Designing Your Life: How To Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life

Book Written by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

Book Review by Lucy Reile

Key Points:

• No matter where you are in life, you can use design thinking principles to design a life you want to live. The authors are engineers and products designers who use design thinking to apply to life design. Many people might get to a point in their lives and feel like they are too late to do something or they should have started years ago, but this book highlights that you can apply life design no matter where you are at in life. 

• The book walks the reader through how to “think like a designer.” The authors provide tools and activities to prototype or “try something out” as a way to build the life you want to live. They often bring up that a “bias towards action” is how design thinking works effectively. You need to try things and test them out in order to find what works and engage in the process not only focus on the end goal. 

• The exercises and tools in the book try to get the reader to think past having a few options when it comes to making a change. They want people to use ideation and creativity to consider options that may not be obvious choices. One activity has you consider 3 possible lives and provides prompts that can help think “outside the box.” Even if you don’t end up pursuing one of your possibles lives, it provides the reader with an exercise to think beyond what they are used to considering and opens up possibilities to try out related areas.  

Alignment to/Application in Coaching (continued):

I find this book to complement life coaching and almost walk parallel with coaching.

• The authors provide tools that can help clients see their goal or topic they want to change from a new perspective, which is how we help clients too.

• The book points out that you can start from where you are and you have the information to help yourself, but the tools and questions can provide a scaffolding system to help the client work through their goal.

• I also see the content apply to coaching in that the authors bring up that they aren’t giving you an answer to your problem or situation, but rather the client, or reader in this case, has the knowledge to be able to find answers.

• The book calls it prototyping and while I may not use that language when coaching, we are helping our clients to create action in order to make change and sometimes that may look like trying out different ways to solve a problem.

• One of the tenets of “Designing Your Life” is a “bias towards action” and that is what we use in coaching too. 
  

Favorite Passage:

I underlined and highlighted many passages in this book, but one that is a favorite is: “…we’ve found that where people go wrong is thinking they just need to come up with a plan for their lives and it will be smooth sailing. If only they make the right choice (the best, true, only choice), they will have a blueprint for who they will be, what they will do, and how they will live. It’s a paint-by-numbers approach to life, but in reality life is more of an abstract painting-one that’s open to multiple interpretations.”

Alignment to/Application in Coaching (continued):

• The myth of “right choice” is something I have dealt with myself, while also (sometimes simultaneously) coaching students in my past career that there isn’t one “right choice.” I know intuitively there isn’t a right choice, but still want it to be true because that would make things/life so much easier! Alas, there isn’t a right choice and in coaching we can help clients as they talk through what is the choice or action they want to pursue. We talk with them without an answer, judgement, or bias, and that is a gift we can provide knowing there isn’t ever going to be a right or only choice. I will apply the bias towards action in my coaching.

• Since coaching is helping the client move forward in service to a better story, it is important they identify an action step to their goal or focus. This is a strong theme in the book and one that fits the coaching philosophy too.

• Another message from the book is to take an inventory of yourself before you begin using the tools. This resonates with me as similar to coaching where we use the Floor Plan and Life Map to have a starting point with clients.

• I also like the instruction of prototyping the authors discuss throughout the book.

  • When working with clients, I can ask clients questions around how willing they are to try something they suggest or how will that get them closer to their goal as a way to help consider trying things out in order to accomplish their goal.  

This is great, thank you so much! Great feedback!