Feeling Good: An Element of Design

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There’s all this talk today about the Law of Attraction or the Secret.  One of the key points in this body of work is that you attract things into your life based on your level of “vibration.”   Basically, what this means is if you’re feeling good, meaning having feelings of joy, enthusiasm and aliveness, you are focused on and attracting what you want.  If you’re feeling bad, meaning having feelings of sadness, resistance or depression, you are focused on and attracting what you don’t want.  For me, the jury is still out on whether there is this universal law of attraction.  Fortunately though, I don’t think it matters because I think the idea of “feeling good” is a useful concept to explore in the realm of design.

My book A Life Worth Living looks at life from the perspective of design.  It’s unique in that it doesn’t teach you a set of techniques to design your life; instead, it teaches you to think like a designer so that you can begin to design anything in your life.  Feeling good clearly has many benefits associated with it. When you feel good, you’re more in flow with life.  You’re more creative when you feel good.  You’re more open to possibilities and less attached to outcomes.  You’re more accepting of yourself and others.  For those reasons alone, it’s a good thing to develop the practice of feeling good.

From a design perspective, feeling good is relevant because for the most part, it’s why you’re designing what you are designing in the first place.  Think about it: why do you want more money?  Why do you want the perfect spouse?  Why do you want to be able to travel the world?  Because in some way shape or form, you want life to feel better than it does today.  You want to be happier.  You want to be more alive, more engaged in the living of your life.  Yes, you can make more money in your life by struggling.  The cost to that thinking is that once you have the money, chances are you still don’t know how to feel good.

We live in this fantasy that one day when we reach a particular destination, we will magically become these better people.  Problem is that once we get to the destination, we quickly realize that we don’t know how to be better people because we didn’t spend our time educating ourselves.  We don’t know how to be happier.  We don’t know how to be more generous.  We don’t know how to be more caring toward others.  We know how to get the things that are supposed to make us feel these things, but we don’t know how to be those people we dream of being when we arrive at our destination.  And so we are left with in this experience that perhaps something is wrong with us or something is wrong with life rather than just seeing our failure for what it is – a gap in our education.

When we design, we design holistically.  We don’t just want the million in the bank; we have visions of how life will be and feel when we have the million in the bank.  When we plan a wedding, we are not just planning a list of activities.  We are designing an experience.  We are designing how we want to feel on that special day.  When we plan funerals, we are designing a solemn, sacred experience.  We are creating the space to say goodbye to someone we love.  We are designing an experience inside of which we can honor the person’s life.

How we feel is part of the equation, and yet, often times when we set out toward a goal, we set aside how we feel as irrelevant.  I’m not suggesting that how we feel should win out at the expense of building what it is we want to build.  I’m simply saying that it’s time we included it as part of the equation.  It’s time to expand our knowledge base to shift from only answering the question, “How do we build __________?” to answering questions like, “How do we built it while feeling good?” or “How do we build it generously?” or “How do we build it while be caring toward others?”  By answering these types of questions, we’ll not only be building the things we want in our lives, we’ll also be “building” ourselves to be the type of human beings that we dream of being, and that’s a creation worth investing in.