go through life being swept along in what is like a strong river current of constant messages about what they “should” be doing at all times, completely forgetting what it’s like to be in control. Joy, fun, rest and living life to its fullest are forgotten like an long lost lover.
What is a soft life?
“The soft life is an intentional, holistic, liberated lifestyle that prioritizes overall health and happiness, while rejecting hustle culture, diet culture and wellness culture. It is characterized by normalizing daily pleasure, energy, sensuality, femininity, self confidence, self trust and self love. The soft life is the art of living well.”
~Lisa
Why a Soft Life is Important
So why is there so much interest in living a soft life among black women? In a way, a soft life is a course correction for black women who have historically been forced to run ragged being the caretakers of everyone. The strong black women trope is used to further thanklessly exploit black women for a neverending supply of physical and emotional labor.
Modern cultural influences exacerbate the loss of softness by promoting extreme busy-ness, unhealthy comparison to others and a set of b.s. standards that we all are supposed to live up to. But these things eventually lead to exhaustion and stress. The number one enemy of good health is chronic stress. Chronic stress can be caused by overwork and the struggle or hustle life and lead to chronic lifestyle diseases. Living a soft life naturally includes self care and relaxation as overall wellness strategies. Black women are tired. It’s way past time for us to take at least as good care of ourselves as we do others.
So the challenge is being able to go inward and access the values that have likely been buried deep due to our culture’s requirements and expectations of us as women. We have repressed creativity, ideas and dreams that we have the right to indulge ourselves in during our lifetimes. It’s our birthright and an important part of our overall wellness.
The Process of Creating a Soft Life
To truly experience a soft life, you will not be able to just follow a set of instructions from a book or article. The reason is that every person is so vastly different that what may be my soft life may be a hard life for someone else. For example, I like to do high intensity interval training a couple of times a week. But it is too intense for many, and would just cause further stress. Or, someone else’s idea of a soft life may be ultra glam beauty and fashion. This would be a hard life for me, having to wear high heels and have perfect hair.
But this is a guide to going inside yourself to find what a soft life may look like for you, after casting aside all the negative external forces that we have become blind to over time.
Lifestyle categories
Choose 2-4 categories that you would like to prioritize immediately. These are sectors of life that together add up to the groups that lifestyle habits fit into. Because a lifestyle is really just a cache of habits.
- Health and fitness
- Intellectual
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Environmental
- Fun/leisure
- Self care
- Creativity
- Relationship
- Social/community
- Financial
- Career
- Parenting/family
- Style/beauty
Once you have chosen 2-4 categories to prioritize, take out a journal or piece of paper and brainstorm your overall life vision. This vision can be 2-3 sentences that capture the essence of how you want to live. Write about what you envision would make a drastic improvement in your quality of life.
Some questions to consider to get your juices flowing:
- What really matters to you in life? Not what should matter, what does matter.
- What would you like to have more of in your life?
- Set aside money for a moment; what do you want in your career?
- What are your secret passions and dreams?
- What would bring more joy and happiness into your life?
- What do you want your relationships to be like?
- What qualities would you like to develop?
- What are your values? What issues do you care about?
- What are your talents? What’s special about you?
- What would you most like to accomplish?
- What legacy would you like to leave behind? ~Lifehack
Clean goal setting
So when you have your life vision statement and your categories, under each category set 2-3 short term clean goals towards fulfilling that category’s place within the context of your vision statement. Clean goals are goals in which the point is not to achieve it perfectly, but to build a habit of taking consistent, imperfect action that will result in permanent, sustainable lifestyle habits.
For example, a clean fitness goal would NOT be to lose 20lbs. A clean fitness goal could be to walk 20 minutes at least once a week. Focus is on consistency. And if you miss a week, it doesn’t derail the whole process. You can easily pick up where you left off.
As you work on your lifestyle goals you should pay attention to blockages that keep coming up and address them. Be fearless in your endeavor, you can experiment, test drive and revise as necessary. Continue to work on your goals, and rinse and repeat with 2-4 more categories or more goals under the categories you have been working on.
From time to time I will be offering live workshops on discovering your own unique lifestyle values. Sign up for my email list for updates.
I’m LifeBliss Lisa and I coach black women on how to create intentional, healthy, soft lifestyles.