Design your career - and life!
- Pauliina Hallama
- Apr 4, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 19
As life coaches, one of our main objectives is to help guide clients from where we are to where we want to be in the most optimal way possible. A typical scenario when a coach might be needed is when people have problems related to their lives that they are unable to solve on their own. They might be missing the right direction, not knowing what to do next or how to do it and, some might be afraid of not making the “right decision”.
A designer works with a concept to build a product or service that becomes a solution. If we were to apply these same principles of innovation methodology to solve a problem in our lives, we might come up with some pretty interesting answers and new perspectives. This is the idea that led Stanford University professors Dave Evans and Bill Burnett to introduce the wildly popular “Designing Your Life” course at Stanford back in 2007 that uses design thinking.
The team also co-authored the New York Times best-selling book Designing Your Life. The book reassures us that “There is no one idea for your life. There are many lives you could live happily and productively". Evans and Burnett argue that we have the talent and capability to enjoy many different kinds of life paths, so choosing one over another isn’t a matter of making a right or wrong decision. There are many right answers. The design thinking approach to achieving goals uses “wayfinding,” a process that allows you to build your way forward slowly by taking the next logical step in completing your goal.
To make the career and life design journey a lot more interesting and enjoyable, developing a mindset of a curious scientist is important. Why? As scientists of our own lives our aim is to challenge the current explanations we have of how the world works. We do this with new evidence, which we get though awareness, reframing the problem, curiosity, collaboration and learning by doing. We will want to overcome or bypass our instinctive thoughts about events and aim to open our minds to other possibilities. We don’t want to be stuck with our old ways or beliefs, rather gather new evidence regardless of any prior beliefs, expectations, preferences or personal investments we’ve made and make decisions based on that new information.
If we, like scientists, start to experience exhilarated feelings of discovery whenever we find we have been wrong and what else could be possible, it could offer us an interesting paradigm shift about our lives.
Written by Inka Rantanen.
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