Life Journey Planning? 4 Takeaways from Designing Your Life Workshop

by Lisa Seppala, True North Implementation

Last week I attended Designing Your Life, an online workshop led by Chris Simamora and John Armstrong from Stanford University’s Life Design Lab. (Thank you, SFU Alumni, for sponsoring this fantastic event!)

The training applies concepts from the design world to life and career planning based on the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-lived Joyful Life (Burnett & Evans, 2016). My objective for attending was to learn new techniques to serve my clients, and I left the session with so much more.

Key takeaways include:

Using schemas to generate creativity and get unstuck

• Looking at categories of information and the potential relationships with other categories (e.g., how many uses are there for my skills in different environments or with different markets?)

Recognizing and reframing dysfunctional beliefs

• E.g., rather than say ‘follow my passion,’ ask, ‘what am I genuinely interested in exploring right now?’

Using a ‘3 versions of me’ approach to creating an odyssey, the authors’ term for life plan

• Create three 5-year timelines. Each timeline represents a different odyssey, complete with a vision and milestones
• Odyssey #1 – What do the next five years look like on the current path?
• Odyssey #2 – What do the next five years look like if the current path isn’t possible?
• Odyssey #3 – The wild idea. What do the next five years look like with no constraints?
• Assess each odyssey. Do I have the resources? Do I like it? (i.e., Will it be inspiring for me?) Do I have the confidence to pull it off? Does it truly represent who I am?

Prototype

• Is there one tiny step I can take to test my preferred odyssey? E.g., talking to others who’ve followed that path or taking some element on that path and trying it out.

Overall, the approach is simple, accessible, and valuable for many applications.

Personally, after an intense year of transforming life and business, my Odyssey #1 meets all the criteria and is the right one for me. That said, participating in this exercise made me realize it’s never too late to add a few of the wild elements of Odyssey #3 to my current path.

A two-hour online workshop is a quick introduction, and this short article only scratches the surface of what was covered. There are many resources on the Life Design Lab website http://lifedesignlab.stanford.edu/resources including an online class consisting of 21 lessons at a very reasonable cost. Also, the book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-lived Joyful Life (Burnett & Evans, 2016), is readily available through mainstream channels (in fact, I received my copy today). If you’re at a crossroads, or if, like me, your work is to support others with their journey, I encourage you to check these resources and concepts out for yourself.

Sources:

Armstrong, J., & Simamora, C. (2021). Designing Your Life: Interactive Workshop on Building a Meaningful, Joyful & Fulfilling Life. Stanford Life Design Lab.

Burnett, B., & Evans, D. (2016). Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-lived Joyful Life. New York: Knopf.