Life design mindset and process
Life design is about creating a meaningful and fulfilling life that is in line with your life purpose and personal values.
Life design is a structured process that enables individuals to create a meaningful and fulfilling life by aligning their actions and choices with their life purpose and personal values. Life design is about intentional living, about encouraging individuals to play an active role in shaping their lives. It is about moving from a passive, reactive way of life to a proactive, deliberate way of life.
Life design borrows principles from design thinking. Every design starts with a problem. In life design, the problem is to create something that has not existed before and for which little data is available: your future life. This is a complex problem for which there is no single, clear solution. There are many great designs for your life. Design thinking is the best tool for solving such ‘wicked’ problems. It is a human-centred problem-solving approach that emphasises empathy, creativity, and iterative prototyping to develop innovative solutions to complex problems.
Life design is not about creating a plan for your life, or about making the best, true, only choice. You’re not designing the rest of your life, just the next part of it. Life is like an abstract painting, it’s open to multiple interpretations. There isn’t only one best way to live your life.
The life design mindset
Successfully navigating the messy, unpredictable life design process requires some simple mindsets.
🧠 Be curious
Curiosity is about consciously seeing things through the eyes of an interested researcher, a novice, or an alien. Curiosity makes everything new and interesting.
🧠 Be inclined to take action
Taking action is essential to making progress and achieving your goals. Action is the bridge between ideas and results.
🧠 Do what is important
To experience a sense of meaning and fulfilment in your life, you must pursue activities and goals that align with your life purpose (what you value doing with your time), in a way that aligns with your personal values (how you want to behave).
🧠 Realise it’s a process
Life design is a process with as desired outcome a fulfilling and meaningful life. It is a messy, unpredictable journey of trial and error, full of mistakes and wrong turns.
🧠 Collaborate
Collaboration is a fundamental aspect of life design. You design and build your life in the outside world, through interaction with the world and with others.
🧠 Reframe
Reframing is looking at things in a different way by choosing a different frame. Life designers reframe situations and problems to get unstuck.
🧠 Embrace your choices
When making decisions about a life path, it is not only about what you choose, but also about the way you choose and how you deal with your choice afterwards.
🧠 Embrace your failures
Thinking in terms of learning experiences helps you not to give up when life's path becomes difficult, not to be afraid to take the necessary risks, and to be more willing to step out of your comfort zone.
Details are available at: https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/the-life-design-mindset
The phases of the life design process
The life design process typically involves the following phases:
👉 Determine what is important to you
Life design begins with an exploration of your life purpose and personal values. This gives you a compass that can guide you towards a well-designed life.
Your life purpose are the activities that make life worth living for you. It is your answer to the question ‘What important things should I do with my time?’
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/how-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-your-life
Your personal values indicate how you want to behave and what kind of person you want to be. They are your personal how, your qualities of doing and being.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/how-to-figure-out-your-personal-values
👉 Determine where you are now
Just as a ship can only start from the port where it is in, designing and building a meaningful and fulfilling life can only start from where you are now. You determine where you are now in four major areas of life: physical health, emotional health, work and relationships.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/determine-where-you-are-now
👉 Determine where you want to go
To design and build a fulfilling and meaningful life, you need to know where you want to go, because if you don’t, you're like a ship drifting aimlessly at sea. You choose the life area you want to improve and determine the design goal you want to achieve to improve your chosen life area.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/determine-where-you-want-to-go
👉 Determine a path to where you want to go
You determine a life path that will take you from where you are now to where you want to go.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/determine-a-path-to-where-you-want-to-go
If you encounter a major change in your life situation, or feel completely stuck, it may be a worthwhile exercise to design three significantly different life paths for the next five years of your life.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/design-three-paths-for-the-next-five-years
👉 Test your chosen path
You test the ideas of your chosen life path to assess how likely they are to help you achieve your design goal. This involves experimenting with various options to gain practical insights. This might include taking courses, volunteering, pursuing new hobbies, or part-time work related to potential career paths.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/test-your-chosen-path
👉 Build your tested path
You build your tested path by implementing its tested ideas, with the aim of achieving your design goal. By behaving in accordance with your life purpose and personal values, you will become more like the kind of person you want to be.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/build-your-tested-path
👉 Periodically evaluate your life design journey
Regularly assessing progress and making adjustments is a key aspect of life design. If certain design goals or life paths no longer align with your life purpose and personal values, adjustments are made.
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/periodically-evaluate-your-life-design-journey
References
Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
My blog posts about life design are available at this link:
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/category/Life+Design
