Design Your Life, Not Just Your Kitchen

What do you mean by a designed life? Life just kind of happens, doesn’t it?

Not according to author and former IKEA executive Pernille Spiers-Lopez. The fact is, most people feel like life happens to them – like life is a ride they are on and whatever comes is whatever comes, but the truth is you can choose to be responsible for your life. And that is the big difference. Choice. We don’t think we have a choice, and while we don’t have a choice in everything that happens to us, we most definitely have a choice about how you respond to it.

Pernille said that there are actually three choices: You accept it, you change it, or you leave.

There are so many people, especially women, who don’t see the choice, all we see is that you have to accept it. If that is where you are coming from you aren’t being true to your core values. If all you do is accept what comes to you, you become passive aggressive and blame everyone else for what is happening in your life that you don’t like. 

Instead of just taking things on, what if we had a conversation about how to change something that it works for everyone involved, or what if you just said no? Now that would be designing your life.  

Discovering your core values, and knowing what really does align with those in your life is another tool that will help set you free. You find those values, and all of a sudden you know what you bring to the table. They are like your tools in your tool belt, and you can use them to help design.

The other thing that Pernille said that struck me was that if you spent as much time and effort on working on yourself as you do working on remodeling your kitchen or remodeling another room in your house, you would be able to design and live a life that fulfilled you and made you ecstatically happy. And it’s so true! I’ve spent hours looking around online for a new coffee table, just a coffee table! And when Pernille is mentioning all of these short exercises, or for that matter when any of the people that I’ve interviewed have given me easy tools to use to enhance my life, I forget about them, or think I don’t have time for them.

So it is time to take time for me. It is time to design my life, and let me tell you, it is going to be glorious!