Measuring Up: Design Your Life
Your divine design, as expressed in Ephesians 2:10, is more knowable than you realize. You are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which He has prepared in advance, that you should walk in them.
With the right tools, courageous dialogue, and an experienced guide, you can accelerate progress in articulating your life vision and aligning your life vocation.
Auxano Founder Will Mancini and pastor Dave Rhodes have developed those tools.
The books referenced in this SUMS Remix are just a taste of what possibilities exist as you explore what you were created for.
Once you read through this “appetizer,” read more about how you can and should know your Life Younique: your God-given identity and your God inspired dreams. Then, you can discern and design the practical next steps to get there.
THE QUICK SUMMARY – Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
At last, a book that shows you how to build – design – a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage.
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking.
In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION
As you look around your office, home, or the coffee shop where you are reading this, you will realize that everything surrounding you was designed by someone. And every design started with a problem.
The same process that created the things around you can be applied to designing something far more important – your life.
Like the unique lamps or furniture, a well-designed life will have a look and feel all of its own. You can use design thinking to create a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling.
You never finish designing your life – life is a joyous and never-ending design project of building your way forward.
A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and wheat you do all line up together.
A well-designed life is a marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know your self better, and of achievements and satisfactions.
A well-designed life isn’t a noun – it’s a verb. Just keep building your way forward. Design isn’t just a technique to address problems and projects – it’s a way of living.
Good design always releases the best of what was already there and waiting to be found and revealed.
Life design revolves around five simple things you need to do:
- Be curious – there’s something interesting about everything. Endless curiosity is the key to a well-designed life. Nothing is boring to everyone.
- Try stuff – With a bias to action, there is no more being stuck – no more worrying, analyzing, pondering, or solving your way through life.
- Reframe problems – Reframing is a change in perspective, and almost any design problem can use a perspective switch.
- Know it’s a process – Awareness of the process means you don’t get frustrated or lost, and you don’t ever give up.
- Ask for help – Radical collaboration means that you aren’t alone in the process.
You can apply some of the five mindsets virtually anywhere, on any given day. The opportunities to live into being curious or to try stuff are endless.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life
A NEXT STEP
Write the five mindset phrases above, each to a single journal page. On a weekly basis, work through the following steps.
Be Curious – choose a new or new-to-you topic which you have just heard about in terms of your ministry area. Reflect on the following questions:
- What would someone who is interested in this want to know?
- How does it work?
- How did it used to be done?
- What is the most interesting thing about it?
- What do I need to learn more about?
Try Stuff – choose a new ministry topic or event in the near future. Reflect on the following questions:
- How can we try this – even on a small scale – this week?
- What would we like to know more about?
- How do I go about finding out?
- What will we learn when we expand the scale?
Reframe problems – choose a recent ministry event that has concluded. Reflect on the following questions:
- What perspective am I viewing the event from?
- How can I change to a completely different perspective and view the event?
- What other perspectives could other people have about the event?
- In describing the event from other perspectives, what new information did I learn that will be helpful the next time?
Know it’s a process – choose a ministry idea that someone on your team has talked about but not yet implemented. Reflect on the following questions:
- List all the steps leading up to, and following after, the idea.
- What would happen if you didn’t think more than one step ahead?
- What’s the worst thing that can happen? What would you do?
- What’s the best thing that can happen? What will you do?
Ask for help – identify a ministry action or event that you have been thinking about, but is not yet public. Find a peer you can talk to about your ideas, using these questions:
- Describe the idea in five minutes, then ask for five minutes of feedback.
- List the individuals and/or groups that would be involved in launching this idea. Are you connected to, and in conversation with, all of them?
- Keep an “ask-for-help” journal, and right down questions you want help on. Each week, identify people who can help you, and ask them for help.
By keeping the mindsets as an active orientation in your daily life, you will soon see how they can help you continually design your life.
Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 80-1, issues November 2017.
This is part of a weekly series posting excerpts from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix book excerpts for church leaders.
SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; each solution is taken from a different book. Additionally, a practical action step is included with each solution.
As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS Remix provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox).
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Tags: Bill Burnett, Dave Evans, Designing Your Life, SUMS Remix, younique
