Before we head down the exciting (and scary?) path of becoming Life Designers and creating our KICKASS LIFE we first need to understand where to start from.

Having the right mindsets as you move through the process is critical.

Here are the mindsets you need for designing the KICKASS life that you want…

• Optimistic Belief – you first have to believe it is possible to have a better whatever it is that you want. Focus on the awesomeness of what could be and not the obstacles you see. Without the belief that a better solution (a job you love, the fitness level you want to achieve, the life you want) is out there you are fighting a losing battle.
• Bias Towards Action – in Life Design it’s more about “doing” than thinking and analyzing. Having a bias towards action ensures that you will get out in the world and actually “do” things rather than just sit back and contemplate them.
• Curiosity – be passionately curious!. Look at the world through the eyes of a child. Invite exploration and experience as many new things as possible. By radical curiosity, you open yourself up to new perspectives, interests, and situations that can help you connect the dots.
• Reframing – as Life Designers we need to embrace the power of a technique that we call reframing. Reframing is when we take a certain problem or obstacle and step back and look at it from a different vantage point. This helps us identify our biases, makes sure that we are working on the right problem and allows us to see new potential solutions. In the process of designing your life, you will come up against plenty of dysfunctional beliefs so having the ability to reframe those beliefs will be critical to your success.
• Collaboration – most people go about trying to figure out what they want to do with their life all wrong. The try to figure it out all by themselves. Design is a collaborative process and many of the best ideas will come from other people. Life Design is no different. Don’t go it alone. Be open to creating your “design team” of mentors, advisors and supportive community members to help you.
• Experiment Your Way Forward – we learn best by doing. One of the problems with trying to figure out what we want to do with our life is the lack of experiencing things. We don’t know what that new job would be like because we have never done it before. We don’t know if that diet is right for us because we haven’t tried it. Here we want to do things differently. We want to get out there and actually try things. We want to create little experiments to see if we are on the right track. We think, learn and iterate based on experimentation.
• Mindful of Process – If you ever get frustrated or feel stuck just remember that there is a process to designing your life. Sometimes you just need to figure out where you are in that process and know which methods and tools to use to help you get “unstuck”.
• Embrace Ambiguity – In Life Design we start from a place of not knowing the answer (or oftentimes the right question) to the problems we are trying to solve. Life is full of ambiguity so you need to be able to embrace it. And though that’s not particularly comfortable, it allows us to become more creative, to pursue lots of different ( and sometimes wacky) ideas, and to arrive at unexpected (and hopefully awesome) solutions.

Designing your life (even a KICKASS one) can be challenging.

So, as you go through the process (especially when you feel frustrated or confused), check in with yourself to see how many of these mindsets you are practicing.