Okay, here we are in step one of design thinking is called research and discovery. It's our foundational work or self awareness work, and I've divided it up into three parts. This first part, we're starting with what lifestyle you want to build for your next career. Now, you may find that a little bit odd, I don't think too many places where you're discovering your next career move really goes into what lifestyle you want. But there's a couple of reasons why I think is significant. A couple weeks ago, I did the same format of a course as a workshop in person and there was about a dozen people there.

And when we went to a lifestyle, it was really a little bit surprising to see how many people really latched on to it when they started thinking about building work around the lifestyle that they wanted instead of the other way around. They really start smiling and thinking, Oh, this really makes sense. I could really enjoy This, what lifestyle I want that is really important to me, especially if you've already established yourself and had a career and you're thinking about your next career lifestyle, I think becomes more and more important as you mature in life. The second reason why I think that lifestyle is so significant is because it was a huge direction turn for my own discovery. Now after I left my full time job, as I mentioned before, I burned my boat early and I had a lot to learn. I had a lot to figure out in those first few months.

Now after going through a few trial and error things. I was reflecting on things I realized, you know what, I'm happy. I'm really happy. I'm really enjoying this. I have failed on this. This isn't this but I'm learning like crazy.

And regardless of not really having direction yet. I just Really happy. So from that point, I changed things around. I tried to figure out, Okay, well, how can I continue this lifestyle that I'm enjoying so much? Because I had flexibility, I had autonomy, I had freedom. And I had my own growth.

And I was learning through my own mistakes, and I just really wanted that continuous. So how can I make this continue? That was my new question to figure out and that's what led direction for me. It was my lifestyle that I was trying to figure out how to support. So it's a different way of thinking about things. I think we often think about our lifestyle fitting into our work life.

And I'm a mindset person. mindset to me is about different perspectives. And I think the perspective of thinking about how our work life fits into our lifestyle. can really lead to a lot of happiness that we may not have thought of. Now, here's another concept that you may have not have thought of. It's another perspective on the thought of a work life balance.

This idea is inspired by something I read in a book called The one thing by Gary Keller. Now for some people, the goal of balancing your work life and your your home life is going to work there. You know, two very things some people really like that balance. For most people. It's very monotonous, you know, to always be balanced. Never have, you know, the exciting extremes on either side.

It's boring. So it's not a great goal for most of us. Here's why you want your work in your life to be harmonious, but not necessarily in balance. The reason it seems like such a great concept, just because Most of us end up with so much work all the time that we're neglecting our life. However, if you can get them both going into extremes, so kind of counter balancing each other, then you're going to have some really exciting times in both your work and your life. And you want that right, you want some excitement.

So even though sometimes work, you might have a project that is really intense, like, there's emails all the time, it seems to be taking you away from your life, but you can still kind of hang on here. But this is so much fun. That's a good thing. As long as it's not overdone. You want those extremes, but you don't want them to be constantly taking away from this one. You want them to come around this side as well.

So in your work life, you know, things happen in life. You need the flexibility in your work, so that you're Your life can happen as well. Sometimes maybe your kids are sick and you need to take care of them. Or you've got elderly parents that you have situations where you've got to, you know, focus more on your life. Or maybe there's something exciting in your life like a trip that you want to do or something like that. You want to extremes over here as well socially have them both balanced, boring.

You want those extremes, or at least most people want those extremes. So I want you to ditch the concept of going after work life balance, because I think what you really want, or most people really want is to have those two elements of their life harmonious and working together, but not boring. So I've got some questions for you that are going to help you figure out what kind of lifestyle you are after in the workbook under step one, a. We've got some questions halfway down the page. What do you think about working from home? Would that work for you?

Or do you like the atmosphere of an office where there's lots of people around you? It's more social? How about flexible hours, some people really need flexible hours, we've got a lifestyle where those flexible hours sometimes longer, sometimes it's shorter, they need that give and take, but other people really like the structure of regular hours. Maybe their daughter is on schedule a regular hours with school, so they really need to end at a certain time. How about corporate life? Do you like corporate life?

There's a lot of advantages that come with that. There's a lot of growth opportunity, but things can also be slow. And there's usually some office politics that you have to navigate. Is that working for you? Or maybe you'd prefer to say work at a startup. That means things are really intense.

You're going to try a lot of different positions because they may just not have hired for that position yet. So everybody's just rolling up their sleeves and helping out where they can lots of problem solving and excitement in a startup? Or how about you like that so much, you actually want to have your own business, you've got an entrepreneurial spirit. Or maybe you have that spirit, but you don't want to take the big risks. You'd rather work in a small business that somebody else owns, but still have that personal connection to it. Or what about your work environment?

Perhaps you really like working outdoors instead of an office or you like working in a social environment? How about travel, some people love traveling, exploring new places when they get there in the he's their business to pay for part of a vacation when they can extend a stay. But other people the travel is really interfering with their home life. So what works for you when it comes to travel? And on a smaller scale? What about commute time?

Do you want to work somewhere that's close to home? Maybe you live in the suburbs, and you'd rather have it job that close to you rather than going into the city, or you know how that lifestyle works in there again, should you be moving to the city so that you close to work? Are you okay with a longer commute? Can you make that work? A lot of people get stuck on full time they don't really think beyond full time. But there's lots of opportunities in part time or freelance or contract work.

If you're doing that route, you may even consider shiftwork know what hours are good for you? Are you a nine to fiver or something else better. There's all kinds of other factors as well that may be specific to you. So take some time go through the worksheet. try and figure out what is really important to you and what does not really matter at all and you can be completely flexible with at the bottom of the worksheet we can look at money. Now.

You want a certain financial income to support the lifestyle that you want, you know finances and lifestyle, really go hand in hand. And However, for a lot of people, we trade our time for money. So we work hourly or we work on a salary. So there's ways to work on a more scalable platform, but the majority of people trade their time for money. So if we look at that factor, and consider that if we have a simple life, maybe we can't afford a lot of new clothes and fancy home, but our work is not too stressful and we don't have a lot of responsibility. We don't spend too many hours on it.

Is that a good trade off for you? Or are you thinking about a call it the bling bling life where you've got the fancy house and cars and the yacht and vacations and designer clothes? sure lots of people want that life but the trade off for that is often that you have to have a lot of responsibility which often stress and often it means longer hours. So there are so many factors that lie between these two extremes, that you don't necessarily have to have a lot of stress to have the bling bling life, and you don't necessarily get a lot of your time back if you're living a simple life. But that is often the case. So take a look at those two extremes and see if it were a sliding scale.

Where would you fit? What trade offs Do you want to make? Now because there are so many factors that weigh in on this, like you may have outside investments that support you so that you don't have to have that, you know, high stress job, but you can still afford a lot in life, for example, you may find that it's just too difficult to put something down on paper and commit to it. So if you would rather just reflect on this question, rather than commit to it, just think about the different trade offs that you would make in your next career to have the lifestyle that you want. What would it So take some time between the this video and the next one to consider that reflect on those questions and what lifestyle you want and I will see you in the next video.