I think that many of us grow up and the thought of what we want to become, or that the perfect vocation is still a distant desire. We went to school to get an advanced degree, or not and no matter the circumstance of our lives we often dream of doing something different or changing our career path and finding a new vocation.
The huge arena of personal growth attempts to help us answer these questions, but for some reason does not hit the mark and we are still left with the same dreams and desires.
In my interview with Stanford Professor and co-creator of a course called “Designing Your Life” Bill Burnett I get to discuss how he his partner Dave Evans envisioned approaching the subject of career and life development. The key component in their course is not part of any other course I have ever seen in my 30 plus years of studying personal development, and that component is the use of applying”design thinking skills” to help us answer these questions.
Bill points out that there are five design thinking ideas that help us solve our own dilemmas about our life and careers 1) Connecting the Dots 2) Radical Collaboration 3) Prototyping 4) Gravity Problems 5) Reframing. To better understand what these design thinking concepts I encourage you to listen to our interview in this podcast.
He states that we should build three Odyssey plans or three different versions of our life for the next five years. As Dave Evans the co-author states in his Youtube video these are really not plans they are ideas, and the purpose is to find areas of our life where we have an interest in learning more. So the process is to empathize, define, ideate prototype and test.
I know you are going to find my interview with Bill Burnett very enlightening as well as something that will get you to think about how you have been approaching your life design.
If you want to learn more about the Designing Your Life book, workbook and course, I have attached links below.
I hope you enjoy my interview with Bill Burnett, and I know this will spark a new desire in your to design your life.
Designing Your Life Book Website
Bill Burnett Presentation Ted X Stanford Talk
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