Prototype your future

We as Life Designer’s know, that we can only gain clarity through real life feedback.

And we as Life Designers also know, that we need to get out of our head and into action as fast as possible in order to stay in the flow of the design process and avoid procrastination.

But the most important thing we as Life Designers know is, we need to take our emotions on board, and not just our rational mind.

Because we need to make sure that the life we’re about to build “feels” right, and not just “looks” right.

So what’s a Prototype?

Prototyping in Life Designing means living into our possible career or life ideas as realistic as possible.

In order to do so, a Prototype needs to be:

• cheap, with relatively low financial investment
• fast, with relatively little time investment
• actionable, with exposure to real life

But to make this more tangible, let’s land this prototype definition with a real life example, how prototyping could look like.

A while ago, one of my Life Designing Online students started to explore the topic of “personal training” due to some health issues of her own and decided to take a course to deepen her knowledge.

This course only confirmed her interest and dedication for this topic and as she received her trainers licence, she immediately started to look for ways how she could put her learnings into action. Not just for herself, but also for others.

She started to offer free training sessions in her office and since she and her colleagues work in a classical office setting, which means hours of sitting, her training sessions were super well received and now became a fix offering at her workplace. Every workday, 20 minutes training, accessible for all who want to take care of their health and wellbeing.

By moving from interest to action, she prototyped her way into valuable real life feedback and into future opportunities. In a fast, cheap and actionable way.

What can you Prototype – and what not

But we need to pay attention, because not everything is “prototype-able”.

What we can prototype is an experience, a feeling, real life feedback. These are cues, insights, building blocks for our possible future.

So we can prototype how we feel when we engage in a new activity, e.g. personal training.

We can also prototype how this is perceived by our environment, the people around us. So in our example my student could also prototype how her work colleagues receive, engage and appreciate her training offerings.

So what we can achieve through prototyping is clarity.

But what we can’t achieve through prototyping is absolute certainty. Absolute certainty about a certain future outcome.

So let’s suppose my student would decide at one point to leave her current job and become a full time personal trainer. No prototype in the world could accurately tell her how fast her business would grow and how her financial situation would look like in the future.

But what a prototype could/ and has told her, is the clarity that she deeply enjoys this activity and that she has a talent to work with people, to instruct, and to motivate. And this clarity would help her enormously to make a future decision in case she would consider to move this pro-bono offering to a full time business.

And it would help her enormously to stay on track, during the start-up period of her new career venture, because she’s already feeling the excitement and joy of her future. And feelings always motivates us so much more than thoughts only.

Possible Side Effects of Prototyping?

Whenever we’re consciously approaching a transition or decision in our life, whether in regards to our career or our personal life, prototyping will facilitate this process enormously.

But there might be life situations where we’re not even aware about approaching life transitions. Or that we’re about to prototype something.

We just have a hunch.

We’re drawn to explore something deeper without a clear intention or outcome in mind. You can call it hunch, or intuition. Or you could simply call it life opportunities, showing up at our door, every single day.

Take my student, once again. She never started her prototype with the aim of changing her career. She started her prototype because she felt drawn to this topic and simply followed her intuition without having a clear outcome in mind.

And she was rewarded for taking action.

Rewarded with completely new opportunities for her future. And with seeing more than one option for herself. A highly appreciated side effect, I would say.

And this is what we want to achieve with Life Designing. Knowing that there’s always more than one option. And knowing that we can pro-actively create career and life opportunities, every single day.

Do you have a hard time creating and seeing opportunities?

Then how about joining me for one of my Life Designing Online Trainings?And let me support you in exploring and designing a future you truly love.