Design Your Life
Sitting in Atlanta, Georgia, around a wooden coffee table on a gray boomerang-shaped couch, it felt more like a living room than a webinar broadcast to hundreds of people. As each panelist responded to my final question, I leaned in to hear the soft spoken wisdom of Dr. Susan Chung.
“Design is Life. And Life if Design,” she said.
Expanding further she talked about her own journey to design her life, a life that she wanted. I couldn’t agree more. One of the things many high-achievers struggle with is getting lost in the doing, rather than the being.
Mental health month is a great time for self-reflection and active experimentation regarding how we spend our time. Below are exercises designed to help you reflect on your current life, explore various life paths, and prototype experiences to build a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling. They encourage an active and iterative approach to life design, much like how a designer would approach creating a product.
1.Workview and Lifeview Reflection:
This exercise involves writing down your philosophy of work (Workview) and your philosophy of life (Lifeview). It’s about understanding what work and life mean to you and ensuring they are coherent with each other.
2. Good Time Journal:
Keep a journal of your daily activities and note which ones engage you and bring you energy (flow activities) and which ones drain you. This helps identify what kind of work fits you best.
3. Odyssey Plans:
Create three different five-year plans for your future life. Each plan varies based on different paths you could take, such as continuing your current career, pursuing a long-held passion, or doing what you would do if money or image were no object.
4. Prototyping Conversations:
Conduct informational interviews with people who are doing work that intrigues you. This helps you understand the realities of those jobs and whether they align with your interests and values.
5. Designing Your Energy Engagement:
This involves tracking your energy levels throughout the day and identifying the activities that contribute to high and low energy levels. The goal is to redesign your daily activities to maximize energy and engagement.
While these exercises are helpful at any life-phase, I think they are especially spot on for graduation season, when so many are thinking about their future, and wondering “what am I supposed to do with my life?”.
So to all of you amazing souls, I send my love and good wishes, and my faith in your path forward, whatever that becomes.
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