Design Your Life: A Career and Life Planning Guide
Welcome! Are you feeling lost or stuck in your career path? Do you dream of a more fulfilling life but aren’t sure how to get there? This page is designed to introduce you to the concept of Designing Your Life, a powerful framework based on design thinking principles that will help you craft a life and career that aligns with your deepest values and aspirations.
What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a human-centered problem-solving methodology used to creatively tackle complex challenges. By applying its principles to your life, you can become the architect of your own future!
The Framework of Design Thinking
Here’s a breakdown of the design thinking phases, which we’ll adapt to the process of designing your life:
- Empathize: Understand yourself. Explore your values, interests, skills, and experiences.
- Define: Identify your life aspirations. What do you want your life to look and feel like?
- Ideate: Brainstorm possibilities. Generate a wide range of options for your career and life path.
- Prototype: Experiment and test different approaches. This can involve internships, volunteer work, informational interviews, or personal projects.
- Test: Reflect and iterate. Based on your experiences, refine your goals and make adjustments.
Stages of Life Design
Now, let’s delve into the specific stages of life design, with corresponding resources to guide you through each step:
- Worksheet: “My Life Values”
- Activity: Create a life vision board to visualize your ideal future.
- Worksheet: “Designing Your Ideal Week”
- Discussion Prompt: What are your non-negotiables in a career and life?
- Website: Stanford Life Design Lab Resources
- Activity: Conduct informational interviews with professionals in fields that interest you.
- Website: Career Services at California State University Stanislaus – Design Your Life Resources
- Activity: Volunteer for a cause you care about to gain experience and explore your passions.
- Website: Western Connecticut State University – Career Success Center – Design Your Life
- Activity: Regularly reflect on your progress and adjust your goals as needed.
Mindsets of Life Design
- Curiosity: Curiosity is a prerequisite for designing the life you want to live.
- Radical Collaboration: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African Proverb
- Reframing: In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem-solving.
- Mindfulness of the Process: Life Design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.
- Bias Toward Action: Designers embrace change. They are not attached to a particular outcome, because they are always focused on what will happen next–not what the final result will be.
Life Design Activities
Life Design activities are tools and exercises that help individuals explore, reflect, and plan their personal and professional lives. These activities facilitate decision-making, envisioning future possibilities, understanding personal energy levels, and examining social identities. Try out the activities below to gain insights into your values, preferences, and goals, in order to design a more fulfilling and aligned life.
The Workview activity in Designing Your Life is an exercise that helps you articulate your personal philosophy about work. It’s not just about listing what you want in a job, but rather a deeper reflection on what work itself means to you and your overall purpose.
The Lifeview activity delves deeper than just work, prompting you to consider your overarching life philosophy. It’s an introspective exercise to understand your core values and beliefs that serve as a compass for your life decisions.
The “collegeview” describes a student’s ideas about what college is for and what it means to you. It is not just a list of goals or a to-do list of activities (that’s your Bucket List). Rather, it’s a personal manifesto about the purpose of college.
A Social Identity Reflection is an exercise that helps you understand how the various groups you belong to (your social identities) influence your life choices and goals. It’s a valuable tool in life design because it allows you to design a life that aligns with your core values and sense of self.
The Work, Play, Love, Health (WPLH) Dashboard is a life design exercise to help you assess your overall well-being across four key areas:
- Work: This includes your career satisfaction, educational satisfaction, sense of purpose, and professional growth.
- Play: This covers activities that bring you joy, relaxation, and a sense of renewal.
- Love: This encompasses your relationships with partners, family, friends, and community.
- Health: This refers to your physical and mental well-being, including your energy levels, stress management, and healthy habits.
The Energy Engagement Map is a self-awareness tool used in life design to understand how activities throughout your day impact your energy levels. By mapping these activities and their energy effects, you gain insights into how to design a life that aligns with your natural energy patterns and maximizes your overall well-being.
The Good Time Journal is a self-reflection tool designed to help you understand what energizes you and what drains you throughout your day. It’s based on the idea that by tracking your activities and energy levels, you can gain valuable insights into how to design a life that brings you more joy and fulfillment.
The Failure Log is a counterintuitive but powerful tool used to reframe failures as opportunities for learning and growth in your life design process. This tool enables you to shift perspective, identify patterns, and promote growth.
Mindmapping is a visual brainstorming technique that can be a powerful tool in life design. It helps you explore ideas, identify connections, and gain clarity on your goals and aspirations.
The Odyssey Planning Exercise is a life design tool that helps you explore different future possibilities. This exercise encourages you to consider different paths and potential obstacles in your own life journey. The activity encourages you to explore Plan A: The Obvious Plan, Plan B: The Alternative Plan, and Plan C: The Wild Card.
After taking the time to reflect and explore various possibilities, you can start testing out some of them through conversations with other people, experiences like volunteering or shadowing, and resources such as day-in-the-life videos.
A Decision Matrix is a structured tool used to compare and evaluate multiple options when faced with a decision. It helps you objectively weigh the pros and cons of each option based on pre-determined criteria.
The Career Values Card Sort is a self-reflection tool designed to help individuals identify and prioritize their career values. This process aids in assessing current work situations, planning for the future, finding suitable job opportunities, and making informed career decisions.
Additional Resources
Interested in taking your understanding of Life Design even further? Check out Designing Your Life, a book by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. This book delves into the principles and practices of Life Design, offering insights and tools to help you create a fulfilling and meaningful life. Through engaging exercises and real-life examples, you’ll learn how to navigate life’s challenges, make better decisions, and design a life that aligns with your values and aspirations.
