Are you living your life by design or by default? Do you fall into life choices (e.g., career/jobs/relationships) by chance or circumstance instead of actively choosing what you want? You can continue to let life "just happen" by default or you can take action to create a life of your own design. Here are some signs that it's time to redesign your life:

• You hear yourself say, "I don't have a life!" and silently wonder if it might be possible to create one that is inspiring, joyful, and fun.
• When people ask you if you love what you do, your answer is always "No!"
• You seek more focus and direction.
• You want to create a better balance between your work life and your personal life.
• You tell yourself, "I'll really start living when..." (I have saved up more money, I finish school, my kids graduate from college, I lose weight, I get married, retire, etc.).
• You sense it is time for a change but aren't clear on exactly where you want to end up or how to begin.
• You find yourself doing what you "should" do instead of what you want to do.
• There is a gap between where you are and where you want to be in your personal or professional life.
• You have been selling yourself short (being undervalued or underemployed) and now feel ready to experience and share your true value.

Let me share with you a truth I learned long ago: If you don't take the time to define your own vision, goals, and priorities you will end up being driven by the needs and priorities of others! As a life design coach I have worked one-on-one with over two hundred people to help them redesign their professional and personal lives. Most show up after having tried unsuccessfully to tackle the redesign process on their own. Most have spent their time and depleted their energy asking themselves one question over and over, "What is it that I really want to do?" Each time they ask themselves this question, they give themselves the same answer, "I don't know." The problem is that this is usually not the right question to start with.

Through research, experimentation, and personal experience I learned that it is critical to begin the life design process by coming to know "who you are" before asking "what you want", and my life design coaching reflects this important priority. Here are the seven key steps that I have found are necessary to create a successful new life design:

1. Discover your Core Elements

Your Core Elements include "Who" you are (e.g., your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, talents and abilities, and temperament), and what you "Need."

Your strengths, talents, and abilities are your unique gifts. You want to design your ideal career and personal life in a way that enhances and leverages these gifts and allows you to share them with the world.

Your temperament is your frame of mind, disposition, or nature. You will find that you can bring greater peace into your life by making career and relationship choices that are compatible with your true temperament. Examples include: optimistic, cheerful, confident, pessimistic, calm, driven, task-oriented, warm.

Your "Needs" are those things that you must have in order to be your best and to be happy. For example you might have one or more of the following needs: to be respected, recognized, valued, listened to, in control, independent; or you might have a need for trust, solitude, or honesty. Our needs push us and drive us and we don't have full choice about them. If we are not aware of them and don't work to get them handled, they keep resurfacing in our lives.

2. Discover your Values

Your Values include what is most important to you and what you love to do with your time. They are the activities and behaviors that you are naturally drawn to. Your Values are the outward expression of the unique being that is you. Your values pull you forward and naturally inspire you. Examples include: contributing to others, building things, learning, being part of a community, being connected, inspiring others, teaching others, adventure, beauty, having fun.

The key is to write down 10 Values that draw you forward and inspire you.

Once you know your Core Elements and your Values, they become the baseline from which you can begin to construct your vision of your ideal career or life environment, and the criteria by which you can judge how well various new career or life opportunities might suit you. Once you know your Core Elements and Values, then when evaluating a new potential career or life opportunity you can ask yourself the following questions:

Will this opportunity allow me to:

• Express/share/leverage my unique strengths?
• Express/share/leverage my unique talents or abilities?
• Resonate with my innate temperament?
• Satisfy one or more of my core needs?
• Feel happy and fulfilled?
• Have fun?

3. Align your Goals with your Values

We all set goals (major and minor) all the time. These goals consciously or unconsciously drive our Strategies, our Action Plans, and our Action Steps (what we actually do). Unfortunately, it is often the case that our goals and resulting day-to-day actions are out of sync with our true Values. When this occurs, our goals become "perspirational" not "inspirational". They require effort and strain and we often pursue them for the wrong reasons:

• Because we think we should
• Out of habit (because we always have)

In this step the idea is to write down any existing goals you may have identified for yourself, and to try to match each of them up with one of your 10 Values. You want to end up with at least one Goal for each Value, and you should feel free to let go of Goals that are not associated with any Value. The power of this process is that it allows you to create a clear and focused set of goals that are oriented around what is really important to you and thus naturally self-motivating.

If you find a Value without an associated Goal, then create a new goal that honors that Value. If you find a Goal that is not associated with any of your Values, see if you can drop that goal or change it so that it better aligns with your Values.

4. Align how you spend your time with your Values

In this step you want to think about how you spend your time and make sure that what you invest your time in is also in sync with your Values and your Goals. It is all too easy to let our time get away from us. We get to the end of each day or each week and wonder what we have really accomplished. We find our time frittered away on obligations, chores, errands, etc. We find ourselves exhausted without enough time left for the things that are most important to us. Now that you have a clearer vision of what is important to you, it is equally important to make sure that your time is allocated in accordance with your priorities.

You can begin by making a list of the activities that consume your time. For example: working (e.g., paid work or going to school), giving of your time (e.g., volunteer work, coaching sports), self care, relationships (e.g., friends, family), personal growth, fun/recreation, transportation (e.g., driving), shopping, pets, money, worrying, sleeping, being alone.

Now estimate the number of hours in the average week that you currently spend doing each of these activates. Then determine the number of hours in the average week that you would like to dedicate to each of these activities given your new Values and Goals.

Identify 5 specific things you can do during the next two weeks to bring your current time allocation more in sync with your desired time allocation. Then do them! For example you might decide to:

• Say "No" more often.
• Set strong boundaries to prevent other people from intruding on your space and time.
• Get rid of tolerations (things that you are putting up with that consume your time and energy; e.g., clutter, or ineffective/inefficient resources, systems, or environments).

5. Start on the path to achieving your goals

Progress begins with commitment. It is not enough just to have a nice new set of values-based goals in your life and a desire to free up time to work on them. You must actually commit to take action and then DO IT! Here is a good way to get yourself moving:

Pick one of your 10 new goals that you want to work on first and write it down.

Write five specific Action Steps that you need to take to achieve that goal. They can be baby steps, but they must be steps that move you in the right direction.

Pick two of your five Action Steps that you will commit to accomplish in the next two weeks. Formalize your commitment to yourself by copying these two Action Steps into a written Commitment Pledge that you post somewhere that you will see at least once a day:

"I commit to myself that I will, during the next two weeks, take the following two Action Steps toward achieving one of my Goals: (fill in your two selected Action Steps here)."

6. Learn the value of experimenting with your life

Herbert Otto said, "Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life."

Have you ever looked at a child and marveled at the openness, adventurousness, excitement, and spark reflected in their eyes and in their actions? Do you ever wonder what happened to the old, more spontaneous, You? The older we get the more it seems our lives are defined by "should'a, could'a, would'a." We lose sight of the concept that we have the power to create and evolve our own lives. One of the key ways you can evolve yourself and your life is by experimentation. Experimentation is nothing more than the following:

• You try something
• You get feedback (positive or negative)
• And you learn and adjust

The more you experiment, the greater your chances of discovery. Experimentation is integral to the process of iteratively designing your life.

7. Uncover and handle what is keeping you stuck

When you think about it, the life design process described above is pretty simple and straightforward. So what makes it so difficult to actually follow? It is because we all have "blind spots", filters, and frameworks that drive our thinking, prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly, and prevent us from discovering and blasting through the roadblocks that we put in our own way. That is why most people who are truly committed to making lasting changes in their lives often seek out a thinking partner such as a Personal Coach to give them an outside perspective, help them identify opportunities and possibilities they might not see, and provide the tools, structure, and support that make profound and lasting change faster, easier, and more sustainable.

What is your point of view? Please post your thoughts on the discussion board.

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