I am enjoying reading Designing Your Life by Burnett & Evans. A friend who is between jobs told me how much the book is helping her to explore what she wants to do next. To me it’s a life coaching book that is reframed through engineering and design lenses. I particularly like that they suggest you enlist help along your way that they call Radical collaboration. It is a cool way to approach the concept that even though you are the driver of your life design, building a joyful life is a result of your ideas combined with contributions from others in the form of brainstorming, advice and mentoring. Teams really do outperform individuals.
One of the tales we believe when we are young is that people have a clear and straight path throughout their life. In school at a young age you start to see which areas of study you like and are good at and that starts you in a certain direction. You are told to choose your major in college as if that will singularly determine which career you will embark on after school. However, that is setting you up for some rough patches when you learn quite quickly that knowing what you like in school doesn’t capture the breadth of your life work endeavors. Not to mention that besides work, there is a whole lot more to life including relationships, health, play, spiritual and personal growth and more.
I like the sentence, “This is what I am doing…for now.” “For now” gives greater flexibility and quite honestly allows for corrections and revisions and obstacles that you will encounter along the trail of your lifetime. Changing direction will and should happen many times over your life. But that is a rare conversation had with most people under the age of 40 and may be hard to grasp if you have felt caught in a certain path at any age.
When you change your direction you are simply creating a new chapter in your life. How lucky that you get to do something that will expose you to new things, grow you in new ways and perhaps increase your joy factor. I hope you find that a relief. I know that whenever I made major changes to my life path I felt like I was doing something wrong, or that I was a failure for not pushing through on the track I was “supposed” to go on. In truth there is no “supposed to go path” no matter what you made up in your mind or heard your parents say. So on this May Day, I say time to design your next chapter…for now. Because today is as good as any day to design the life you want to live.
If you could use some help designing your life, check out this free guide: Free Guide For Dreaming
xoxo Rachel
Wondrance 