Thinking about Life Design
II just finished a course that follows the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (2021). This book is readily available for order online and there is also a web site that may be of interest to you. Leesa Farrell led my group of five who gathered remotely from east coast to west, Japan and Mexico, for a 6-week experience applying design principles and tools to think about how we might craft a fulfilling career and life. I also bought and read the book, and shared my insights along the way with a friend of mine who was doing the course at the same time with another facilitator.
The book says to do life design we need to think like designers and engage in building things that they call prototypes to explore and get data and information to inform our choices. The book mentions five mindsets we need to really strengthen for this design process to truly work: being curious, trying stuff out, reframing problems, knowing it’s a process, and asking for help. Adopting this way of thinking about situations, challenges, and the unknown can help you change the story of your life.
Here is a quick overview of a couple of the tools I found really useful that you may find of interest yourself.
I got a lot out of the activity log experience, where daily for 1 – 3 weeks you write down what you are doing, in other words your activities, and then rate how engaged and energized you were by each one of them. You can use little gauges like a gas gauge in your car, or a graphical image of a low to high scale. This exercise helps you to see if you are spending time on things that drain you and are not engaging. Or on the flip side, what activities make you feel engaged, maybe even “lost” in the activity for you are so engaged, and you are “in the state of flow.” Just based on this information you can immediately make choices about how you are spending your time and life energy.
You may also want to use the mind map exercise to help you think of new ideas around changes you want to make, or how to spend more time on the activities identified above that are engaging and energizing. Wikipedia offers some readily accessible information about the mind map - a tool to organize and brainstorm information all coming from a central theme or topic. Your map can start with a simple activity such as Getting Exercise. Then you just “free associate” all kinds of ideas and write them down branching off the central concept of Getting Exercise, and one idea leads to another, and another. And then even different paths may become apparent when coming up with all these ideas associated with Getting Exercise. There is a lot of information on the internet if you want to read more about this concept, which is a great tool to help you get “unstuck.”
I also got a lot out of the odyssey plan exercise where you envision three different, very unique plans for your future. You give each plan a title and a short story. In the group setting you share your ideas other others and often start the brainstorming process to explore each plan through prototyping. Prototyping is a design term where many different approaches may be created, explored, tried out and tested, and information and data are gathered to help inform your next steps. Practically speaking, it can be trying out things in small ways to see if they are a good fit for you, or even just talking to people who know something about what you are interested in to learn more. The process of coming up with prototype ideas, doing brainstorming on activities associated with that prototype, testing the ideas, collecting information, and making a selection of action gives you method for life change decisions that may be easier and more sound and informed.
The Designing Your Life methodology was built working with college students at Stanford University. The program wanted to optimize student’s entering the world of work when they graduated so they could pursue the right fit in terms of jobs and professions to be happy and productive. But it also applies to anyone faced with the desire to make changes in their life, to do something different, or even reinvent themselves with an encore career. You may want to check it out!