DESIGNING YOUR LIFE 50 Years of Research and Testing to Bring You These Life Possibilities
Apply Creative Design Principles to Bring You the Life You Dream Of
Designing Your Life By Annie Collyer
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Designing Your Life is not a new concept.
People from the beginning of time have worked to create and design the kind of life they dreamed of living. Some with success. Most falling short of the ideal life they want, and ending up with some sort of compromises. Over the past 50 years, there has been a lot of research into the concept of design. People have designed cars and plane engines and lightbulbs. Now people are learning how to design their lives.
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Design Engineering for Human Beings
Many of the principles of design engineering apply to life design. But there are some very important additions. Mostly because we are not designing a machine when we talk about life design. We are talking instead about human beings, with histories, emotions, intelligence, aspirations, belief systems and value systems. That means that designing your life involves a lot of other concepts: things like education, psychology, sociology, philosophy for instance. There are probably myriads of others that come into play. I am not one of the researchers into life design. I am a consumer. I use life design in my own life. I want to live the life I want, not some life I get stuck with. Can you relate to that idea? What if you can have happiness in your life? Instead of just settling and coping?
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I am here to tell you that there are some researchers out there who have done a LOT of work so that we can each claim life design for ourselves. Isn’t that exciting? Doesn’t that make you start to salivate at the very idea that you really can have it all! I know it does for me. I hope you will join me in exploring about Designing Your Life and put these ideas and action plans into effect, so that you can Live the Life you really want! Beginning now.
You Can Be The Real You Human-centered design has the goal of making You Be the Real You. Not some imitation of anyone else. Not some life that someone else designed for you. Not even some you that you feel stuck being. The Real You. First let me say that the adage that you need to follow your Passion is not true. Research shows that only about maybe 20% of the people alive today even know what their passion is. The other 80% may have a lot of things that interest them, and they are hardpressed to pick one that they can say is their passion. So forget that idea. Following your passion is not the way to Design Your Life.
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There is a best-selling book right now called Designing Your Life. I have read it, and some of the ideas in this ebook are drawn from it. It was written by some researchers named Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who started a whole Institute at Stamford University, where for the past 50 years or so, Stamford students have been able to study in courses in how to Design Their Lives.
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There is also a course at Harvard University called Happiness. Harvard Students can actually study the science and lifestyle of having happiness in their lives. More and more of these courses are opening up. People are hungry to be happier. Why is that? Perhaps it is because we have so much technology and so much change and so many options these days, that people feel it is possible to look for happiness. They are not “stuck on the farm” or “working in the salt mines”. They have options. Perhaps it is something that has been sought by human beings from the beginning of time, and now we have the ability to study and learn it, instead of maybe happening upon it by good luck. What I can tell you, the methodology is here. You can Design Your Life.
Some Untruths to Be Debunked There are a couple of basic principals to talk about first, to open up possibility for you.
One, there is nothing wrong with not knowing what you want. As said just now, 80% of people don’t know one thing Designing your Life
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they are passionate about. That doesn’t make 20% of people right and the other 80% wrong. It makes the principal idea that we should somehow know what we want and pursue it passionately wrong. There is nothing wrong with you when you do not know what you want in your life. In fact, the word should should be excommunicated from our language. There is no should. There is just IS. All you need to get started in Designing Your Life is to start, right where you are, right now. At Stamford, they have a big sign on the front door of the Institute –. Where is here? It is wherever you are, right now. No right or wrong. Just is. Just here.
The second principal to be debunked is this: Are you being the best possible version of you? The truth is, this is a really stupid question. When asked, most people think they can have many different lifetimes within their one time on this earth plane. The answers range from 3 to several hundred, with the average about 7 or 8. I know in my life, I have lived already at least 9 different lives in my life span, and I have a lot of years left. You may have even more years left than me. Or you may have fewer. The point here is that you have lots of options for life ahead of you. Designing your Life
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No one version is the best, is it? It was what it was, when it was happening. It is what it is, right now. It will be what we design it to be in the future, when we use the principals of Designing Our Life. Life does not happen in a line. There is not one single best life. There are many better life choices, and thinking one is the best is limiting. Severely limiting, because it eliminates all the better choices while looking for the one single nonexistent elusive Best Life. Make sense so far? So we get rid of these two completely inaccurate untrue and limiting beliefs that many of us have been taught. Just throw them out. Reframe instead with these two principles: 1- I can design a life I want by accepting that I am starting here. 2- I have many better lives I can design, and just need to pick one.
Five Principals of Life Design There are Five Design principles in Designing Your Life, according to the Stamford researchers. 12345-
Have endless curiosity. Try Stuff Change Your Perspective by reframing limiting ideas Be Aware that Life is a process, not a goal Ask for Help
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About curiosity. Can you think back to when you were a child and asked why all the time? Can you remember the way you looked at bugs and flowers and trees? Can you remember how you tried to figure things out, and understand what was going on around you? Can you remember how you tried to figure out who God is, or isn’t? We need to get back that curiosity when we get into Designing Our Lives. We need to be open to asking questions, and looking at things in new ways. Ways that are free of the restrictions and limitations of what we have been taught. One way to begin to do that, is called ideation. Start out, they suggest, by looking at where you are right now. Keep a journal for at least three weeks on what you do and how that makes you feel. When you are at work, what tasks did you do that day and how did they make you feel? When you wake up in the morning and take your shower and eat and get dressed, how do you feel? When you are traveling to your job or to a meeting, how does that go for you? When you come home at night, how does that make you feel? How do you spend your evening, and how do you feel? Just take notes. Keep in mind there is no should. There is no judgment. There are no right or wrong answers.
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What you are doing is to take your temperature. You want to find out when you feel good, or in the zone. When you feel energized. When you feel useful and satisfied. When you are bored out of your mind. When you are just neutral and dispassionate. And when you get frustrated, or scared, or angry. Notice what makes you feel good, and what doesn’t. Just be mindful about what is going on in your life for you, emotionally. Some of the things that will trigger different emotions for you will be interactions with people. You may love being with people, or not. You may enjoy teaching, or learning. You may enjoy fiddling with machines or numbers. You may enjoy the satisfaction of assembling something. You may zone when you meditate. You may thrive on family time in the evening, or not. You may enjoy peace and quiet or high activity and noise. Just notice it. This is called being mindful. Becoming aware. The parts of your life will break down into activities, environment, interactions, objects and people in various roles. Remember, no judgment. No should. No right or wrong. Just be honest.
Step Two is Ideation
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To get creative and free with ideation, it is good to make a mind map. Take a large sheet of paper – I mean really big. From your journals, pick one thing that made you feel good. Any one thing. Write it in the middle of the paper. Then let your mind go free. Write 5-6 ideas that pop into your head related to that one thing that makes you feel good. Then go really free and crazy nuts. Write in another circle out from that first idea and the circle of the 5-6 ideas, 3-4 ideas that pop into your head from each of the 5-6. Now you have 3 circles. You want to have 3-4 circles in all. Keep going with ideas. Let your mind go crazy wild with anything that pops in. No censorship! Just be
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nuts. No one else has to see this so no one is going to laugh at you. NO Judgment! This should be fun. It should also take about 3-5 minutes in all. Don’t give yourself time to think. Just write. Let ideas pop for you. By the way, as you get to the outer 3-4 rings, the ideas will not even appear to relate at all to your first central idea. That is how it should be.
Take A Look At What You Got OK, now take a deep breath. Look at what you have. Draw a circle around a few that jump out at you. Just let yourself pick them by trusting your gut and your emotions. They are your inner guidance system. Some of your ideas are just not going to work. These the Stamford folks call gravity problems. You are probably not going to travel to Saturn. There are some things you are just going to have to accept because they cannot be changed. No problem. Most things are not gravity problems, but some just are. They are part of reality. There are other challenges that are anchors. These are belief systems that limit us. These are what need reframing to open up possibility. So you have a few ideas that jumped out at you. See how those may fit together for you. There was an example in the book Designing Your Life of a man who worked at a car rental agency. He hated his job. He did not know what to do. He did this exercise and found out that what really gave him happiness and joy in his life was working with kids, and being at the beach. It turned out that his company had car rental agencies in Hawaii, and he could go to work for them there. He could do his job and pursue what made him really happy in his new location by starting a beach pirate camp! He learned how to Design the next few years of his life to be what he wanted. Designing your Life
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When you come up with the things that pop out at you, you can write them down. You can do some research on them, and see how they might fit together. You can read books, search the internet, and talk to people. If you have an idea for a job or business, it is good to have conversations with people who are in the business. People love to talk about themselves. If you ask, most will be happy to share a cup of coffee and talk about how things are working for them, and how they spend their time.
Many people – hopefully this is not you or me! – get comfortable just staying where they are. There can be some feeling of security in holding on to something, even if it is not working for you. It is what you know, after all. Opening up can feel risky. It can bring up a fear of failure, instilled in us from our earliest test-taking days. We need to get it all right, don’t we? If we try something and it doesn’t work, then will people laugh at us? Will they make fun of us? Won’t it be safer to just stay right in the failed life we are living than to risk that? I hope you don’t feel that fear of being judged. It is true that there are people who always will do that. But there are also cheerleaders and encouragers and mentors and advisors who will help us. We
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each need to get rid of or ignore the toxic judges and build relations with the people who are going to be positive in our lives.
Risk Limitation With Prototyping We also need to limit the risks. We can limit them by taking baby steps.
If you have a great idea, there are several ways to test it out without giving up your job, moving yourself and your family to Bolivia and becoming a beach bum and surfer. You can talk to people who live that life to learn more. You can take a vacation and see how that goes for you. You can watch YouTube videos about the life. You can investigate ways to pursue the life you want while you look at how you are going to buy food, and educate your kids, and have good health care. One of the key ideas in Designing Your Life is that there are many, many possibilities for your life that will all work for you. There are almost too many. So a good thing to do is to select three possibilities. Three is a good number for making a choice. Too many choices are too broad, and no choice happens at all.
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Fewer than three is too limiting. Keep in mind, there is no right answer. There are a bunch of possibilities. Just choose three. Any three. One is basically the life you have now, with the addition of things that would make it work better, based on your mind map results. The second is your back up plan, what you would do if your current life disappeared. What Life would you lead. And the third is a Life Design you would have if you had no limits or constraints. Money is not a limit. Time, health, age are all not limits.
Then take each one and draw it out. Drawing helps to keep our minds from getting stuck in intellectual and habitual thought patterns. It keeps us freer in our ideation. By the way, no judging the drawing quality either! Take your plan forward for five years. Five years is kind of a magic time. Most people figure things are going to be changing in about four years, so you give it the four plus one more for more room. Make a timeline for each one, one at a time. Give your plan a title. Ask questions that need to be tested out to see how they work. Questions you can research.
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Create a dashboard to measure the outcomes. What resources are needed for this plan? What do you like about it? How confident do you feel in it? Does it line up with your values? That is called being coherent. And then add in other things, like location, experience you hope to gain, the impacts and results. Note what life looks like 5 years out. Do this exercise with each of your three plans. At Stamford, they call these the Odyssey plans. Now you begin to get some answers to the questions you found in the exercise. They call this prototyping. The purpose of prototype is to try things in small chunks. Small experiments. Most are going to be failures. This needs to be reframed to be learning and growing experiences, not something bad. Try them out. See what works. See what fails. Evaluate what you learn and move on.
Leave Room for Serendipity to Happen
I know the Law of Attraction is a Natural Law that is true and real. When you are looking at your Odyssey plans, and opening yourself to possibility with them,
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remember you came up with them because they resonate with you in your gut and in your emotions. That process of thinking and giving it emotion and mapping out details triggers the Law of Attraction. You will have people and information and opportunity come into your life by that Law. Be open to it. Be mindful of the fact that things will be attracted to you, for a plan that will work for you. One of the things the authors finally get into toward the very end of the book Designing Your Life is that they both meditate. I believe meditation is creative mindfulness. They don’t use that term, I do. I believe that this whole process is an opening up of our minds and emotions to possibilities from the Universe that will work for us. When we practice mindful meditation, we open up to information from God or Spirit or the Creator or Krishna or whatever name you give to the Infinite Intelligence. We allow good things to come to us that will make us happy.
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Time to Choose
Finally we come to making a choice. We have gathered information. We have talked to people. We may even have a group of likeminded folks who mutually support one another in looking at possibility. Choosing can be another scary time for some people. The reason why goes back to the idea that there is only one best possible life option. Remember that just is not true! There are many. You have done your work to find one or more that is a real possibility. Now it is time to make a choice.
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One thing that is really important is to do is to avoid rethinking your choice. doubting, regretting are just agonizing. That makes for anything but happiness. Embracing your choice is choosing happiness. Let go and move on, into your choice. Move into the Life you have designed with gusto. Remember all of life is a process. It is not an endgame. Life is an infinite game, where you play with the rules, the authors say.
Five Big Takeaways I listened to a lecture by one of the authors on YouTube, where he outlined the five most useful truths that past students have identified from the Designing Your Life teaching over the past 50 years. The first is that a good Life Design connects the dots. It has meaning and purpose that aligns who we are, what we do, what we believe in and why we are here. It is congruent with our essential being and values. The second is that there is a reality of Gravity problems. Things we cannot change and simply must accept. If a person is blind, that is the reality of life for him or her, for instance.
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The third is knowing how many lives we can live in this one lifetime. The average is 7.5 of what most people think. That is a lot of possibility and takes the sting and concern about making a choice on a Life Design. The fourth is to make a choice well. We gather options, make a list, test it out and make a choice. Removal of the FOMO, Fear of Missing Out is part of choosing one of many good options. Leave room for serendipity, and the Law of Attraction, in my words. The fifth key idea is to trust your gut and embrace your choice. You know you have chosen well. Now want what you have got. Remove any reversibility in making your choice. Go for it with gusto.
Afterword: You have subscribed to the Career and Business newsletter from Annie’s Tips. A part of your Creative Mindfulness in Designing Your Life has to do with your career and business. Many of my readers are considering the possibility of looking into an online business they can do from their own homes, so that they can maximize other aspects of their lives. This newsletter talks about that kind of business, and gives you information and ideas that you will want to consider, or prototype, to see if this is a good choice for you. Fortunately online business options are free to look into, low cost to enter if you decide to, and with some hard work, dedication and application of training, you can build an online business in your free time, without giving up our day job. There are lots of opportunities to prototype this business in baby steps, without a lot of risk. If it fits you, there is a tremendous potential in it. Over the coming weeks, you will be receiving a series of emails with the newsletters. I hope you enjoy them and benefit from them, as you Design Your Life. Designing your Life
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You may notice that Annie’s Tips offers other newsletters on other aspects of being creatively mindful in Designing Your Life. Please feel free to subscribe to any of the other free newsletters as well. I want to help you have a life you love. Annie’s Tips are designed to help. Please let me know how it goes for you!
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Designing your Life
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