The Designer Steps to Lifestyle Design

This is the old podcast but you can still listen here.

Welcome to the first episode of 2020 of Design Your Lifestyle Podcast. In this episode, Kimberly discusses the DESIGNER steps to Lifestyle Design. 

Lifestyle Design

Why I am Relaunching the Podcast

Why am I real launching my podcast when I realized what experience does podcast feed and happens to lotta podcast or’s that goes into creating a podcast and I simply was not ready so what’s new with me in the last year 2019 I wrote and self published a book on Amazon called design your life and business Amazon and it still doing really well I would love for you to check it out – KimberlyLoves.me/book 
 

My book is called Design Your Life & Business and its all about Lifestyle Design. 

You might be wondering what does lifestyle design mean exactly. In my book, I define Lifestyle Design as “creating a deliberate and purposeful plan that promotes a desirable life.”
 
Lifestyle Design means different things to different people. I can tell you what it has meant to me: 
 
  • Meant being able to fly to Arizona and help my sister, who was having a  difficult pregnancy stay for a month without losing my job. 
  • Means being able to travel and be there for my family, my grandfather, who recently passed and my beautiful granddaughter  who lives in another state.
  • Meant picking up my kids at school instead of them staying at aftercare or with a nanny. 
  • Means having a home cooked dinner with my family every night instead of sitting in I-4 traffic. 
  • Meant volunteering with my teenage daughter at Give Kids the World and modeling how to be of service to those in need.
  • Means I can work at in my home office, at Starbucks, or at the beach . 

How is Lifestyle Design Good for the World?

Lifestyle Design is better for the environment because if everyone were designing their life, we would have less traffic, less waste, and more time freedom. 
 
You may think that lifestyle design is a new concept invented by young people like Tim Ferris author of the book The 4 Hour Workweek.
It’s a strategy that works for the young and the young at heart. 
 But it is a concept that goes back to people like Henry David Thoreau, who said, “If one advances confidently to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
 

Lifestyle Design is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s not always easy. 

 

How do we design our lifestyle? 

 
I use the word DESIGNER  as an acronym for the steps to designing your life & business.  These steps are used towards creating a lifestyle business that you can run from anywhere in the world. 
 
D = Dream & Decide 
E = Engage & Empathize 
S = Study & Survey 
I = Invest & Ideate 
G = Grow with Gratitude 
N =  Nurture Yourself & Your Clients 
ER = Evaluate & Refine 
 
So it starts with a dream. It starts with dreaming up lots of ideas too many big lofty ideas, maybe you’re like me and you get lots of great ideas and you have trouble deciding on the right idea. 
 
If you are ready to take the first step in Designing Your Life, I encourage you to take the Dream and Decide Workshop. I will walk you through how to figure out your best idea and launch a lifestyle business.
Dreaming and deciding is the first step to lifestyle design. 

Dream & Decide Workshop

5 Ways To Design Your Personality

Have you ever wanted to be someone else or change your personality? Here are 5 Ways To design your personality. design your personality

Personality is what makes you a unique human being. It encompasses the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and while you may like all aspects of your character, you may notice that others don’t always have a positive reaction to specific traits. Or perhaps you recognize some bad habits you have developed over the years and are wishing to make a change.

If you are looking for ways to enhance personality, to build new character traits that mean others are more comfortable with you, then we’ve got you covered. Here are five ways to design your personality.

#1. Discover Everything You Can About Yourself

Spend some time really evaluating who you are, what you like, how you behave, and how others react to you. Take time to notice how people respond to things you do and say, see what others appreciate most about you, and purposefully observe how you interact with others in different types of situations. Make a list of the personality traits that you think are strengths and identify a few key areas where you would like to improve.

#2. Expand Your Interests to Design Your Personality

The more you read and experience in life, the more interesting you will be. Reading, travel, and hobbies all expand your understanding of the world, teach you new perspectives, and enhance the empathy for others, also. This can make you a better friend and provides you with topics for interactions with others. Listen to a new podcast, pick up a new-to-you genre of book, or learn a hobby you’ve always wanted to try.

#3. Focus on The Needs of Others

By learning to be supportive of others, you enhance your personality and welcome more people around you. When you maintain interest in others’ passions, you show you are actively interested in their lives and care about what matters to them. Most people love to feel that others are interested in what they have to say, and they, in return, will reciprocate with interest in you, as well.

#4. Focus on Your Conversational Abilities

Whether you identify as an introvert or an extrovert, improving the way you communicate with others will enhance the relationships around you. There’s a lovely dance that goes on between introverts and extroverts. Introverts have learned to listen but by simply asking an extrovert a key question they can engage in conversation. Practice active listening techniques as well as share your knowledge and interests with those around you. Becoming a good conversationalist will help in your personal as well as professional life.

#5. Take a Stance

Most of us have a viewpoint but are afraid to show it.  Most people find others with no opinions to be boring. Know where you stand on issues important to your beliefs and be sure you have information to support your perspectives. But, you should also be willing to listen to others’ views and use those to evaluate your own stance. Make an effort to talk with people whose views are different than yours to understand their perspective better.

Final Thoughts

You have the power to design your personality and enhance specific traits. By learning to evaluate what you like best about yourself, then selecting new characteristics you wish to develop, you have created a plan for your personal development.

Once you start implementing these new changes, practice again observing how you are making progress, how others respond to your attempts, and identify where you need to make adjustments. It’s always helpful to talk with others whom you really trust to see how they think you can improve your personality.

They may have identified specific traits you were not even aware others noticed about you. When you take the time to commit to this process, you will put yourself on a course toward personal development and improved happiness.

Design Your Life and Business Book

What If You Could Design a Life and Business You Love? 

Design Your Life and Business

I just published my new book, Design Your Life and Business. I wrote this book for the young and young-at-heart women business owners who have started a business, or the gal who is dreaming of starting a business. She has lots of big ideas but doesn’t know where to start. She has trouble managing her time and reaching the big lofty goals she set for herself. 

You’ll Discover Entrepreneur Mindsets and Habits

Do you look at business planning tools like calendars, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, and financial statements and cringe? Design Your Life & Business book is for you if you are an entrepreneur who wants to take control of your time and income in a fun and playful way. If you look forward to reviewing spreadsheets about as much as a root canal, this book is for you.

Do You Need Ideas for Small Business Startup? Or Do You Suffer from Too Many Ideas?

What If It Were Fun to Design a Life and Business?

Design Your LifeThe reality is that as business women, we have so many things to manage: our time, our energy, our homes. I believe planning a business should be as much fun as planning your next vacation.

What if you knew what to do next?

One of the worst feelings to have as an entrepreneur is not knowing what action you need to take next because you have so many action steps on your list. 

This book was Inspired by modern day entrepreneurs such as Tim Ferris, Jamie Tardy, Nick Loper, Connie Ragen Green, Michael Hyatt, John Lee Dumas, Pat Flynn, Bob Burg, and Nicole Dean. Along with experts in their fields like Stephen Covey, William McDonough, Marianne Williamson, William McDonough, Nora Ephron, Bill Burnet and Dale Evans, and Barbara Sher who are quoted in this book. 

The Best Business Startups are Floating Around in Your Head Now is the time to Take Action Steps Towards Your Idea.

Get Your Copy of Design Your Life and Business today!

Design Your Life and Business

Designing Your Life: A Palette of Choices

An important step to designing your life is acknowledging and understanding the choices you have in your life, being willing to make the most of those choices, and leveraging the choices you have to select the best path forward for yourself.

Life is not something that just happens to you, and you always have choices. The key to designing the life you really want is knowing exactly what your options are and using all the information at your disposal to make the best selection for you.

Your life is defined by the choices you make. While not everything that happens in your life is up to you, how you respond to life’s circumstances and opportunities is always a matter of choice. Even when you choose not to act or react in your life, you are still making a decision, so there is nothing that is beyond your control.

Becoming Aware of Your Choices

There are certain things in life you cannot control. For example, you have no control over the circumstances of your birth or family, your genetic makeup, or the opportunities you were given as a child. However, your choices can override these circumstances.

Your choices determine how you treat others, how hard you work, and the activities in which you engage at even an early age. This helps form you into the person you become later in life. As you get older, you have free will to choose who to love, what do choose as a career, and ultimately, what you will strive to achieve in life.

Acknowledging that all of these are choices in life, and not things that happen without your consent, is a big step toward designing your life. Choosing to accept responsibility for these choices, and not to blame life or others for the circumstances in which you find yourself, helps you not only move forward from your past but also accept the tremendous power you have to select your future.

You already have all the ability within you to choose the life you want and to design the experiences that will lead you to your goal.

Using Self-Knowledge to Make Better Choices

Developing knowledge about yourself, including your fears and insecurities as well as your strengths and gifts, is essential to designing your life and attaining your goals. Until you truly know yourself, which means getting clear about your beliefs and values, you will always be vulnerable to crafting your life to please others or assessing your accomplishments against what others have achieved.

When you become aware of yourself and your inner longings and desires, you can use that information to better inform the design process for your life. Without knowing your true passions, interests, and strengths, though, you are left making decisions based on poor information.

Without self-knowledge, you are more likely to pursue work or other goals that are unsuited to your talents and passions. Instead of choosing what makes you happy, you may opt to go along with the crowd or take the advice of others when you lack sufficient insight into yourself. This type of decision-making can lead you to invest more of yourself and your money in pursuits that don’t make you happy, too.

Designing Your Life is About Choice

Understanding that life is about choices and you are in charge of those options gives you the power to design the best life for you. Even opting not to choose is a choice, and only you will have to live with the consequences of those choices.

Regardless of your initial circumstances or what you were born with, your life is defined by the choices you make with how to deal with those events and what dreams you strive to attain.

Life Design Strategy: Using Your Problems To Design Your Life

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.



Design Your Lifestyle