A Design for Life

March is a good time to assess where you are in your personal and professional journey. Maybe now is the time to redesign your life!

One of my favourite bands is The Manic Street Preachers. In 1995 guitarist Richey Edwards disappeared and the band were lost for a time as they had always been a four piece. They had to come to terms with the fact that life might be different if Richey never came back and they needed to decide how to be a three piece together. In 1996 they released the hit song?“A Design for Life”?and the song explored the relationship between the working classes and middle classes. It is one of the most beautiful songs I have every heard and proof that people can move on with their lives in times of challenge and despair. The band found a way to be together and designed the life they wanted to live despite being in mourning for someone they loved.

Many leaders that I work with don't feel that they are in control of their own lives. They work hard and achieve professional success but many also sacrifice their personal dreams and relationships. In this article I will briefly explore how any leader can redesign their own lives so that they achieve both their personal and professional goals.

You can find out more about this topic by listening to me in?Arthi Rabikrisson's Inspire Your Life Podcast?and reading my book?Self-Coaching for Leaders.

Reflection

Spring time is a good time for reflection. We can take some time out to look back at the last 12 months and take stock of our achievements. We can also pause and feel gratitude for all that we have and the relationships that support us each day. However, when we reflect we can sometimes focus on what we don't have and feel jealous of those that do have what we want. Sometimes this can be as simple as laughter in our lives or spending quality time with our friends.

An exercise that can help us reflect across all the areas of our lives focuses on free writing. In free writing we pick a topic such as “Reflections on the last 12 months” and then create a peaceful environment in which we are not likely to be interrupted. With a pen and paper to hand we then have the topic in mind and then write freely without taking the pen off the page for three minutes. There is no time to pause or think about what we are writing we just write what comes into our heads in each moment.

The objective of this exercise is not to understand what we write but just to express it in written form. This helps our unconscious mind to become free and less cluttered for us to be able to explore the future in more depth.

Design your life

The next stage to exploring how you might change your life is to think about a time frame that you can relate to in the future. This might be one, five or ten years or a time period that makes more sense to you. We then need to design a question that excites us enough to explore the possible answers. A popular question that comes up for my clients is “If I had no financial, family or career limitations, how would I spend the next five years of my life?”.

Other leaders want to be more specific and may add in some factors that are very important to them. A leader I worked with chose the question “If I had no financial, family or career limitations how would I build on the knowledge and skills I have gained to date to live a fulfilling live over the next five years?”.

Once we have the question in our heads we can take a creative approach to exploring all the exciting possibilities for our lives in the future. We use a creative approach to engage our right brain more freely so that it can complement and inform our rational left brain.

One fun way to use a creative approach is by drawing the answer to the question posed. This works best when you create some time and space for yourself where you won't be disturbed and give yourself up to half an hour. Then think deeply about the question you have posed youself and then slowly start to draw on the paper what comes to mind in terms of the answer to the question. It works best when you don't use numbers or letters. Try to use circles and lines or symbols to denote the parts of the answer that come to mind.

Don't stop drawing until you feel there is nothing else left to draw. A good indicator that the drawing is not finished is when there is a space on the page that looks out of place. This space is waiting for a drawing to appear!

Once you have finished the drawing try and connect to the feelings that were coming up for you as you were drawing and think about when you have those feelings and who you are when you have those feelings.

Most leaders that do this exercise create a meaningful drawing that sets the compass for future decisions.

Living your redesigned life

So how can this drawing help you live your redesigned life?

Yes it is a drawing that is without any restrictions so some might say it is an unrealistic dream? The important thing to note is that it is something you can work towards.

When I did my drawing in 2016 I redesigned my life so that I could set up my own business and work towards becoming an executive coach and spend more time with family and friends.

I started telling my friends and family about my dream and then started to speak with my network of contacts on linkedin asking them one simple question. “Now you know my dream for my redesigned life, if you were in my shoes right now what would you do next?”.

This question is so powerful as it is really effective in gaining insight from a broad range of experience and knowledge that is different to yours. In my case it gave me insight into the training I needed and my likely earnings in the first five years of the business. It also provided me with my first clients as they were interested in how I could support them. It is also a safe question as you are not asking anyone for specific help or a job, just their views.

In February 2017 I set up The Tallents Partnership and have been trading successfully for five years now. This all became possible due to me taking the time to reflect back in December 2016 and draw my redesigned life. By sharing my vision and passion I gained support and showed courage and intent in the setting up of my own business with no savings in the bank.

Any leader can change the course of their personal and professional journey by taking the simple steps above. Why don't you take some time out this month and let me know what your redesigned life looks like? It may take some time to get there but at least you have a focus and an intent and sometimes the restrictions that we place on our own lives are not as real as we perceive them to be.

Andrew Tallents

Andrew Tallents has over twenty-five years’ experience in delivering a wide range of leadership consulting solutions to a variety of organisations around the world. He grew up on a council estate in Manchester, and after graduating from Salford University with a business degree, he joined the utility industry and spent his early career in business support functions.?

He then moved into the recruitment industry where he supported CEOs in growing their organisations and developing their own careers. During this time, he was fortunate to work with global organisations and developed his multicultural awareness, enabling him to work with a wide variety of leadership styles.?

He established the Tallents Partnership in 2017 to support leaders who are ambitious for themselves and their organisations. He has worked with large corporate organisations to small not-for-profit organisations and has learned that in any organisation, a leader is only as successful as the relationships they develop.

Andrew is an amazon bestselling author and published his first book?“Self-Coaching for Leaders - The unique and simple approach to living your personal and professional dreams”?in 2021. He is a keynote speaker and travels the world sharing his experiences of self-coaching as a way of living our personal and professional dreams.

He is proud of his family and circle of friends and associates. When he is not supporting his clients, he enjoys working towards fulfilling his potential on the golf course. He also supports charities in the social mobility sector. Andrew lives in the Wirral in the UK with his wife, children and Ollie the Cavapoo.