Design Your Life: Your Post Self-Help Process
Break rules. Challenge stories. And most importantly, recruit a guide.
Lifestyle Design is taking center stage as the growth method du jour. But before you roll your eyes, here’s why this NKOTB will be sticking around awhile.
What It Is
Lifestyle Design: The process of breaking from conventional rules and archetypes in order to live from within.
Most people live a life designed by their society, culture and family. In lifestyle design, an individual learns to challenge conventional lifestyle rules, then break away from societal conditioning while redesigning a more genuine, fulfilling existence.
Why We Need It
You’ve likely done a lot of work on yourself already, and you’ve brought yourself as far as you have the energy to go on your own. You’re in need of someone who can challenge you, guide you and ask the tough questions your friends and family won’t.
You want to step into that life you think about. You want things — lots of things — and still feel so excited by life’s possibilities, but you are overwhelmed. Or maybe it’s been awhile since you’ve been genuinely lit up by anything (a.k.a., “languishing”, the dominant feeling of 2021), which leads to more hesitation, emotional blockage and judgement. You might be charged with keeping little humans alive or a demanding job, or both, so you set your own life aside for “someday”. At the same time, you feel like time is running out.
The pandemic has brought many of us to this exact feeling. Maybe some of you have been living there longer than you care to admit.
Because women today stand on the shoulders of the women who came — and fought — before us, many have the privilege of living outside the glass boxes created for us by society. Originally meant to keep us safe (and at some points in history, alive), these glass boxes of what a woman is supposed to be are more limiting and unfulfilling than helpful. These boxes remain strong, threaded into lifestyle narratives repeated to us by family, entertainment or colleagues : be small, be soft, be dependent, be sexy… but sweet.
I can’t help but notice how often we still agree to these stories — how often we limit ourselves.
For most, our internal dialogues sound something like this:
There must be more.
What more could you possibly want?
I know there’s more.
There’s always more, don’t be greedy. You have a good life.
I’m capable of more.
Are you?
I’m bored.
But you’re so busy…
This isn’t me.
You can’t just change your life. You have responsibilities.
When we tease apart our socially conditioned voice and our real, internal voices, it can be a lot to manage. We can listen to the podcasts, read the books, envision the dreams. But there is nothing like living it in reality, and there is only so much we can do on our own.
Limitations
As with many industries, there is no widely agreed upon or necessary certification to call yourself a lifestyle designer. This is likely due to the nascence and, admittedly, the ambiguity of the field. Great marketing can catapult an ill-equipped lifestyle designer to financial success before anyone realizes the branding did all the work. Here are some important things to look for while starting your coaching process.
What To Look For
While there is no required industry certification, the list below are a combination of powerhouse ingredients for a well-rounded, informative and supportive experience:
Authentic Connection - lifestyle design is deep work that requires bidirectional trust, integrity, respect and enjoyment of one another. First and foremost, find a designer that makes you feel warm, comfortable and safe, and with whom you can resonate with on some level.
Knowledge of Human Behavior - behavior science has become a loose term in recent years and, while some may be gifted with empathy and the ability to relate to others, there are many who tote the title “scientist” with no background in human behavior. Lifestyle design is most effective and speediest (and, in my opinion, safest) when supported by the knowledge of why we do what we do and the complex interworkings of human behavior.
Inclusion of Spirituality - this does not mean religion or the mention of a God, but instead deals in the matters of energy work, attraction, mindset, manifestation, human design, or a connection to anything outside oneself that the individual can resonate with. One’s ability to teach and practice non-judgement and non-attachment is specifically important.
Formal Practice in Science/Experimentation - lifestyle design includes elements of design thinking and science. Essentially, anyone with this background and experience can help you be intentional with any changes while saving you from the tendency we have to make broken things work. Mini experiments should have a desired feeling or outcome, small behavioral changes to get there, and checkpoints to assess how the process is going.
Guidance and Leadership Skills - think of this as “the ability to hold space, listen, reflect and guide”. Your designer is someone with whom you share experiences, feelings and desires, and who presents thoughtful questions and reflections directed toward meeting a need or want of some kind in return. The practice is cyclic, open and inquisitive, and includes the belief that each person already has everything they need in order to be successful. This approach allows the client to sustain their changes long after the client-designer relationship is over. If your experience feels prescriptive, over directed or forced, you may want to consider looking elsewhere.
Lifestyle design should be an elevating, enriching, enjoyable and outrageously effective investment in your life. Above all, enjoy the process.
