I’m sure you’ve noticed that when you design your life in a way that your values, goals, and actions fall out of alignment you feel like you’re spinning your wheels in circles. You’re continually working but not really getting any closer to your best life.

Unfortunately, few people take the time to establish alignment and life balance for their unique lifestyle. Thankfully, you’ve noticed the problem. Why else would you be here searching for answers?

When I first noticed this issue, I began evaluating the life balance and alignment of our world’s most successful individuals. I wanted to learn how they used these to facilitate their personal and professional happiness and success!

That’s why today I’m going to walk you through creating this alignment based on what I learned from these people. Once you’re done with this article you will have a strong sense of what actions you need to take to design your life in the best way possible.

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Design Your Life Warm Up

Before you get into designing your life and aligning your values and goals you need to actually have defined values and goals. You need to know your values and goals so that you can establish what you stand for personally.

Once you’ve identified your values you’ll design life goals which are congruent with who you are at your core. Because these goals are aligned with your values you’re more likely to stick with them and achieve them!

Success and motivation experts like Tony Robbins have even suggested defining values you want to move towards and which ones you want to avoid. Essentially this means moving closer to the life you want and further from the life you don’t want. For example, maybe you want a life that is filled with the values of love, happiness, and intelligence and avoids loneliness, sadness, and confusion.

I understand that this process can seem intimidating. Fortunately, over the past two weeks, I have revealed my 7-step process for defining your values and my 7-step process for defining your life goals. Both of these articles will provide you with tons of useful information that will help you to design your life.

Also to help you, I’ve found a great TEDx Talk by Dave Evans. In it, he shows us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling regardless of who we are, where were are, or what we do. Just watch the first few minutes!

Does This Sound Familiar?

I spent many years not having a clear vision and path for my life. My life had been spent living it the way I was told to live, by family, friends, and society.

However, I never really felt like I fit in and I couldn’t figure out exactly why.  The “right” way to live was so ingrained in me by the people around me that I thought I was the dysfunctional one.  I couldn’t see that, in reality, there was nothing wrong with me, but simply something wrong with the path I had chosen.

When we try to lie and live a life that doesn’t align with our goals and values we become unhappy. We feel as though something is wrong with us because we just don’t live up to the standards set out by that incorrect path.

I was lucky. Eventually, I figured out that my unhappiness was the result of me neglecting the life path a truly wanted. I was unhappy because I wasn’t able to be myself or pursue the things I wanted in life.

I’m not going to lie. Starting to develop your own sense of where you want your life to go is difficult.  It’s strange territory for most of us. But reflecting on this can provide us with a whole new sense of direction in life.

The Problem With How We Design Our Lives

If you watched the video, you saw just how common it is for us to have no idea where our futures are taking us. This lack of direction and purpose can lead to a lot of problems.

The first being makes it makes the path ahead unclear. Though you’ll never know with 100% certainty what the correct answer is for every decision you make, having some direction is nice. Lack of direction will cause you to stress over your decisions as you won’t have any guiding factors to reference.

The second problem is that you may end up living your life according to someone else’s script. If you aren’t sure what your values and goals are, how can you pursue life according to them right?

People often don’t take the time to figure these out for themselves. Then they simply live in alignment with the goals and values set for them by their parents, bosses, social circles, etc. Though you may have some common goals and values with these people, you are unique. You need to learn how to design your life for yourself, don’t let someone else do it for you.

If you truly want to live your best life you need to reflect and figure out what your goals and values are. This will allow you to design your life in a way that embodies your goals, values, and life balance.

The Best Way to Design Your Life: Reconstruct Your Values

The best way to begin designing your life is to reflect and reconstruct your values.

There are several questions you can ask yourself to help you figure out what values will make you happy:

What things do you choose to do freely in your life?

Which activities do you have a great passion for?

And, what activities, experiences, and people cause you to feel deeply engaged and connected?

Your answers to these questions will help guide you to your core values.

Next, an important part of this reconstruction process is reframing success in a way that is consistent with your true values. Don’t just buy into the definitions of success imposed by popular culture (wealth, status, popularity, and physical appearance). Create your own definitions of success, live true to your values, and set and achieve meaningful goals.

Living Your Values

Now you have two choices. Live the life you currently have which is familiar and comfortable but failing to make you happy. Or, learn how to design your life in a way that is aligned with your newly identified values and goals. Though these life changes can be intimidating, the rewards are worth it.

Try to understand why your old life isn’t acceptable any longer. Use that as motivation to stick with these life changes. Also, remember that this isn’t starting a whole new life. Not everything needs to change. You can make meaningful and significant changes simply by taking small steps towards greater alignment with your core values. What this means is that every day you’ll aim to design your life in a way that allows you to engage in the valued activities and experiences.

The hard part of this process will be stepping away from the values society has told you are important. Remember, your values are what will bring you happiness, success, and fulfillment, not the ones that society pushes on you.

Doing this will allow you to step away from the things that are holding you back and move towards the activities and experiences that bring you value and fulfillment.

5-Steps to Design Your Life

1. Establish Your Core Values

The first step of the process is to establish your core values. These core values outline who you are and what is most important to you. They’ll guide you through tough times and decisions as you design your life.

To establish your core values there is a simple 7-step process. I’ve gone over this 7-step process in a prior post which I definitely encourage you to check out: 7-steps to define your life values.

Basically, in this process, I help walk you through the best method for defining your core life values. You start by brainstorming a ton of different values you that resonate with you personally. For example, intelligence, continual learning, and life balance would be just some values which resonate with me.

Then you trim that list of life values down to form your “core life values”. Your core values are a group of 4-6 values which truly define who you are and what is most important to you.

The final step is to then take time to reflect on your core values and decide whether you need to make any changes moving forward.

This isn’t a one-off process. You’ll constantly be evaluating and tweaking this list as you grow and as your life and goals change over time.

These core values will guide you as you design your life!

2. Determine Your Life Mission Statement

Without a clear vision, it’s tough to know where you’re heading. If you don’t know where you’re heading, your next steps could cause you to stray from your path.

This is why the next step to design your life is to use your core values to establish your personal and unique mission statement. This statement will help keep your core values in front of you and remind you what is most important.

For example, using the three core values I outlined in the last step, intelligence, continual learning, and life balance you might come up with a mission statement like:

“I will always seek out new opportunities to learn and expand my horizons as well as invest in a deeper understanding of the topics which are most important to me. However, I will not do these at the expense of my self-care or life balance.”

This statement incorporates my different core values and reminds me of what’s important. Here my value for life balance trumps the other two. You may rank your core values like I did in this example or you may have them all equal.

Once you’re done, your mission statement will help you to design your life and stay focused on what’s truly important to you personally.

3. Determine Your Life Goals

Now that you have your core life values and mission statement it’s time to think about your life goals. Establishing life goals which align with your core values and mission statement is where many people get stuck.

However, taking the time to complete this step right will result in goals which are more meaningful to you personally and will provide you with a greater overall sense of life satisfaction and fulfillment.

Again, I’ve covered this previously. If you want to take an in-depth look you can do that here: 7-steps for defining your life goals.

Basically, you want to try and set life goals that involve activities, people, and experiences you enjoy. Setting goals that you enjoy and value will make the struggles and obstacles worth it. You’ll be more motivated to push through those hardships and setbacks.

Ask yourself:

What activities do you most enjoy?

Who do you enjoy being around?

What would make you feel accomplished, successful, meaningful and fulfilled?

Your answers should help you set life goals. Just remember to keep these goals “SMART goals” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Don’t just set your goals randomly, use them to help you design your life with a purpose.

When you have these goals, write them down. 100% WRITE THEM DOWN! Stick it somewhere that you will see them regularly. These little reminders help a lot. Trust me.

4. Develop Plans to Achieve Your Goals

Now, this step is the beast. This is where people often quit because it takes a little more effort than the prior steps. So do yourself a favor if you’ve made it this far and see this through to the end! This step will be by far the most useful to you as you design your life.

You’ll have a detailed step-by-step plan of what you need to do to achieve your goals and attain that valuable, meaningful and fulfilling life. You’re essentially creating your life design blueprint.

The best way to do this is by starting from the end result and working backward to where you are currently. For example, if you had a goal to run a marathon this might be the process you would go through:

End goal: Run a marathon

8: Run your own marathon at a high pace

7: Run 42 km at an easy pace

6: Run 30 km

5: Run 20 km

4: Run 10 km

3: Run 5 km

2: Run 1km

1: Get running shoes

These steps take you from where you are now to where you want to be. It’s an incredibly useful trick as you design your life.

Remember, the more detailed your plan the better! The clearer the steps are, and what you have to do to achieve them, the easier it will be for you to take action.

5. Take Action!

Now that we’ve outlined our core values, mission statements, and made plans to reach our goals we need to begin taking action. What good is all this invested effort if you don’t ever take action!

This is a tough step for a lot of people because bringing about change in our lives isn’t easy. We’ve grown comfortable with how things are and these changes may make us uncomfortable at first. We’ll likely be tempted to revert back to our old lifestyle. So try to keep your momentum and progress moving forward.

We both know that sometimes it’s going to be tough. But the rewards will be worth it. Don’t let your efforts and potential go to waste by failing to take action.

Schedule a target deadline for each small step you plan on taking towards your goals. Physically write it out on your calendar. The stick to it!

Remember, knowledge is great. But, if you want to truly impact your life you need to take action!

Design Your Life Wrap Up

Well, that’s it for today’s post on designing your life. We talked about the problem with following the script society has set out for you. We’ve talked about the importance of designing your life in a way that makes sense for you. And we also discussed the 5-step process you can use to design your life in accordance with your core life values and goals.

I hope you found this article valuable. Remember, knowledge is great. But taking action on that knowledge is what will help you become extraordinary!

Stay excellent everyone!

Next Week

Last week I took you through my 7-step process for defining your goals. This week I then took you through my 5-steps for designing your life alignment. Taking these steps will help you to achieve your unique life-balance!

Next, we are going to talk about some common life-balance myths. I’ll debunk these and clarify them for you.

I’m super excited about this one, so I hope you are also!

So until next week, stay excellent! Keep on chasing those life goals in the meantime!

-Mark

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