Whose life is it?

My people haven’t designed a life for themselves. Their dreams and ambitions set by their parent, teachers, society society.

You spent your whole lives doing what you had to do, what you were supposed to do — but rarely, if ever, what you wanted to do. You spent your life being responsible to and for everyone else. And that focus, that commitment to be who and what others needed and expected, has paid off handsomely. It's led to great success.

But for who?

And now you're at a stage in your life — perhaps nearing a certain age, retirement, or facing the next promotion — and you are wondering: Is this it?

Where are you in your life?
Where is the joy?
Where and when do you get to do what you want?
When do you stop living and working for everyone else and start living for yourself?

The questions tug at you in the rare quiet moments, and because they seem so big, so abstract, you push them away.

How could I not want this? I have so much. I've spent my life working and sacrificing to be where I am and have what I have. How could this not be it?

The problem isn't where you are or even how you got here. The problem is that you are being faced with a moment — a fork in the road, an opportunity to choose yourself, to define what a well-lived life looks, feels, sounds like to you. Not based on someone else's definition of success, but your own.

You have the chance of a lifetime to create the life you want and live it.

And instead of embracing that moment, you are delaying it. And what that means is that you are shortening the amount of time you get to live that life.

We've gotten so comfortable delaying what we want for ourselves that we rarely think about what it's costing us.

We assume that we will always have time, that there will be a later, and that we'll have the physical capacity and energy to experience the life we want. And the older we get, the more dangerous an assumption that is.

The time to live is now. The time to decide and define what we want from this one precious life of ours is now.

That's why life by design is a key part of Beyond Success — it's where you have the time, space, and guidance to design a life that makes you shimmy, that makes your toes curl, that excites you.

For some, that means retiring from their current career and doing something else entirely. For others, it might mean doing exactly what they're doing right now, but differently — toward the goal of fulfillment and purpose, rather than proving something to somebody else.

When we get this right, we create space in our lives for the things that matter to us: joy, connection, relationships, experiences, living, enjoying the lives we've built. We can stop living by default and start living intentionally–by design.

But the problem is: we can’t create something new under the constraints of our current reality.

Over time, our identity — who we are, what we think, how we make decisions — becomes tied to who we've had to be. Tied to being the achiever, the rescuer, the cycle breaker, the responsible one.

That’s become our default setting–the setting that's enabled us to rise through the ranks, to make us the exception, to tolerate certain challenges in the name of success. We have default beliefs that keep us on this same track, doing what we've always done, and in essence, getting the same results.

And if we are going to change, if we are going to evolve, we have to do one thing.

We have to disrupt our default.

So what exactly does that mean?

Disrupting your default begins with embracing where you are — embracing this moment and recognizing it for what it is: a turning point, an end and a beginning, an opportunity to grow and evolve.

Then we examine our beliefs, habits, values, behaviors–who we’ve had to be. We conduct an audit of sorts, asking ourselves: What do I believe? How has this belief served me in the past? Where did it come from? How might it be limiting me? Given who I am now, what might be a better belief?

Then there's the excavating — and there's a difference between examining and excavating. Examining is looking things over. Excavating is digging down deep and pulling up the things that no longer work.

After that excavation, you get to explore — new options, new ways of being, new beliefs, new habits. And exploration is not about finding the thing. It is about dabbling, sampling, trying things on to find what fits you.

And once you find what fits, you walk in it. You embody it. You practice living in it until it becomes you.

That is what this work is about. That is how you begin to live into a life by design.

This is part of the work we do in Beyond Success — whether I am working with you one-to-one, in a small cohort, or in a more private partnership. The work is the same.

So if you are ready to stop living on autopilot, to stop doing what you've always done and getting the same results — those very same results that have you sitting awake at night after you've given your all to everybody else, wondering, when is it going to be my turn? — you have to do something different.

And it starts with deciding that you are not going to live your life by default anymore. That you are going to be intentional and decisive — not to shatter some arbitrary glass ceiling, not to meet somebody else's expectations, but so that you get to live.

Your life. By design.

It’s time.