Over the next 5 days you will be laying the foundation for creating a life that you absolutely love; from the inside out. This course does not assume you are broken or that your life is in awful shape. It assumes that you have caught a glimpse of your own awesome potential and/or that you sense that you were created to be, do, have far more than you are presently being, doing, or having.
So with that being said, let's dive in with a precursory discussion about the impetus to design a life rather than simply accept the default. If you think about the idea of a default, it puts you immediately in the frame of mind that something better is available. If there are no other options, then there is no default. So a DesignerLife is a life where you upgrade based on your own personal desires, intentions, and values.
A DesignerLife does not imply that you must have a certain income, drive a certain car, live in a certain kind of house, and have a spouse and 2.5 kids. A DesignerLife is not rooted in material possessions, or other's standards for success, but in honoring our soul's dream.
Our soul's dream will guide us to design lives that leverage our natural talents and abilities, that orient around our values and commitments, and that support us in growing, developing, and contributing to the advancement of life. A soul's dream is not tied to our past failures, hurts, and disappointments. It does not erase them, but integrates them into a beautiful tapestry that allows us to live fulfilling lives without pretext or pretense.
It puts me in the mind of an upscale garment where the tag reads, "the unique irregularities in the fabric are part of the design". A DesignerLife has at its core the soul's dream. It is a deeply reverent expression of the Self as a unique and magnificently created being who happens to be human.
This 3 session course will cover 5 points:
- Getting clear about what you really want your life to be about
- Identify what specific things you need to include/exclude to be the best person you can be
- Identifying the gap between your dream life and your real life
- Establishing S.M.A.R.T. goals to close the gap
- Setting up structures to help you take consistent and clearly focused action
You will begin the adventure with one simple objective in mind; to gain clarity.
1. Get clear about what your DesignerLife looks like and then identify the key benefits.
To make this exercise easier, I invite you to imagine that it is five years from now and you are at the conclusion of a typical day, most likely a typical workday. This day was a perfect day; even the challenges and problems you encountered were perfect. You are about to go to bed and the phone rings, your good friend has called just to chat for a few minutes and he/she asks, "How was your day?" Now, having a life that you absolutely love, such a question is an invitation for you to bask in the events that made up your perfect day.
Take the next five minutes or so and write out your response; the response that has you reflecting on the day's events with a contented smile on your face. When you finish your response, you should have a warm feeling inside and your soul should feel sweetly satisfied that "this was a good day!"
One word of caution. This is not a pie-in-the-sky exercise. If it is not likely that you will live in a Castle, be married to a movie star, or have more money than Oprah, leave those things for fantasy time. Once you have written your response, begin to mine it for nuggets of truth about the life that will best serve you and that you are best suited to design and live into. Here are a list of questions to ponder:
- Who is routinely part of your perfect day?
- What are you doing?
- What talent, ability, gift are you engaging?
- What value does your activity honor?
- Where are you spending your time and what's special about your physical environment?
- When are you doing what? Are there times more suited for productive activity, times most suited for rest and relaxation, times for social interaction, times for reflection and being alone, times for creative exploration and discovery, times for supporting others, times for nurturing yourself?
- Why do these things belong in your perfect day? What do they give you that would be sorely missed if it were not present?
- What perfect problems do you have? What do these perfect problems tell you about your perfect life?
- If you had to use one word to describe how you feel about your life, given that it is mostly made up of perfect days and some of them with perfect problems, what word would you use?
Congratulations! You have completed lesson One. You stepped 5 years into the future and explored your perfect life and brought that wisdom back to the present moment to define what your DesignerLife really looks like.
In the second lesson we will cover the process of getting clear about what specific things you need to include and exclude to have that life. This step will focus your efforts on things that are important and essential and then we will also cover a technique for identifying the gap between your dream life and your real life.
This is one step many people shy away from because it is sometimes painful to look at your life and be candid about the things that just aren't working for you. When we own our life in totality, the good, the bad, the ugly...we will feel compelled to make some changes, but first we usually rake ourselves over the coals for the mistakes and bad choices we have made. If you want to make this process easier, decide up front, right now, that no matter what mistakes you have made, you will really forgive yourself and allow yourself to learn from those mistakes and get on with creating a fabulous life.
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