What a Life Design Coach Is and How They Can Help

I have just certified as a Design Your Life coach. Why did I do this? It was during a recent period of feeling dissatisfied with my life. I was feeling unexcited by my work and the thought of doing at least another 20 years of the same old same old until I retired made my heart sink.

I’d been itching to make changes to my life for a good five years. I’d toyed quite seriously with the idea of relocating. I’d also wanted a second child for a while and as a solo mum I knew that I’d have to up my income game to be able to afford another child on my own. So I set about thinking about what I could change up.

I stumbled across the book, Designing Your Life. This is the New York Times best-selling book based on the methodology that Bill Burnett and Dave Evans developed, and is taught in a class of the same name at Stanford University.

I felt more and more excited as I turned the pages. The ‘design thinking’  felt original and new to me. The book was written in a down-to-earth, real way with both writers sharing vulnerable experiences and case studies and I felt energised and inspired.

The principles and thinking shared in “Designing Your Life” (which I will from now on refer to as DYL) and their second book, “Designing Your New Work Life” resonated with my Gestalt Therapy theory training. Firstly, the focus is on the ‘now’. The book invited me to think about my situation as it is now. What can I do with my current situation to start generating changes?

Similarly, in a Gestalt Therapy session I start with enquiring how a client is right now. Fritz Perls et al. were influenced by Taoism and believed that focussing on the present as much as possible was the best way to effect change.

The book puts a lot of emphasis on self-responsibility. This resonates with Gestalt Therapy’s existential roots. As a therapist I support a client to have awareness of how they are influencing their situation and what they can do to change this. The book echoes this, communicating that we always have a choice about how we feel about and perceive our situation. This in turn informs what we do.

One way Bill and Dave highlight this is in identifying common negative beliefs and how we can re-frame them. Reframing negative beliefs is of course nothing new and many psychotherapeutic methods tackle these. What I liked was the specific focus on negative beliefs to do with work that I had witnessed my clients struggle with. 

One of these is, “I’m stuck as I don’t know what work I’d rather do”.

As a life design coach, I invite you to re-frame this.

For example, are you literally feeling stuck in this moment? Right here in this moment scan your body and your mind for ‘stuck-ness’.

When I ask this, I’ve never had a client agree that they feel stuck in the moment. If anything their body feels buzzy, fidgety with anxiety and their mind  is racing with thoughts. The DYL book then goes on to ask:  “ can you generate any ideas right now for what to do next?” You may so ‘no’ but if we dig a little I’m sure you will come up with some ideas.

For example when I felt stuck, I began to think about activities and hobbies I’d enjoyed in the past. I also asked myself what I would do if I became a millionaire and never had to earn a living again. Yes, the ideas that come up might feel far-fetched but there might be something we can try or do with them.

Recently when I asked a client this, they started to talk about jobs they had wanted to do in the past. We considered ways they could talk to people doing these types of jobs now to find out more about them.

Another negative belief around work is, “I need to figure out the perfect profession” before I try anything. Bill and Dave challenge this. If we wait around to figure out the perfect strategy to get the perfect job we’ll be sitting around forever.

Looking for a job, designing your life is a process. This also resonates with my Gestalt Therapy theory training which is process-oriented. We are are able to re-create ourselves from moment to moment. In fact there are many versions we can be. Therefore there is no “perfect” job out there. By seeing life as a design process, we can generate ideas in the moment, try them out and move on from there.

3 Ways I Can Support you as a Life Design Coach

1. Improve your Current Life without Changing your Job

Life View Tool

One of the first design tools I tried was writing my “Life View’. These are a set of questions to identify how I think about life. Some of those questions are:

• Why are we here?
• What is the meaning or purpose of life?
• What is the relationship between the individual and others?
• What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace and strife in life?

The rationale behind these questions is that we need to know our life philosophy, before we can evaluate our life satisfaction. If we know what our philosophy is, we can figure out how things are measuring up. We can also tinker with aspects to try and improve our situation.

Answering these questions has helped me and my clients take stock of my life situation and highlight possible areas to change. We can also reflect on our “Work View” but I’ll write about that another time.

Maker-Mix Tool

Another design tool is the “Maker Mix“. The DYL book defines three categories that are important in life. Each of us has a different ‘mix’ of these that makes life feel good. These are:

• money,
• impact
• expression

We can visualise the Maker-Mix tool as a (now old-fashioned) sound mixer that sound engineers used. Adjusting the levels makes the music of life sound different. The money category is about whether we feel the money we are making is enough for us. We all have different attitudes towards money and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. The question of whether you make ‘enough’ for you is personal. 

The expression category refers to how much we express ourselves creatively in our lives. This might be through the arts or writing, but also through many other activities for example flower arranging or interior design. We all have a different need around how much or little we express ourselves.

Impact refers to how we have an effect on others. That might be through writing, teaching or coaching. It might also be the impact we have through writing public health policy, or through being a barista. Once we have logged where the dials are currently, we can play around with adjusting them. For example, I might decide that I need more expression in my life and so I take up an acting class or start writing poetry.

Good Time Journal

Another tool is the Good Time Journal. Here we note down the activities of our day and evaluate each of them on a scale for engagement, flow and energy. This tool helps to counter our bias towards the negative. If we had lots of non-energising and non-engaging experiences we tend to generalise that our day was ‘shit’.

However if having done the Good Time Journal we realise that we actually had a nice 20 minutes chatting with a friend or doing some meditation it can help us feel differently about our day. This in turn helps our mood.

Secondly, once we know which activities energise us, engage or lead to a state of flow, we can tinker with the order of our schedule or the activities. For example, if I realise that I feel energised after collaborating with other therapists, I can arrange more peer meetings or even think of ways to collaborate with a colleague on some therapy-related project

2. Completely Transform Your Life

Odyssey Plan

One DYL tool that can help with this is the Odyssey Plan. It really stretched my imagination and challenged my ‘that’s not possible’ part. Bill and Dave invite us to spend just 5 minutes or so writing up 3 different life plans. The premise is that we all have many potential ways of living and gaining a livelihood. There is no one ‘right’ self. 

Firstly we flesh out the plan for if we continue with our current life.  We imagine and then write down what the next 3-5 years would look like. We can draw it out as a very simple cartoon or jot down a few graphics.

For example my current life in 3 years will include feeling more integrated in the city of Lisbon, Portugal where I recently re-located. So I describe what I imagine what this will look like. Once we have written/drawn it we can also say it aloud in the present tense and notice what happens in our body and energy levels as we do so.

I then move on to my second Odyssey plan. Bill and Dave explain this is the one if due to AI, there is no longer a need for therapists and coaches.

Then I move on to the last Odyssey plan. This one should feel like a total ‘wild card’. The plan you would follow if everyone promised not to laugh at you and if money wasn’t an option. 

I realise that when I originally did the plans about 3 months ago I found it very difficult to come up with alternatives lives. It was as if my brain was narrowly sticking to the version of life it had already decided on. 

More recently as part of the certification training, I took up the challenge and dug deeper and cast my net wider to create alternative lives for myself. This time around I was surprised by how many ideas popped up.

I remember either Bill or Dave saying that it didn’t actually matter what the idea/plan is. The point is to practice temporarily lowering the barrier in our brain that says ‘that’s not realistic/possible’ and thus tries to keep us safe from rejection and subsequent shame. Yes this barrier is trying to keep us safe but it also stops us from being as creative as we can be.

All of a sudden I had alternative careers as a wildlife photographer, international correspondent and midwife as well as actress, producer and screenwriter. Exciting! 

After having spent about 5 minutes on all three plans, I then assign a number between 0 and 10 to reflect:

• 1) how much I like the plan,
• 2) how coherent the plan feels,
• 3) how confident I feel about the plan and
• 4) how many resources (time, money, energy) I have for the plan.  

Prototyping

Prototyping is a design tool which can be used after doing the Odyssey Plan. Prototyping is what in Gestalt Therapy we call experimenting. The point of a Gestalt experiment is not to succeed or fail. Nor is it to give a specific and prescribed ‘right’ outcome. It is simply to try something out and see what we can learn from it.

This ties in with the ‘bias to action’ of design thinking. The idea is that we can prototype our way into designing a new way of doing things. We try something out and it doesn’t have to be something big. I might decide that I want to prototype an aspect of my Wild Card Odyssey plan which involves acting, producing and screenwriting.

I’m aware that despite this plan, I don’t actually know what it’s like to be an actress or producer on a film or TV set. So using a design mindset, I think, “Who could I have a 30-minute coffee over Zoom with to discuss further?” 

Bill and Dave differentiate between trying to get a call with the impossible, for example Jodie Comer. Or, thinking about what kind of people are closer to that circle and having a chat with them instead. For example, I can brain storm people that spend time with actors. They could be camera men, location people, props people, stylists, hairdressers etc. Some of these people mighe be more approachable and identifiable to have a conversation with. 

And there is no specific or ‘right’ outcome from the conversation. But perhaps I’ve learned something. Maybe I’ve learned that it all sounds a bit mundane with lots of standing around on set drinking cups of tea.

So I then think that I could go and talk to a theatre actress like Sophie Okonedo and see what she has to say about playing Medea recently at Sohoplace theatre. Well i’d likely not get to speak to her but maybe there is a box office attendant who can shed some light? With each conversation I learn something new about the topic or about myself or both which helps in my life design process.

Maybe what I learn has nothing to do with being an actress/producer/screenwriter but takes me on a new turn towards something that I can start to build in a more concrete way.

Mind-Mapping

The Mind Map is a third design tool that can be used for making a complete change When I first saw the section heading in the book I thought to  myself, ‘nothing new’ and didn’t feel energised. As I read on I realised that this wasn’t the mind-mapping I had learned at college where you brainstorm using logic. In the DYL book I was being invited to put down whatever weird and wacky words came into my head. 

On the recent coaching certification training Bill and Dave talk about this process as doing a  mind map “mash-up”. I started with the central concept of flow and then added words that came to me connected to flow state such as ‘acting’, ‘dancing’ etc.

I then added whatever words came to my mind next however illogical and non-sensical they were. In this way we are  training our brain to lower the barrier between our left and right hemispheres. This is the barrier wants to keep us safe by not ‘failing’ and looking stupid if we stray out of our comfort zone and try something new. 

The final stage of the mind-mapping process is to to gather the words at the edges of the mindmap and come up with some crazy creative idea or project linking them all. My words were ‘Yosemite’, ‘kids’ and  ‘film’. In this practice session I was being ‘coached’ by my fellow trainee.

I felt a bit blocked as to what to come up with but they stuck  to the literal meaning of my words and suggested ‘making a film about  a group of kids on a camping trip in Yosemite’. “A-ha’, what a good idea I exclaimed. She had literally hit the nail on the head and translated these words as concretely as possible.

The idea resonated with me, it was certainly something I’d had in the back of my mind for many years. I was fascinated by how this random experiment had ‘hit’ on something that felt so congruent to me.

Now I’m not saying that I’m going off to do this film anytime soon ( you never know though….) but there might be a concrete prototype action I can take now. Maybe it’s just about researching trips to Yosemite a bit more.

3. Feel Happier at Your Current Job

Good Work Journal

A design tool to help with feeling happier in your current job is the Good Work Journal. This is similar to the Good Time Journal I explained above. However this time you spend a few minutes at the end of each day or couple of days asking the following three questions:

• Who did I help?
• What did I initiate?
• What did I learn?

We don’t necessarily have to learn, initiate and help each day. It’s more of an awareness exercise, such as we do in Gestalt Therapy. Due to our natural bias towards seeing the negative we can overlook the positives about our day and generalise that everything about our job is bad.

Through journalling we also become aware of what interventions and actions help us feel more energised and uplifted and then do more of them. This might mean recognising that we are happier when we learn something.

So how can we tinker with our jobs to include more learning?

Maybe there is a course we can ask our boss to send us on?

Or if we realise we like helping, perhaps we can offer to mentor new employees at the organisation where we work?

Impact Map

Impact Map is a design tool that can help with how satisfied we feel in our current job. This is a tool that assesses how we have typically impacted others. There are two axes. One is the spectrum from personal to global. The second axes is from repair to innovate.

A physiotherapist who helps patients on a one-to-one basis to recover from injury makes a different impact than an App designer. Neither is better or worse, just different. We can simply be curious and see if there is anything we want to try doing differently.

For example, I realise that in the last 12 years I have impacted mostly on a one-to-one basis and I have supported clients experiencing trauma to function better. I’d like to experiment with impacting in a different way.

This realisation is congruent with my recent training as a life design coach which is about optimising individuals rather than supporting individuals to function. Blogging, which I have also re-started is a way to have a wider impact than just the one-to-one.

Re-designing rather than resigning – while this isn’t a tool it’s a reframed attitude that is helpful when we are feeling dissatisfied with our current job. At the very least, we are statistically much more likely to get a new job if we are in current work. Throwing in the towel quickly if we hate our current job is not the way forward. Unless of course we are in a very toxic work environment which is not open to change.

We can re-design according to the data we glean from the Good Work Journal and the Impact Map tools. This might be discussing with our superiors about what we’d like to focus on and seeing if they’ll accommodate and change our job spec.

It might also mean initiating projects alongside our current tasks that we enjoy. For example mentoring new employees. As well as enjoying our current work more, we are making our CVs look better to future employers too.

As a result of the Designing Your Life Books I’ve relocated from London to Lisbon, Portugal. I’m also incorporating passion projects such as Life Design coaching into my services. I feel energised and motivated (and at times anxious about the unknown) rather than stuck and low. This energy tells me that i’m leading a version of life that is more authentic to me.

If you’d like me to accompany you through your own life design project, be it big or small, I’d be delighted to take you by the hand and lead you through the steps.