Have you thought about a life design strategy for yourself?
You do not have to simply endure your problems and negative experiences in life. These troubling circumstances and events can be learning tools for you that can help to design a better life moving forward. The problems in your life can be helpful and informative to help you determine how best to create your future.
Learning from negative experiences improves your future decisions. Setbacks and failures are learning opportunities, and you can apply this to your next attempt or future goals. Problems provide you with the skills and knowledge you did not have previously and improve how you decide to pursue things in the future.
The negative experiences in your life often point to areas in your skills, knowledge, or self-knowledge that need improvement. Even when the circumstances were completely random and beyond your control, you can still learn a lot about yourself, including areas for improvement.
Life Design Strategy: Use Problems to Redesign Your Life
This unique life design strategy means choosing between many possible futures, and then making a choice to do the work necessary to accomplish your goals. These choices define who you are and what you will become.
The first step to using your problems to help inform your life’s design is to spend some time logging all your failures and problems. Select a specific period to examine, then write down every problem or failure you experienced during that time. Focus not only on issues for yourself but how your choices created problems for others.
For each of these problems, then, you need to determine the source or type of your difficulties. Is it a minor screw-up that was easily fixable? If so, have you acknowledged this problem and either apologized if needed or otherwise moved on? These types of problems shouldn’t necessarily inform your design process, but they can tell you where you need to focus more attention in your daily life.
Is the problem a result of personal weakness? Are there mistakes that you seem to make again and again? In these cases, you may need to choose to avoid specific situations or options so as not to engage these weaknesses. Remember, avoidance is a choice, too. Not all problems require a solution. Some just need to not be repeated.
Finally, is the problem a growth opportunity? These situations invite you to improve, learn, and grow by paying attention to what went wrong, what you could have done differently, and using that knowledge to make better choices in the future.
Those areas that are growth opportunities are places where design thinking can help. These represent parts of your life where you are unhappy or can grow, and these can be used to design a life that helps you achieve all you want in life.
Life Design Strategy: Become Immune to Failure
When you see your problems and failures as learning opportunities, and when you realize that designing your own life means you can’t fail, you will become immune to worry and anxiety about your problems and fears.
Your problems are what help you develop perseverance or what some call grit. When you see your problems and failures as growth experiences, instead of roadblocks, you build grit and are able to accept that life is a process, not an outcome.
Life Design Strategy: Think of Problems as the Raw Material for Your Dreams
There
is no winning or losing when you choose to design your own life because the
process means you get to keep designing and changing in pursuit of happiness.
Your problems are just the raw material for your dreams. We all have problems
and make mistakes, but learning from these is what makes you a stronger, more
confident person who is ready to pursue any dream you choose.
Are you wondering how you can reinvent yourself? Consider for a minute how much of your life is affected by stress. It’s possible to get so entrenched in fighting fires and lurching from disaster to disaster that we become essentially reactive. We plan our lives around our troubles, instead of having fulfilling lives filled with challenges and opportunities.
We get so enmeshed in problems related to stress, our very personalities get warped. This isn’t to say we become an evil shadow of ourselves, but we end up straying from what we want to do, how we want to be and who we really are.
It’s possible that at one time we had some great coping skills, but times change, and so do situations. What worked well in the past might not be working so well nowadays. Think then of how different your life could be if you weren’t so powerfully affected by stress. By learning some new coping skills, you reinvent yourself anew.
Consider the following techniques to reinvent yourself with new ways to cope.
Reinvent Yourself by Changing the Way You Talk to Yourself
It is actually a simple thing to change your self-talk. Often we aren’t aware of the way our inner voice affects our outer reality, but we need to get awake to it. When something irksome happens, do you think “Not another disaster! What am I going to do? This is hopeless.”
No one is suggesting you change that to a mental happy dance when something bad happens but changing your self-talk to a more supportive and encouraging stance helps reduce stress. In many ways, it’s the way we perceive disadvantageous situations that control our response—not the trouble itself.
Cognitive re-framing is an excellent way to Reinvent Yourself
Changing your self-talk is part of a coping skill set called cognitive re-framing. Cognitive re-framing involves looking at a problem or situation with a fact-based approach, as opposed to an emotional approach. Feelings are real, and it’s important to honor them, but our emotions are not always rooted in reality.
Recognizing when our feelings aren’t coming from a realistic outlook is one of the most powerful coping skills you can ever learn. It’s a skill, and it takes time and practice to shift from a stress-coping approach based on emotion to one based on facts. By observing things as they are, as opposed to how we wish they were, how we think they should be, or how we fear they might be, we learn to tackle problems realistically.
Be Flexible in Your Approach
Increase your flexibility. Often, we don’t see solutions to life’s problems because for various reasons, we deliberately block off those very solutions. This following is a complex example, If you’re behind at work, but working one weekend would get you totally caught up, would you do it? If your answer is “No way, I’m never doing work for free,” yet you agonize over your backlog of work all week long, are you really better off holding to your ideal of no weekend work? If it’s just one weekend to correct a perpetually agonizing thorn in your flesh, which would you rather have?
There are so many examples of this kind of self-blocking. Sometimes, you have to think of the unthinkable to reduce stress. As well, a rigid approach to problem-solving doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Reducing stress requires a fairly flexible approach. People will notice when you become less rigid.
Being Mindful is an Excellent Way to Reinvent Yourself
Add mindfulness to your life. Mindfulness is self-explanatory, but more of a challenge than it sounds. Mindfulness means fully attending to what we’re doing right now, what we’re feeling, and what’s prompting those feelings.
Mindfulness also takes into account the physical environment. Where are we, what are the colors, the whole tactile experience going on around us?
If that sounds ridiculous, remember that everything we experience—everything—gets filtered, interpreted, valued or discarded inside our heads. Our minds create stress. You can be mindful anywhere, at any time.
We all want to be the best version of ourselves as we can be. This takes time, self-reflection, diligence, and willpower. You have to take great care in designing your life and yourself. This woman’s guide to designing her life is a process that can be even more challenging for women, as we tend to struggle in putting ourselves first and taking time for ourselves.
Designing
your best self involves a fair amount of self-analyzing; you’ll need to
identify and address your faults and be patient enough to handle slow,
incremental changes.
This
process can’t happen overnight. In this article, we’ll walk you through this
process and tell you how you can design your greatest self.
The Woman’s Guide to Designing Her Life is a Process
Be Open to New Things
The
first step in designing your greatest self is to try new things. Be open to new
opportunities and adventures. You might be surprised at how much this simple
act can change you and your path in life. Try new things, learn new skills,
meet new people, explore new places; you never know where you might end up or
how it might change you.
Take Time for Self-Reflection
You’ll
never be your greatest self if you don’t know yourself. Taking time to explore
who you are as a person, what you like to do, what you want in life is
essential to your happiness and success. Take some time monthly, weekly, or
even daily to really get to know yourself.
Stay Motivated and Keep Your
Momentum
We
all have days where we don’t feel as motivated, but we can’t let them get the
better of us. If you’re going to design and work on your greatest self, you
have to push through the slow period and find your motivation so you don’t lose
momentum. Progress is an incremental process.
Know the Good Habits from the Bad
Habits
We
all have a mixed bag of good and bad habits with which we deal. It’s important
to identify these habits and whether they’re good or bad when designing your
greatest self. You should do what you can to maximize your good habits and
minimize the bad ones.
Don’t Let Your Emotions Take
Control
While
experiencing emotions and working through them are normal and necessary parts
of life, allowing them to take control and rule important decisions in your
life can be detrimental. It’s important to keep them in check whenever
necessary and to identify appropriate times to express them. In order to do
this, you’ll have to be in-tune with your emotions to know when they’re taking
control and when it’s an appropriate level of emotion for the predicament or
situation.
Put Yourself First Sometimes
While
it’s important and honorable to put others before yourself, you’re important
too. You have to put yourself first every once in a while. It’s a trend among
women to always put the needs of others before their own, which is amicable
until it becomes detrimental.
If
you never take care of yourself, you’ll become too weak and feeble to care for
others or yourself. You have to find a balance and be sure to give yourself the
time and care you need.
Being
your greatest self takes work, diligence, patience, time, and a whole lot of effort.
You have to take time for self-reflection and the patience and strength to work
on improving yourself. This is not always easy, as you’ll have to admit to and
address your faults, but it’s necessary and healthy, as well as the only way to
become truly your best self.
We hope that you found this article to be useful as you navigate through the process of designing your best self. Just remember, as you go through this process, that the change will not happen overnight; it will take time for you to fully implement these changes and start to see results. Be patient with yourself and don’t give up.
5 Key Reasons To Design Your Lifestyle the Way You Really Want
By making the choice to design the life you really want, versus letting life just happen to you, you will experience some crucial benefits. Taking control of your life and going after the things that are really important to you can help you not only achieve your dreams but also learn new skills, find new opportunities, and let go of the fears that are holding you back. Here are the top five reasons you should start today to design the life you really want.
#1. You can learn to identify what makes you happy in life.
When you make the decision to design your life the way you want it to be, you have to understand what it is that make you truly happy. When you get in touch with your strengths, your gifts, and what brings you joy and energizes you, you can use this knowledge to put yourself on a path toward something better.
Designing your life starts with an assessment of yourself, and you’ll gain untold new knowledge about what makes you happy in life and how that is likely to change over time.
#2. Design Your Lifestyle so You can learn to appreciate failures and mistakes as learning opportunities
When you design your own life, you learn that all the missteps and obstacles that you face in life are not setbacks or failures. They are, instead, opportunities to learn and grow. Being happy in life and achieving your goals is a process. It doesn’t all happen at once, and you don’t know everything you need to know right now to make it all come true in the future.
You have to learn, and learning is a process of trial and error, of making and learning from mistakes. Designing your life allows you the freedom to set your sights on a goal that makes you happy and be at peace with the process of learning and evolving that must happen in order for you to achieve that dream.
#3. Design Your Lifestyle so You can find a fulfilling career or create your own
Designing your own life means you don’t have to be stuck in your current job and that you can reach for new aspirations at any point in your existence. The design process teaches you to imagine many different futures, all of which could make you happy, and to understand that finding work that energizes you and brings you joy and passion shouldn’t be a big lofty goal that is un-achievable.
Design your lifestyle means you pick the one job that fulfills you today, and when that stops being your passion, you know you have the skills and mindset to find the next great opportunity.
#4. You can learn to navigate the biggest decision points in your life with ease.
Designing your life teaches you how to assess, make evaluations, envision multiple outcomes, and select among many different choices.
These are all essential life skills when it comes to not only designing your life but also making tough decisions along the way. Once you feel confident that your design process works and is bringing you happiness, you’ll start to see many ways these skills are transferable to all the decision-making points in your life.
#5. You can imagine multiple futures for yourself, then decide which to pursue.
Design is a process that involves choices and options. When you design the life you really want, you take the time to imagine multiple futures and varied pathways.
You see that several different options could bring you joy, and you are reminded that there is not one right future or path for you. Knowing this is freeing, allowing you to change directions in the future or start again when you find your passion and joy waning.
