designing your own life

I had a lovely Sunday when I inadvertently went on a bookshop-and-coffee-shop crawl in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Whilst traversing, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Happiness Lab by Dr. Laurie Santos. The podcast explores how we think about happiness through scientific research, often with expert guests. I listened to two episodes – “How to Design a Meaningful Life” and “Stop Wasting Your Energy” – both centered around the themes of radical acceptance and shifting intentionality. In “How to Design a Meaningful Life,” we are introduced to Stanford’s Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, developers of Life Design, which applies design thinking principles – empathy, prototyping, and iteration – to build a joyful, meaningful life and career by tackling key questions and major life decisions. In “Stop Wasting Your Energy,” we’re introduced to Dr. Diana Hill, who shares meaningful tactics for better using our energy by focusing on what gives us more life. In my mind, I hodgepodge these two episodes into one and came away with a few thoughts that have been guiding my life lately.

Radical Acceptance:

I'll admit I'm familiar with the term from my clinical work, but I don't know if I actually knew how I defined it. The formal definition is along the lines of accepting what you cannot control. Rooted in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a therapy model that focuses on emotion regulation and aligning with changed behavior, it emphasizes that radical acceptance means accepting situations without judgment, which can lead to less suffering.

What I often miss from these definitions is the key outcome from radical acceptance: flexibility. Burnett and Evans focused on the concept of flexibility and how that enables us to look at what's in front of and around us. Flexible means accepting our realities and choosing to “rewire.” The idea is that we’re not married to rigid ways of thinking, but are adaptable to change. They suggest that we often look at finality, assuming this is the "best" or "last" thing, when we could instead savor the moment or feeling and know there's more to come.

What stood out to me was the reframing of being present, and more so, leaning into what's existing to get more. It was an interesting reframing to look at acceptance as: "These are things that are out of my control, I don't have to like them, but what can I lean into to make this a better experience for me?" And then they share this mind-blowing concept of also just changing the thought by doing something else.

Probably obvious to some, but it was really eye-opening for me to remember I can change my mind or do something else to shift my mindset. There are times when I ruminate on things that were said that I didn’t agree with, or when I let intrusive thoughts take over. It happens much more often than I actively acknowledge, and I can see how that tends to shape my mood for the rest of the day. It’s in those moments that if I allow myself to choose to change my mindset, I probably can. I can just do something else to change how I’m thinking in the moment. Again, it’s less about actively avoiding the feeling and/or thought, but it's about acknowledging that it exists, and I don’t want to spend more energy thinking about it. Bringing awareness to that thought and then actively pursuing an action can help alleviate the desire to ruminate, but it also serves as a forcing function that prompts you to think about something else.

It also adds meaning to “don’t boil the ocean.”

Values:

In “Stop Wasting Your Energy,” Hill posits that when we’re stuck, it’s because we’re in misalignment with our values. Values often sound like “accountability” or “integrity.” But, for Hill, values are qualities of action.

Hill asks herself the question: What makes life life-y? In other words, what are the things in life that make life more worth it? Hill posits that by asking this question, we get closer to understanding how we define our own values and the intrinsic motivations behind them.

Even doing just a scan of your day and examining what stands out to you as “life-y,” you’ll notice that you likely don’t spend a lot of energy there – it’s life in the in-between moments of life.

For me, it’s often walking my dog, Romeo, in the morning. It’s early, and it’s just us. I get my best ideas or my deepest introspection in those moments. Or it’s when I can figure out a solution to a People problem and keep everyone happy. Or when I dig into a meaty insight with a client. All of this tells me how I might want to spend my energy. It also tells me that I hired the right person to support me since they get energy from doing the things that I’m not good at/don’t want to spend my energy on.

At the very least, it makes whatever I’m doing for the majority of the day a little more enjoyable. How? Well, knowing that my peaceful walks with my dog motivate me to work so we can afford our dilly-dallying, and that I’m on the right path for what I enjoy doing: connecting. It might seem like a stretch, but when you think about it, the things we may not love spending all our energy on can provide the means to do the things we actually want to spend energy on, so it’s up to us to figure out what we can center/decenter and trade off. But, again, it takes awareness of self/needs/motivations to do this.

This was a nice layer to my own definition of values, and I appreciated the perspective. It’s also been a great question for my clients, as they’ve been swirling through general life transitions, and it’s been a good exercise in grounding.

So, to recap:

Dilly-dallying is a core value of mine
Radical acceptance is less about avoiding and more about being aware of what’s happening and leaning into what’s happening in front of you
What makes life more life-y to you?