71. Designing Your Life | How an engineer recommends evaluating your work, health, love, and play
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Feb 7, 2022
The podcast explores the concept of life balance from an engineering and design perspective. It discusses the importance of evaluating work, health, love, and play in designing one's life intentionally. The hosts address the unique challenges faced by doctors in their clinical work. They emphasize the significance of play as a means of recharging and recommend balancing purpose-driven work with activities done for pure joy. The speakers encourage listeners to self-reflect on their own balance, take specific actions to enhance it, and offer a subscription invitation at the end.
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Design Thinking For Your Life
Design thinking applies to life by building prototypes and iterations to see what works.
Use feedback from experiments to design the next version of your life intentionally.
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Use Four Gauges To Assess Life
Assess where your energy goes by dividing life into four gauges: health, work, love, and play.
Rate each gauge from empty to full (or beyond) to visualize balance and strain.
insights INSIGHT
Health Is The Foundation
Start with health because it underpins all other areas of life.
Health includes physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions, not just fitness.
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A book I recommend to many coaching clients is “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I’ve even had a client use a several month coaching engagement specifically to focus on the exercises in the book. What makes it such a potent tool? Design thinking.
What happens if we take the same principles that are used to create the fastest road bike or most efficient electric vehicle and apply them to help us live our best life? The concept was not only intriguing, it blew me away. In today’s episode we break down one tool from Designing Your Life: gauging how full/empty we are in 4 buckets of life (health, love, work, play), determining if these buckets are in balance, and introducing the process for rebalancing.
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We Discuss:
“Designing Your Life” thinking is about approaching life from the perspective of engineering and design, building prototypes to see what does/doesn’t work and using that information to create your next iteration.
When thinking about the quality of your life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans suggest that you assess your life in terms of these 4 distinct yet overlapping areas: health, work, love, and play.
Start with health, since it is the foundation of all of the other gauges or buckets (pick your metaphor).
While it is often imbalance the work gauge/bucket that brings people to seek the help of a physician coach, work is just another bucket in the totality of what goes into making your life.
The love bucket takes into consideration both the love you give and the love you receive.
The final gauge is play. Play is vital because it allows you to massively recharge.
Once you have determined where your gauges fall or the fullness of your 4 buckets, the next step is to determine whether there is an imbalance and how to correct it. Only you can answer that.
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