For most of us, there is far more to our work-lives than our job. Many of us feel that even if we love the job we get paid to do, there is a part of our creative contribution as a professional that is never fully expressed in the employee-job relationship. That this relationship leaves so much of us off the table.
Yet most people – whether they're just starting their careers and chipping away at a mountain of school debt, or they're seasoned leaders with teams and families depending on them – can't radically redesign their work-lives to foster greater freedom, creativity, and expression in one fell swoop. There are mortgages to pay, kids or cats to feed, and lights to keep on.
Even people on the cusp of retirement looking to freedive into replenished reservoirs of time often find it difficult to emerge from the exoskeleton of employment, not knowing where to go and what to do next.
We all live in the confines of this reality, often stuck on our inability to make changes that make us feel more wholly nurtured and seen in our work-lives, and liberated to a true point of sharing our message – the "why" that brought us to our world of work in the first place.
This desire for change – to do and share more based on what we've learned and how we've grown – looms largest in our minds when it is stifled, and in our frustration we often mistakenly think changes to our work-life must be drastic in order to be effective. We have to quit our jobs, move to another city – somehow, we must start over to do more of what we want. This is justifiably terrifying. Thankfully, it's also wrong.
The reality is that, in order to be both effective and sustainable, change has to be small and incremental, and based on prototypes we design within our current reality to test the workability of new ideas.
These small experiments, whether it's starting a blog in response to an overwhelming desire to write a book or interviewing someone in a new industry as opposed to committing to a master's program, effectively posit us into an alternate future we're interested in without breaking ourselves or the bank. They help us overcome the inertia that stands in the way of all of us and new things.
Prototyping, a core concept of the design process, is how leading companies and organizations develop new products, tools, and systems. It's how schools build deeply effective human-centered programs that help us learn. And its core principles can also be applied to how we design and iterate our work and lives.
As an ACT Leadership and Design Your Life certified coach, I engage creative leaders in all seasons of professional life in this exploratory process, helping them develop more agency and actionable ideas as craftspeople of their work-lives.
