Design Your Life

How have you designed your life so far? For many, particularly in tough financial times, the answer is merely to survive. To pay bills. If you have money, how have you designed your life? To own stuff. To be comfortable. To be a consumer with a lifestyle. If these are your answers, I cannot help but ask, really? Is that it?

But if you have been wanting to awaken, to mobilize, to activate, to engage, to experience fulfillment, then the real question is this: What designs tap into the best you can be? What designs allow you to fulfill yourself, to have integrity with yourself, to make the most of what makes you unique?

To answer these questions, I revisited a lesson from naturopathic medical school. 1 That is where I learned that quality of life can be viewed as a triangle. The baseline of the triangle represents our constitution, what we are born with, the givens of our existence, things over which we have no control. The ascending line represents the choices we can make. The hypotenuse represents our quality of life. The longer the line, the greater the quality of life. Class, how do you make the hypotenuse of a triangle longer? You must lengthen one of the sides. (See, your math teacher was right, they said this would come in handy one day!!!!)

You cannot lengthen the baseline. We all have our genetic strengths and weaknesses. Some are born to privilege, others to poverty. Some are born with weak eyes, or weak kidneys, or a heart defect. Some are born strong, like George Burns, who drank and smoked cigars every day until he died at the age of 100. When he turned 90, a reporter asked what his doctors had to say about his lifestyle. His reply? “What can they say? They’re all dead!” His strong constitution allowed him to make such choices with little consequence.

Not many of us are so lucky as to be blessed with such a strong constitution. But we all can make wise choices, which increases our quality of life, our ability to embody the experience of fulfillment. In my work with individuals and groups over the years, I’ve found that the wise choices people make to experience a high quality of life come down to four simple things:

A PURPOSE TO FULFILL, SO THAT LIFE SEEMS VALUABLE AND NECESSARY. Purpose rests on values, and values require clarity to give rise to purpose. And, values create a powerful filter through which information and experience must pass, and against which they are measured. People who know their values cannot be easily manipulated by those with harmful agendas.

HELPFUL HABITS FOR ENERGY and A SENSE OF CONTROL IN OUR LIVES. If you say you value family, but never have time for them, or say you value health, but your habits destroy your health, such incongruity makes you a house divided against yourself that cannot stand. And you probably can’t stand it either.

SUSTAINING ATTITUDES TO DEAL WITH REVERSALS OF FORTUNE. As John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” In the face of adversity, your attitudes give you resilience, the ability to bounce back and keep going.

SUPPORTIVE RELATIONSHIPS THAT PROVIDE ENCOURAGEMENT, GUIDANCE and ASSISTANCE. No one is an island, and you are never alone. But if you have only yourself, or place all your support needs on one person, it ís difficult to gain and maintain traction for living intentionally. Individuals achieve their greatest aspirations by working with, learning from, making commitments to and counting on others.