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Just create what you want.  Just create. Just create.  Just create.  It sounds easy, certainly obvious, and yet sometimes it doesn’t seem so easy (or obvious).  If you find yourself stuck a lot in terms of moving forward or even focusing on creating what you want, there’s one simple reason why:  You haven’t articulated your vision clearly enough so that it pulls you forward toward it.  This is important so I’m going to say it again (a bit differently): If you’ve articulated what you want to create and there’s no forward movement, then you haven’t articulated what you want.

Last post, I talked about Old Games and the impact that these games have on our ability to create.  One of the reasons that we continue to play our old games despite the fact that we may understand intellectually that they don’t take us where we want to go is we don’t see another choice.  The things we want to create somehow don’t seem as real to us as our old games.

We’ve all had this experience.  There have been creations in your life that move from mere inklings to “good ideas in theory” to real pursuits.  If you examine some of those creations where at the outset, you didn’t think it was possible or it just didn’t seem real, you’ll see the idea itself shifted over time.  In the mere inkling or even the “good idea in theory” stage, the reasons why not like seemed more real than the possibility of creating what you wanted.  The barriers to what you wanted may have seemed insurmountable, but then time passed, and something shifted.  The barriers didn’t necessarily go away, but something in the way you saw the creation itself crystallized to a point where suddenly the barriers were no longer reasons why not; instead, they were just things to handle.

Some people ask me, “But Bill, aren’t there times when the barriers really are insurmountable no matter how you think of the vision?” and my answer is always “I don’t know.”  What I do know is when they ask me that question, they are deflecting the reality of the situation, which is they are stuck, they see barriers, AND they want what they want.  Too often, the default solution in this situation is to put aside what you want as a mere childish dream instead of doing the work to actually articulate what you want sufficiently so the creative process works.

The practice here then is to resist the urge to dive in and analyze and better understand the barriers to what you want.  Instead, turn your attention to what you want to create and find a way to make it more real to you in the way that you are framing the creation in language.  You must come up with a richer, more authentic, more complete expression of what you want to create.  Somehow, someway, you are leaving something out.

And when you get it, you’ll know it.  Your relationship to the creation and your participation in the creative process will shift.  Suddenly, everything that was stopping you will just be “things to handle” and you’ll be ready to act.

You’ll be … just creating.

One of the premises of my work is that you are either creating what you want OR you’re playing an old game. An old game is basically a game of survival.  Like any game, if you play it long enough, you’re going to develop an expertise in that game. For example, a very common old game is the “I don’t have enough time” game. Each of us, at one time or another, have had an experience of not having enough time. Our plate becomes full. There’s a lot on the calendar and we just feel overwhelmed. For those of you, where lack of time is not a common occurrence, you’re likely not playing an old game.

Someone who has the “I don’t have enough time” game has become a master in this game. They almost never have enough time.  They are always talking about and complaining about their lack of time. If they don’t want to do something, it’s there first reason why not.  If you try to help them with their time issue, they shoot down every suggestion and they might even get upset with you because they feel you just don’t understand how life is for them.  They’ve thought through every reason why their time issue cannot be solved and yet, they are likely trying to solve it; but there’s no solving it.  In fact, if it was possible to literally empty their plate, take away all of their commitments and let them create their life from scratch, they would build a life of “not enough time.”  Why?  Because that’s how they know how to do life.  They are experts in their game.

Basically an old game is so a part of who you are that it doesn’t seem like you’re playing a game.  It’s not something you’re doing or participating in; “It’s just how life is.” Some other examples of old games are the Victim Game, the Bully Game, and the I Want People to Like Me game. There is also the Men (Women) Suck Game, the Relationships are Hard Game and many more. An easy way to find your games is to look at your primary reasons why your life hasn’t worked out the way you thought it should or the reasons you use to justify not changing your life.   You will find the name of the game just by examining the very language you use day in, day out.

Where did these games come from?  The basic versions of your games developed when you were young.  You were going along living your life and you wanted something but, for whatever reason, you failed to get it. You experienced a limit and someone wasn’t there to move you through the limitation in a healthy way. Instead you were left to experience the pain of the limitation likely along with some useless platitude like “This too shall pass” or “If it doesn’t kill you, it will only make you stronger” (which only served to reinforce the feeling of helplessness).  Some of these limitations you did eventually move through, but others, for some reason, you didn’t.  They only became more solidified over time, and ended up becoming part of your worldview.

People often want to get rid of these old games, which is completely understandable. The problem is that old games are a part of you. Trying to get rid of an old game is pointless. You’ve developed an expertise in your old game.  If you developed mastery in cooking or playing the piano, you’re not just going to get rid of that expertise.  Sure, if you stop playing, you might get a bit rusty, but your mastery has become part of you.   For someone who plays the Victim Game, they have elevated being a victim to an art form. In fact, they probably have a great deal of vision and creativity around this game; always coming up with more and more inventive ways to play the victim.

More importantly, it’s not necessary to get rid of your old game.  If you wanted to do something else other than cook or play the piano, you wouldn’t have to get rid of your expertise in those areas; instead, you’d just have to develop expertise in your new area of interest.  My blog has been about helping you to develop expertise in the game of creating what you want.

One of the things to begin to understand about an old game is that it seems like winning at or overcoming your old game is on the pathway to creating what you want.  “If I could just be more effective at managing my time, then I could really create what I want,” says the “I Don’t Have Enough Time” player.  Creating what we want has become synonymous with fixing our flaws or overcoming our limitations, or old games.  The problem with that strategy is the more you attempt to fix the old game, the more you are playing it, and are engaging in the dynamics of it and the only thing you’re really accomplishing is becoming more sophisticated at playing the old game.

Creating what you want is a whole other animal.  It’s not about getting rid of something; instead it’s about bringing something new into being.  Creating doesn’t start with your current circumstances.  It doesn’t start with your old games.  Your circumstances, your old games are just things you’ve already created.  Creating begins with asking the question, “What results do you want to create in your life?”

Sounds easy, right?  In the next post, we’ll explore more deeply why this seems easier said than done.  It’s actually not because creating is inherently difficult.  As we’ll see, it’s more because we don’t understand the life cycle of a creation.

Did you know the number zero “0″ was invented?  And at first, it wasn’t even used as a number, simply a placeholder.  The seventh-century Indian mathematician Brahmagupta was the first to use zero as a number and create rules for its use.  Rules for its use? Today, the number zero, like all numbers, is part of our everyday lives.  Take a moment and think about life without zero.  Imagine how you’d talk about nothingness without the number zero.  Hard to imagine isn’t it?

Zero was invented.  And so was the word “I” and along with “I” came self-analysis and reflection.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with self-analysis and reflection.  Such things can be beneficial.  My intention, as is typical, is to create some space in your thinking so that something new can show up.  So yes, like I did with zero, I’d like you to imagine life without “I”.  I’d like you to imagine life without anyway to talk about or think about yourself and your inner world.  Imagine if, for one day, you could not use the word “I” in your thoughts or in your speaking.

Why would one do something like this?  Creating something is just that it’s creating some thing. It’s about building something in the world.  Inherently, it’s not about you.  One of my missions in life is to put an end to the link between our ability to create and our identity (”I”).  Yes, I understand you are the one that will take action toward your vision.  I understand that you are part of the creation process.  But as a creation, the thing you are creating is not you.  You know that your house isn’t you and your car isn’t you.  Yet, when we go to create what we want inevitably we make it about ourselves.

So what does making our creations about “I” look like?  Simple.  ”I’m going to create an amazing relationship but I’m not sure if I can because I’ve had 5 bad relationships that always seem to end up the same way.”  ”I’m going to double my income next year, but I’m not sure if I’m good enough or if I deserve it.”  You see how identity shows up in our creations.

Culturally, we’ve come to believe that our identity issues are our creating issues and our creating issues are our identity issues.  Don’t believe me?  Start listening to the conversations of the people around you AND your own.  What you’ll hear is the same message over and over again said in different ways and that message is, “In order to create what I want, I must first handle some issue about myself.  Something is wrong with me that must be fixed before I can create what I want.”  Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to work on some aspect of one’s character, attitude or psychology.  I’m simply suggesting that doing those things don’t have anything to do with creating what you want in life.

Just because you hold a strong association between what you believe about yourself AND your ability to create what you want in life doesn’t mean that association is valid.  I’m not saying that if you have that association that it won’t have an impact.  That’s the point.  It absolutely will have an impact on your ability to create.  I’m simply asking you to consider that the link we’ve historically made between our identities and our ability to create isn’t a foregone conclusion.

What if creating what you want doesn’t have anything to do with your identity issues (i.e. my beliefs about myself, who I am and what’s possible for me in life)?  What if creating is simply a mechanism?  It’s not magic and it’s not a secret anymore than it’s related to your identity issues.  It’s just a mechanism.

Right now, there are many things that you create without any reference to your identity.  Remember creation is simply taking an idea from idea through action until it results in physical structure.  Baking a cake, getting a glass of water, and planting a garden are all acts of creation.  For most of us, baking a cake doesn’t require analyzing your relationship with your parents.  It wouldn’t require working on some character defect.  Nasty, rotten people can bake a cake just as easily as wonderful, generous people.  Each can do so because a cake results from the mechanism of creation.

I’m not suggesting that baking a cake is the same thing as creating a great relationship with your spouse or building a company or … oh, no wait … that’s exactly what I’m saying.  Or to be more precise, they all utilize the same basic mechanism of creation.  The content and complexity of each creation may be different but the mechanism of design is the same.  How each moves from idea to outcome is a result of the same basic mechanism.

Want to add power to your ability to create?  Get the “I” Out of Design.

Last time, I talked about creating a vision and how that was the critical first step to creating what you want.  A vision is crafted in language (and I’m using the term “language” here loosely to include pictures as well as words).  No surprise here right?  A vision of the house you want to build isn’t the actual house that will exist in physical reality.  One is a construct of language and the other is a construct of materials - wood, cement, glass, etc.

The nature of language is that it’s malleable.  Physical structure is set.  Once the house is built, it’s built!  But while it remains a vision in your mind, you can in an instant change the color of your siding from yellow to blue to white to pink.  When you’ve actually put the yellow siding on your house, sure you can change it, but it requires that you start the creative process all over again.  It requires that you rip the yellow siding off and slap that pink siding on.

I realize that none of this is rocket science, but I’d like you to begin to consider that in many instances, you relate to your thoughts as if they are as static, set and physical as the things that exist out here in physical reality.  If you did the work I assigned you in the last post and created a vision, go back to it.  Think about it.  See if you can distinguish any thinking that you’ve made part of your vision that you really don’t want to be part of your vision.  It could be something that found it’s way into your vision without your full awareness or it could be something that you placed in your vision because you thought it was necessary.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the association game.  It’s that game where someone says a word and then asks you to say the first thing that pops into your mind.  Psychologists use this technique to analyze the types of associations that you make as a means to discovering something about who you are.  In the realm of design, we are not so much interested in analyzing the types of associations you make as we are becoming aware that you make associations.  The brain is designed to make order out of chaos.  It’s designed to put things into compartments and to automatically fill in any holes in thinking.  While this is a very useful process, it’s also useful to be aware that the process is taking place and to recognize that making associations is sort of the “auto-pilot” setting for the brain.  The brain is really good at making associations, but it’s not so good at questioning or even seeing the associations it’s made.

Very often we are not aware that we’ve made an association, because the thoughts either arise so quickly OR the thinking that arises doesn’t occur like something we should even question.  The point here is that when you have a vision of something you want, your brain is wired to make associations about it, and whatever associations the brain makes becomes part of your vision of the future.  It becomes part of the thinking that like any thinking starts the creative process.  For example, imagine your vision is to build a new home.  When you think “new home” your mind will start to make associations. You might imagine a white house, 5 bedrooms, out in the country, 5 acres of land, etc.  You mind might also start to think things like, “A house like that is going to cost $250,000 easy.  It’s going to require a 10% down payment, which I don’t have.  I could take on an extra job or maybe two to raise the money, but then when would I spend time with the kids.  I’d never have time to be with them.  But I want to be a good parent and give them a nice home.  This is going to be hard.”

Sounds reasonable, right?

It is reasonable, valid even, but that thinking has just made it into the vision of the future.  It’s defines the parameters of our vision of the future in the same way that choosing the color of the siding does.  Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, there are constraints when you create.  Buying a home does typically require a down payment.  I’m not suggesting that if you give up this thinking that the money is magically going to reveal itself.  It’s more about being aware of the associations we make and the impact that our thinking has on us.  We often talk ourselves out of the things we wish to create with our own thinking.  We often forget that the first stage of creation is happening in thought and that the nature of thought is it’s malleable.  While you’re forming your vision in thought, just like you can change the color of your siding in an instant, you can remove and change ANY THINKING including the thinking about how you are going to bring your creation into existence.

Let me say that again.

While you are forming your vision in thought, just like you can change the color of your siding in an instant, you can remove and change ANY THINKING including how you are going to bring your creation into existence.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the thinking above of how to raise the money for a down payment on a house; that is unless that thinking actually stops one from moving forward on their vision of the future.  Understanding the nature of language isn’t about making any particular thinking wrong, it’s simply about being aware that you - the thinker -are defining the parameters of the problem, and therefore, you are defining the entire picture of the vision of the future.

So take some time and re-examine your vision of the future.  Make sure you include not just the object of your desire but the entire pathway from today to that tomorrow when the object of your creation will exist in physical reality.  Note where you have any feelings of resistance or conflict that arise as a result of your thinking.  Let it be okay to let that thinking be there, but also commit to coming back to resolve the feeling of conflict.

Just remember if you aren’t moving forward in action on your vision, it’s simply because you haven’t resolved some conflict in your thinking.  It’s no different that choosing the color siding for your house.  Until you can decide between the yellow or the blue, the construction of the house will be stalled.

Have you ever noticed that the first step to building a house is to visualize what you want?  In some way, shape or form, you need to get some picture of the house you want to live in.  It’s always the first step to building a house.  It’s not the only step.  It’s not the last step.  It’s the first step.  A rough vision leads to a more detailed plan leads to blueprints leads to a whole host of other things that need to happen in reality.  I know this is obvious, but now think about how most of us react when asked to create a vision for our lives, to fantasize even about the type of life we want to lead and the type of world we want to live in.  When it comes to our lives, our deepest desires, our visions for what we want our lives to be are shrugged off as mere fantasy.  “C’mon, I don’t have time for dreaming.  You need to get yourself into reality, Giruzzi.”

Good idea.

So, in reality, the first thing you must do if you are to build anything in the future is craft a vision of it.  Again, it’s not the only step, but when it comes to our lives and the type of world we want to live in, creating a vision is looked at as some frivolous, almost irrelevant activity.  “There’s too many serious problems in the world to spend our time dreaming.”  Following that logic, if one wanted a new house, the excuse would be that we are too busy fixing up the old house to think about the new one.

With a house, a car, a chair; with things, we can distinguish the difference between fixing the old versus building or buying a new one.  It’s not that envisioning the new car you want to buy is some magical trick that you use, but it’s also not that envisioning the new car is some totally fantastic act showing you’ve had a complete break with reality.  I’m not suggesting the level of complexity of a life or the world is the same as a house or car.  I’m distinguishing the underlying mechanism that is at play whether we are talking about a house, a car OR a life and the world.

It’s natural to be cynical in a world where part of the predominant world view is that “Talk is cheap.”  It’s challenging to think about crafting a vision when the next step after the vision seems so monumental.  So yes, there are a few more things to understand so that our vision has real power to it.  It really is possible to create a vision so that action flows naturally from it; rather than being confronted by what’s next.  We’ll explore what these things are in upcoming posts.

For now, I challenge you to take some time, sit down with pen and paper, and think about what you really, really want either for your life, some aspect of your life, or for the world.  Heck, how about a vision for your life AND the world.  Your job is to write something that leaves you inspired to act.  Yes … inspired!!!  If you can get excited and inspired about a new car, a new tv, or a new house, it really is okay to get excited about your life and the world.

Yes, yes, yes … the conversation is growing.  And yes, I’ve been delinquent at keeping my blog up to date, but the conversation is growing.  I’ve gotten a lot of questions lately regarding what’s up with the blog.  To be honest, I just needed to step away from it for awhile to let things gel a bit … to let the conversation grow.  I’ve been doing a lot of thought work over the last year or so and am committing to write at least 12 blogs in 2011 - one per month.

My question for you is “How has the conversation been growing for you?”  What new insights, new visions of hope, new ideas for a creating a way of life where good things happen naturally for people have you had in the last year?  How have you grown?

Would love to hear from you!

Do you compromise your ideals and standards?  If you live in our culture chances are you do.  Now this might seem like a harsh judgment, but it’s really not intended to be.  Most of us have learned that compromise is good and sometimes life just won’t meet our expectations.  One of my commitments in life is to put an end to that way of thinking.  Yes, I am committed to the end of compromise.  Be clear I’m not saying an end to collaboration.  I’m not suggesting an end to people helping one another.  I’m declaring an end to the compromise of our ideals and standards.

In my experience, people compromise for one fundamental reason – they’ve bought into the current reality.  They’ve forgotten that they have the power to create something else.  From a design perspective, the only purpose of current reality is to be used as a reference point for what you want.  As a reference point, the “job” of current reality to reveal what you don’t have that you want.  It’s also, of course, is going to be screaming really loudly that you cannot have it.  Why?  Because if the current reality supported you having what you wanted now, you’d either have it OR you’d believe that you could have it, and so not having it in this moment, wouldn’t occur as a problem to you.  It would just be something for you to handle.  Certainly, you wouldn’t feel the temptation to compromise your ideals and standards.

Wherever you are sitting right now, imagine some simple you’d like to have.  Imagine you want a glass of your favor wine or imagine you’d like a piece of chocolate cake.  Chances are you don’t have some melodramatic story for why you can’t have that simple thing.  Notice how clear you’re thinking is – there’s the current reality (no wine, no cake) and there’s the future, the reality you want to create (wine, cake).  If you held those two simple visions in your mind, the relationship of where you are to where you want to be, you would very naturally take action toward what you want to create.  You’d get up and uncork a bottle of wine, or go to the store and buy one.  You’d heat up the oven to bake that chocolate cake.

“C’mon Bill, life isn’t just about wine and cake.  It’s much more complex than that.”  The problem isn’t that your other goals are more difficult and complex that leads you to compromise, your fundamental problem is you don’t think of your other goals in this very simple way. We make it more complex and act like the fact that we think life is more complex means that life is, in fact, more complex.  Robert Fritz, author of The Path of Least Resistance, calls this force – the force that exists between where you are and where you want to be – structural tension.  Structural tension is healthy and when you clearly identify where you are relative to where you want to be, your mind starts to resolve the tension naturally by moving you forward toward your goal.  That is provided you don’t put anything in-between to muck up the works.

I’m not suggesting that because you want something guarantees you’ll get it.  The point is that whether you get it or not, the fact remains that you want it.  And so the reality is that either you’re moving toward it by creating or you’re living a life of compromise.

Maybe just maybe, the real juice of life comes from how you live it instead of whether you always win.  Notice I said whether you always win.  Getting what you want is a part of the creative process and so it’s both whether you win or lose and how you play the game that matters.

Have you ever noticed that there is always a tremendous amount of evidence for why things must stay the same and very little evidence for why they can change?  We throw phrases around like “In reality,” as if those words have somehow endowed us with the power to speak the ultimate truth.  What often goes unnoticed is that the only reason we can cast dispersions on the current reality is because we also have a concept about how life should look.  Without the picture of what you want, there would be nothing to compare the current reality to.

Having this picture of what we want is extremely powerful, but often we use it to make the current reality wrong.  “It shouldn’t be this way.”  “You shouldn’t be like this.”  We beat ourselves and others up for not living up to our pictures rather than using our pictures to create our future.  What if you started interacting with others from your vision of who you want them to be.  Doing this will likely not make them change overnight, but  stop and think about what it’s like to be around someone who only sees the best in you.  Doesn’t it feel great?   Doesn’t it make you want to grow, become more, become better?  There’s something truly magical about being seen this way.

What is that magic?  It’s space.  It’s space to be who we are now and more importantly, it’s the space to grow and become more.  You’re always going to have two pictures – the picture of how life is is AND the picture of how you want life to be.  Transformation begins when you stop using your picture of how you think things should be to make the current reality wrong, and start using that picture to create life how you want it to be.  Just because there’s little evidence to support your future doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

That’s the mindset of a designer - being able to see past how things are to create what’s next.  This possibility, this magic is available to us at every moment in every situation.  Some might think that this point of view is naïve; that we can’t just deny the possibility that sometimes bad things happen.  A designer of life doesn’t deny anything.  A designer knows that bad things might happen.  A designer knows there are risks to creating.  A designer knows that failure is a possibility.  But what a designer of life also knows is that picture of what he or she wants isn’t going anywhere.  It’s here to stay.  It’s part of who they are.  It deserves to be honored and used in a way that will actually make a difference for people.  Either that picture will be used to crucify the current reality or it will be used as the source for making life better.

How are you going to use your picture of the future?

Last week, I wrote a post about the idea that life is not personal.  This week I want to delve more deeply into this idea and give you more power as a designer in your life.  So here’s the next piece of the puzzle: You are not the things you design.  I know on some level, this seems obvious.  I’d like you to consider that each of us personalizes some of the things that we have created and are creating in our lives.

Imagine a young man or woman who is looking to find love in their life.  They want to find a lover, a soul mate, a mate, etc.  This person might start to think something like, “How do I find someone?”  “How do I find someone who’ll like me?”  “I guess I’ll have to start asking people out?  I hate that.  It’s makes me feel so uncomfortable.”  “It’s so hard to meet people.  I go to work; I come home.  Where am I going to find this person?”  This individual has made finding that special someone all about them.  More importantly, they’ve made the “game” of finding a mate contingent on their limitations and worldview.  Predictably, this person will formulate strategies for finding someone that are not based on what works; instead they’ll be based on what the person does or doesn’t like to do, how comfortable they feel taking the actions, etc.

If we approach the “game” of finding a mate from the perspective of true design, we’d begin with questions like, “How does one find a mate?” or better yet, “What’s the nature of the game?”  The nature of finding someone essentially involves product development, communication, marketing and sales.  Now when I say product development, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be true to who they are.  This is not about being phony.  At the same time, the “game” of finding someone is to make yourself as attractive to the world as you possibly can.   So rather than judging and evaluating yourself, “I’ll never find someone to love me,” one could begin to seek out feedback from others on their personality and their physical presentation.  Again, this isn’t to make you into someone that you’re not, but these are legitimate non-personal questions that are relevant to the game of romance.  Imagine if Derek Jeter wasn’t open to feedback about his swing?  Or if Robert DeNiro wasn’t open to input from his director on how to deliver a line?  When you take on the mastery of something and can see it as separate and distinct from you, you naturally want to know all the different facets that would make you excellent, and you become open to feedback.

When you can see that finding a mate involves on some level marketing yourself, you can begin to think about how that can be done?  Who can you enlist to help you?  If you find that you’re awkward in conversation, you can create a training plan around this so you can develop yourself over time.  You may never have the true gift of gab, but finding someone doesn’t mean that you master all the elements of the game; it just means that you maintain a certain level of conscious proficiency about them.

The point here is whether we’re talking about love or golf or building a business or being a manager or any aspect of your life, the thing you are creating has it’s own nature and requirements.  Yes, there are a countless number of ways to build a business or find a mate.  Yes, there is much room for an individual to be innovative and creative in the pursuit of what they are designing.  In fact, you will be amazed at how free and creative your mind becomes when you stop resisting the nature of the things you want to create.  That’s what all the ruckus is about.  Your mind just wants to know that you are taking care of it, and doing the things required to move your life forward.  When you don’t honor that, your mind goes berserk and it can start to berate you, berate others, become very loud and unsettled.  As annoying as it can be, your mind knows when there are holes in your plan.  When you can let it know that you’ve thought it all through and are covering all the bases, it will let you be.  Even if you consciously decide to not take on an aspect of the “game,” it will know that you’ve made that decision and still have a plan to take care of it.

Designing your life doesn’t guarantee success.  It doesn’t mean that you will always win.  It does though put you in the driver seat.  The most important thing to remember is that it’s not you that you are designing; it’s your life.  You don’t confuse baking chocolate chips cookies for you.  You don’t mistake growing a garden for you. You don’t mistake building a house for you.  If you don’t personally know how to build a house, you don’t come up with some warped strategy of building a house that is limited by your knowledge and skill.  You go find someone who does know.  Your focus is on the outcome itself, not whether you can personally do it.  It’s not personal.

“C’mon Bill, building a house is not the same thing as finding true love.”

I know but … imagine if it was.

When you live as a designer of life, a funny thing happens.  Life suddenly is not personal.  What I mean is you’ve been living your life … well … your entire life.  It’s yours.  It’s personal or at least, it certainly seems personal.  People do things to you.  Bad things happen.  Good things happen. You win some.  You lose some.  And through it all, there’s a lot of emotion.  You’ve made decisions about yourself and who you are.

So how can I even remotely suggest that life is not personal?  Well, first of all, when I say life’s not personal, I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t experience emotion.  I’m not suggesting that you won’t show your love (or anger) for people.  This is not about you living some stoic life experience devoid of the wide range of human emotions and experiences.

Instead, when I say that life is not personal, I’m pointing to all the drama and meaning that we add to life.  I’d like you for a moment to imagine life minus all the narration that is added to it by your inner voice.  You can even try an experiment.  For one day, try walking around turning the mute button on and off for your inner voice.  Really imagine you actually had a remote control that controlled your inner voice, and you could turn it off and on at will.  From time to time see if you can mute your inner dialogue about what’s happening out here.  I’m not saying think differently about it, or think positively about it.  Mute it!  All the concern, drama and story that you add to life gone.  “She’s so insensitive.”  “I’m never going to be able to pay these bills on time.”  “Where are we going to get the money to pay for Josh’s braces?” “I’m so happy they are coming for dinner on Sunday.”  “Why the hell is he so negative.”  “When am I ever going to find more time?”  Imagine all of this added commentary has vanished from your life.

And now imagine, if you weren’t spending the vast amount of your time stirring things up with the little drama in your head, what would you be spending your time doing?  Think about it.  If all the extra added reporting simply didn’t exist for you anymore, or at the very least, you could mute it, what would be left to think about?

Do you see it?

Yes!  What would be left is designing your life.  Instead of spending your time commenting on the life you have, you’d spend your time creating the life you want.  You’d spend your time like a designer asking questions like, “How do I design my relationship so it works?”  “How do I create my job so it’s rewarding for me?”  “How do I build a life that really fulfills me?”  A conversation for design is a conversation to build something.  It’s not about commentary, narration, opinion, or judgement.  Certainly, you can have an opinion about what you’re designing, but that is not a design conversation.  From the perspective of design, life is not personal.  You build things.  You create things.  You design your life.

This is not something new for you.  You’ve been designing pretty much your entire life.  Your life right now is a result of design.  The only thing that slows down the process is the vast amount of time spent on the commentary of what you’ve designed.  The time spent arguing for or against something.  The time spent wishing that what you designed wasn’t so.  The time spent pining for another life.  All of those things live in the realm of commentary and they make life seem very personal like “What’s wrong with me that I keep ending up with this result?”  We make the results we produce in life personal rather than just getting they are function of the conversation we are engaged in.

So you still might cringe at the suggestion that life is not personal.  Just remember, until you croak, you have no choice about whether you design your life.  Even if you say, “The hell with it, I’m not designing my life,” that’s an act of design.  You cannot escape it.  Perhaps arguably you cannot stop your mind from vomiting commentary and opinion about your life.  The one thing you do have choice about is where you put your focus.  Which conversation is going to win in your life?  Will it be design?  Or will it be commentary?

So if you still cringe, just remember, the concept, “Life is not personal,” is not true.

I designed it.