At times some of us wonder: what am I doing with my life? Without realizing it, we may come to a point in life where we hope we are somewhere else. Fret not, it’s not too late! You can start at zero and still lead a wonderful and successful life, placed right where you want to be. All this can be done by designing your life.
Here are some tips to designing your life:
1 Understand yourself
Rather than go straight to the action part of the plan, it would be wiser to start by self-introspecting yourself. Ask yourself these questions:
What exactly do you want?
What do you want to achieve?
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
When was the last time you felt truly happy?
What makes you smile and laugh?
What do you wish you’d never have to do again?
You need to take a good hard look at yourself and your life. Asses your experiences, jobs, relationships and extracurricular activities. The dangers of not self-introspecting yourself well enough is that others’ opinions and expectations will come in the picture and take over. In the end, you will be left with nothing but others’ opinions and expectations on how YOUR life should be led.
2 Define your problem
The second step is to define what you’re trying to achieve.
Is it a career goals?
Is it in your relationship?
Or is it in your family?
Be clear on what you want to achieve. It is only through thorough understanding of your life that that you will begin to understand where it is you hope to go in the future. While figuring out where you are going, it’s important not to note the things you cannot change.
3 Create ideas
After assessing yourself, imagining where you hope to go, the next step is to visualize HOW you will actually get there. Start thinking about the possible ways to reach your goal. You get to imagine different five and ten-year scenarios for your life. You can start with three life paths, ones that are conventional depending on your background to the ones you would be doing if money wasn’t a factor and if you didn’t care what other people thought.
4 Prototypes
The next step is to set the prototype of your future lives. What does it mean to build a prototype of your life? It means going through experimental phase of going through the experiences in your life to see what problems crop up and finding solutions. It can be through conversations, interviews, shadowing of positions, or short or long term experiences. If you are looking for a change in career, you can talk to a few people who are in the same lane you want to be in, learn the ins-and-outs of the job and industry. Take it further by attending courses and classes to see if you really do enjoy it in real life.
5 Test
The final step is to test out your prototype. Get first-hand experience on how the path feels to you. It may feel awkward and it will take some time getting used to, but this is the only way to know if it truly is the path for you. If you don’t like these experiences, then head back to the start and begin from stage one all over again. If you find that this is not for you, then take some time to reflect your experiences and decide what you liked and did not like about it. This might help to re-frame some goals for your life moving forward.
What do you think of designing your life? Tell us your opinion and experience with it in the comments section below!
