Creating a well dressed mindset: the images, symbols and metaphors that define your life

The only thing that is consistent in our lives is inconsistency.

As someone who likes to have a plan, the last five years have shown us that just because we have something down on paper that we would like to happen, it does not mean it will work out in exactly the way we had hoped.

When I interviewed Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for this week's podcast, she discussed the concept of mapping out your life over time. Her suggestion wasn't to create a rigid schedule of deadlines, but rather to use mapping to identify which goals to prioritise now and which can wait for the future.

The way that I interpreted this is to make choices about what is truly important to achieve in the short term. This is about identifying what is important to you - not what you feel you should be focused on because of your age, or the point that you are up to in your career or even worse because you are looking around at other people's goals and thinking that they should be yours.

'An awful lot of people (particularly aged 25-50) are responding to other people's expectations, not their own. They're pressured by parents, by peers, by ridiculous social media competition. The earlier you can unhook yourself from those benchmarks, the better.'

Avivah shares her personal tips on how to do your own mapping exercise and impresses the importance of aligning it with those around you who you share valuable relationships with.

She suggests breaking down time into seven year chunks and thinking about what you want to do across a seven year period. I asked several people their view on this (and on their last seven years) and each one could see significant personal and familial milestones they had achieved over the last seven years, and the also the ones that felt in touching distant across the next seven looking forward. When you think back seven years to where you are now, it's pretty eye opening to think about how you have changed and grown - but also what might have stayed as a constant in terms of priorities.

Finally, Avivah's advice is to get excited about the fact that on average we are living 26 years longer today than we were in 1950.

'We're not really waking up to the fact that our lives are going to be much longer. And really embracing that we have been gifted 30 extra years of life just in the last century. What are we goign to do with it? People need to get geared up to know that they can change and evolve much more often, including if they want their identities, their focus...it's kind of exciting.'

So as someone who flip-flops between a well dressed view (clear plan in place) and stressed view (everything is changing and out of control) what I have taken from the conversation with Avivah is that we need to choose what we want to take control of right now. We need to get clear where our priorities sit and what is truly important to us rather than where society tells us we should be, and when you start to think about taking that level of control of your life Avivah is right...it's kind of exciting.

Listen to our conversation:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bgnu81eCnD7Wkjjdtl1J3?si=VvEgUlkYSBajoWYVMTzI-w

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/season-7-episode-6-creating-a-well-dressed-mindset/id1725889381?i=1000689854543

Have a great weekend!

Dahlia

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