Design Your Future

Design Your Future motivates you to get out of your limiting beliefs and fears that are holding you back from building a life you love by identifying why you got stuck in a career or job you hate and what steps you must take to finally live your dreams.

When you’re in a career you hate, the hardest part is breaking free. Usually, it’s so difficult that external events like getting fired are the only way you can get out. This is exactly what happened to me, but it was just the push I needed to start the life I now love.

There are many reasons that we stay stuck and at the forefront of them is fear of the unknown. Will your dream career pay the bills? And what if you become even more miserable than you are now?

You also might struggle with the fear of the emotional drain you experience when going through big changes. What you don’t see, however, is how awful the emotional toll is of letting things stay the way they are.

Change hurts, but it’s far less painful than continuing an awful relationship or keeping a job you hate.

So you know that you want to break free, but how do you do it? The author gives three steps to start:

Awakening Disrupting Designing

To wake up to see the awful state you’re in, use the power of mindfulness. Observe your actions and habits to see the patterns you follow that keep you stuck. Especially focus on the things you do that make you unhappy.

Disruption comes next. To do this, experiment with ways to change your routine and see how it makes a difference. You’ll only see how good things can be when you try something new!

Once you have an idea of what works, you can start designing your life, which is what the rest of this book is about.

One of the things that terrified me the most about my career situation before I changed it was what my manager’s lives were like. They worked 50-60 hour weeks and hardly ever took vacations. I promised myself I would never live like that but it wasn’t easy at first to realize this was where I was heading unless I quit. It’s hard to connect with our future selves, and MRI scans confirm this. Economist Hal Hershfield found that brain scans of people who are thinking about their future selves are just the same as if they were thinking of a complete stranger! To beat this, visualize your future self. One of the author’s clients did this with great success. He was miserable in his sales job and considered his motivation, relationships,…