Designing Your Life

Designing Your Life will show you how to break the shackles of your mundane 9-5 job by sharing exercises and tips that will direct you towards your true calling that fills you with passion, purpose, and fulfillment.

Have you ever tried to use Google Maps to get to a place you’ve never been to? I don’t use data very often, so it occasionally has a hard time finding my current location, let alone where I want to go. Interestingly enough, this is a good analogy for what you need to know to begin designing your life.

To get an accurate picture of where you’re at in life right now, you need to ask yourself the right questions. Start by looking at how you’re doing in each of the four key areas:

Health Work Play Love

What you want to do is balance all of these pillars of life, but what that looks like is your choice. Younger people often look more to play, while those that are beginning to get older might focus on relationships or health.

By asking yourself how you’re doing in all of these areas, you can easily see what you’re neglecting. It’s important that you then set some goals to help you keep that part of your life healthy. Your relationships might need some attention, for example, if you’ve spent too much time focusing on your career.

Sometimes, the only thing holding us back from pursuing a more purposeful life is not knowing what fills us with energy.

To figure that out, just pay attention to what you do and how it makes you feel, then record it in a Good Time Journal. Use it to write down experiences, positive and negative, and how they make you feel.

Documenting what makes you sad is important but what’s vital is that you capture what you do that makes you feel focused, engaged, and in a state of flow. Make sure to be detailed about what you were doing when you felt these feelings, too!

Flow is particularly important. This is when you are so entranced with what you’re doing that you lose track of time. For me, it happened once while playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I won’t make a career out of that. I do pay attention, however, when it happens while doing certain writing tasks.

It’s really empowering to discover that certain work activities can actually increase your energy rather than draining it. Make sure to capture these in your Good Time Journal so you can see where you should go next with your life plan!