The One About Life Design

Let’s start with Design Thinking

Design thinking is a user-centred approach to innovation that involves creative problem-solving, iterative prototyping, and a focus on empathy. It’s about understanding the needs and experiences of users to create solutions that resonate deeply with them. It makes sense that having an affinity for design thinking is in alignment with being a coach, because both approaches are fundamentally about helping people solve problems creatively and effectively.

My Journey with Design Thinking

Throughout my pre-coaching career, I was already passionate about design thinking, before I knew that it was a concept. When working in legal knowledge innovation management, I encouraged lawyers to embrace legal design – applying design thinking to contract drafting, communicating legal issues more client-centred, and optimising in-house legal teams' internal processes.

And when I delved into life design about a year ago, I realised it aligns perfectly with my coaching practice. It was a revelation to see how these principles could be applied to help individuals create fulfilling, intentional and well-balanced lives.

Application of Design Thinking to Life: Life Design

Applying design thinking principles to life results in what we call life design. Life design uses the same creative, problem-solving approach to help individuals craft fulfilling and balanced lives. This involves seeing life as a series of prototypes, where we continually test, learn, and iterate.

Core Principles of Life Design: Comparing Design Thinking and Life Design

Design thinking focuses on a human-centred approach to innovation, utilising a set of mindsets and principles that foster creativity and practical solutions. When translated to Life Design, these principles form a powerful framework for creating a fulfilling and well-balanced life.

Let’s explore and compare these core principles:

1. Curiosity vs. Human-Centred Empathy

?? - Curiosity: In Life Design, curiosity drives exploration and play. It encourages us to see opportunities and possibilities everywhere, making us "good at being lucky" as we constantly seek out new experiences and perspectives. Curiosity helps us stay engaged and open-minded, leading to a richer life.

?? - Human-Centred Empathy: In design thinking, empathy involves understanding the needs and experiences of others to create solutions that truly resonate with users. It’s about deeply understanding the people you are designing for. In Life Design, the user is yourself.

Burnett and Evans (the authors I’m drawing this Life Design framework from) do not mention empathy a great deal, but it should not be overlooked here: Understanding oneself deeply and practicing self-empathy is essential for to direct your curious mind to creating a life that truly fits you, the ‘user’.?

2. Bias to Action vs. Prototype and Test

?? - Bias to Action: Life Design emphasises the importance of doing rather than just thinking. By trying out different actions and creating prototypes of our lives, we learn what works through real-world experiences and are not afraid to fail and iterate. This active experimentation helps us discover practical solutions that we might not find through contemplation alone.

?? - Prototype and Test: In design thinking, this principle also revolves around creating prototypes and testing them iteratively to refine ideas and solutions. It’s about learning by doing and being adaptable to change, which is central to Life Design as well.

3. Reframing Problems vs. Define and Ideate

?? - Reframe Problems: Life Design uses reframing to get unstuck and to ensure we are working on the right problems. This involves challenging our biases, limiting beliefs, and opening up new solution spaces. Reframing allows us to view challenges from different perspectives, leading to innovative solutions.

?? - Define and Ideate: In design thinking, defining the problem clearly and ideating multiple solutions are crucial steps. Reframing helps in this process by looking at problems from different angles, ensuring we are addressing the root cause.

4. ?Process Awareness vs. Understand and Observe

?? - ?Process Awareness: Life Design acknowledges that life is messy and iterative. It’s about understanding that mistakes and failures are part of the journey and focusing on the process rather than just the end goal. Taking this meta perspective on your growth and progress helps you remain flexible and resilient.

?? - Understand and Observe: Design thinking emphasises understanding the context and observing how users interact with solutions to gain deep insights into their needs and challenges. This observational insight is vital in Life Design to ensure our solutions fit our unique circumstances.

5. Radical Collaboration vs. Collaborate and Co-Create

?? - Radical Collaboration: In Life Design, collaboration is essential. It involves reaching out to others for help, using mentors, coaches, friends, and engaging with a supportive community. It’s about recognising that we are not alone in this journey. Life Design thrives on the collective wisdom and support of others.

?? - Collaborate and Co-Create: Similarly, design thinking involves working with diverse teams and stakeholders to co-create solutions. It recognises that the best ideas often come from collective effort and multiple perspectives.

Triangulating Life Design with Coaching

Integrating Life Design with coaching provides a robust framework for personal growth, especially for individuals with ADHD.

1. Curiosity in Coaching: Coaches encourage curiosity, helping clients explore their interests and passions.

2. Bias to Action in Coaching: Coaching focuses on action-oriented strategies, encouraging clients to set goals and learn from experiences.

3. Reframing in Coaching: Coaches help clients reframe challenges, promoting flexible thinking.

4. Process Awareness in Coaching: Coaches support clients in noticing their process. I always ask my clients when there is an insight: “What do you notice about how we got here?”.

5. Collaboration in Coaching: Coaching involves collaboration, co-creating solutions and strategies with clients.

Life Design and ADHD

Life Design offers a transformative way to approach life’s challenges for individuals with ADHD. It turns ADHD from a series of “gravity problems” into design challenges we can creatively work around.

Leveraging ADHD Strengths

Life design principles leverage ADHD strengths such as creativity, ideation, and curiosity. Research since the 1990s indicates that individuals with ADHD are inherently novelty-seeking and more creative, being less constrained by existing knowledge and less prone to 'design fixation' compared to non-ADHD individuals.

One the reasons for this is that the prefrontal cortex in ADHD individuals is less powerful and will generate less self-censorship, enhancing their ability to ideate and create multiple options.

Temporal discounting, where the perceived value of a reward decreases as the delay to receive it increases, is stronger in people with ADHD. This has been consistently observed in both children and adults with ADHD, reflecting their heightened impulsivity and challenges with delayed gratification.

For the above reasons, Life Design and in particular Prototyping can be a perfect match for feeding ADHD creativity and compensating ADHD temporal discounting, by maintaining momentum and interest, focusing on short-term goals and immediate feedback.

Decision-Making: Navigating the ADHD Groan Zone

Individuals with ADHD often face significant difficulties in decision-making due to deficits in executive functions, impulsivity, and working memory limitations. These challenges make it hard to remember past experiences, weigh options, and control impulsive choices, leading to a taxing decision-making process.

One particularly challenging aspect for ADHD individuals is the "groan zone," a term borrowed from Sam Kaner’s diamond model of participation. The groan zone, in collaborative brainstorming and decision making, represents the phase where diverse ideas and perspectives must be organised and brought to consensus. This transition from divergent thinking, where ideas are freely generated, to convergent thinking, where the focus is on prioritising and making decisions, is essential for creativity and innovation but can be extremely uncomfortable.

For people with ADHD, narrowing down options and making decisions can feel restrictive. Even when all the options have stemmed from themselves ! Selecting one option among many beloved ideas can cause discomfort, sometimes described as physical pain or a feeling akin to grief. This discomfort stems from difficulties in prioritising and organising thoughts, making this an especially daunting phase, which can feel very emotional... a sort of internal ADHD groan zone.

ADHD coaching can be instrumental in helping individuals navigate the groan zone. Coaches assist clients in developing decision criteria, managing emotional discomfort, and fostering intentionality in their actions. By addressing difficulties in evaluating options, controlling impulsive choices, and learning from past experiences, coaching helps make the decision-making process more manageable. This support is crucial for helping ADHD individuals move through the groan zone and achieve innovative and creative outcomes.

Additional Challenges in Applying Life Design to ADHD

Overwhelm: Generating many options can lead to indecision and paralysis due to difficulties in categorising, prioritising options, and sequencing ideas and tasks. This is not necessarily a groan zone phenomenon. It can also be just an information overlad, and nothing can happen in this space.

Lower Self-Continuity: Due to issues with executive functions, immediate gratification, and time perception, people ADHD have a harder time projecting themselves into future scenarios, a concept known as self-continuity.

Future self-continuity: This is how connected you feel with your future selves, and this too impacts your decision-making and your ability to properly assess the feasibility of long-term commitments and endeavours. People who do not struggle with those issues probably don’t even realise that this is something we are not all equipped with equally at birth. ?

Lower Self-Efficacy: Self-efficacy is the belief in one's ability to successfully accomplish tasks and achieve goals. It influences how people think, feel, and act, playing a crucial role in motivation, persistence, and resilience. Self-efficacy is often lower for people with ADHD due to the many challenges they have encountered throughout their lives, especially in poorly-adapted environments. Overcoming this is an extra hurdle to the implementation of life design strategies.

Prospective Memory: Prospective memory is the ability to remember to perform an intended action or task at the right future moment. It involves planning, remembering the plan, and executing it at the right time, is crucial for managing daily activities and responsibilities and… is the result of another blend of executive functions, that non-ADHD people do not even see as granular, separate challenges.

Prospective memory is a challenge for those with ADHD and this impacts follow-through on plans. Much like impaired self-continuity and self-efficacy, challenges to prospective memory all can potentially hinder the pace and momentum of the life design cycle.

Process Awareness: People with ADHD tend to have very good process awareness when it comes to other people’s processes or external processes. They can be excellent at problem spotting an imperfect process. However, they may lack this self-awareness when it comes to their personal processes (their habits, patterns of behaviour, etc.)

Bias to Action: While a bias to action can be advantageous, for ADHD people it can stem from impulsivity rather than intentionality, requiring careful management.

Consistency Issues: Challenges in maintaining consistency due to follow-through, memory, emotional dysregulation, and distraction. Intentionality is key to maintaining consistent actions.

Perfectionism and Maximising: ADHD often brings a tendency towards perfectionism and maximising, leading in turn to analysis paralysis/overwhelm and difficulty getting started.

Role of ADHD Coaching

ADHD coaching can be a game-changer. Coaches help identify strengths, set realistic goals, and develop personalised strategies, providing support and accountability.

Here’s how ADHD coaching helps address specific challenges:

• Narrowing Down Options:?Coaches assist in developing decision criteria and managing the emotional discomfort associated with making choices.
• Overcoming Overwhelm:?Coaches help learn to prioritise tasks, break down goals into manageable steps, and reduce decision fatigue.
• Enhancing Self-Continuity and Self-Efficacy:?Coaches work on improving self-awareness and self-efficacy, helping clients project themselves, visualise hurdles and the future past the hurdles, helping them believe in their capabilities.
• Improving Prospective Memory and Follow-Through:?Coaches provide strategies for remembering planned actions and maintaining follow-through.
• Increasing Self-Awareness of Personal Processes:?Coaches help clients become more aware of their own processes and improve internal process management.
• Balancing Bias to Action with Intentionality:?Coaches assist in distinguishing between intentional and impulsive actions, ensuring actions are aligned with goals.
• Managing Perfectionism and Maximising Tendencies:?Coaches help clients embrace "good enough" and overcome analysis paralysis.

Gravity Problems and ADHD

In "Designing Your Life," Burnett and Evans define gravity problems as issues that are unchangeable, much like the law of gravity. For individuals with ADHD, the key to a well-balanced life is to decide whether their ADHD is a gravity problem, or an actionable challenge. ADHD coaching helps shift the mindset from seeing ADHD as a fixed obstacle to viewing it as a manageable and leverageable aspect of their life.

Many of my clients initially battle reality, getting stuck in thoughts such as "I really wish I didn't need all these coping strategies". The biggest progress is made when this is let go of, and ADHD coaching helps in accepting the specific design and problem-solving that living with ADHD requires.

As Burnett and Evans put it:

"The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. (…)?That's why you start where you are, not where you wish you were, not where you hope you are, not where you think you should be, but right where you are."

Conclusion

Life Design offers a refreshing perspective for ADHD individuals, transforming what once felt like insurmountable gravity problems into exciting design challenges. By adopting a holistic, adaptable approach, we can create lives that cater to our needs and strengths. ADHD coaching facilitates an ongoing connection with one's intention and intuition, making life design a viable and effective approach. By embracing life design principles and leveraging ADHD coaching, individuals can craft fulfilling, adaptable lives that play to their unique strengths.

Personal Reflections and a Word on Intention

As someone who has applied these principles both personally and professionally, I can attest to their transformative power. Life design is not just about solving problems; it's about reimagining possibilities and continuously iterating on our journeys. For those with ADHD, this approach can turn perceived obstacles into opportunities for growth and creativity.

One of the most profound aspects of ADHD coaching is its ability to help clients reconnect with their intuition and intention amidst cognitive hyperactivity. This ongoing connection to intention is crucial because, without it, maintaining consistent actions becomes challenging. As Russell Barkley suggests, ADHD might as well be called Intention Deficit Disorder (IDD), highlighting the importance of this connection.

Remember, with Life Design:

"You aren't designing the rest of your life, you are designing what's next."

You are welcome.

References

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