3 Tips For Designing Your Landing

The landing is when you start to re-tether yourself to the elements that make up the next chapter in your life. The who, what, where, and whys. These 3 tips will help ensure you are doing so with key learning and self awareness so that you land in a live of conscious alignment.

TIP #1: New outcomes require new information

Take the time to gather new information before locking in any decisions. That is what the liminal is all about. Untethering, exploring, finding the neutral place to discover and design from. If we try to design the next chapter with the same perspective we used to designed the old one, it’s going to look pretty familiar.

So before you design your landing make sure you’ve done the work. Hire a Coach, sign up for one of our programs, or read the books in the resource list to guide you through the reflection work to extract as much learning about who, what, where and why brings out the best in you, then design around that.

TIP #2: Redefine what success looks like to you

Many of us spend our careers chasing some elusive summit of “success”. It often looks like more money, a nicer house or car, bigger title, or “being someone”. The trouble with this measurement is that you’re never done. It’s never enough.

When it comes time to design your landing, you’ll need a new yardstick (or meter stick for those of you sane enough not to use yards), to measure what success means to YOU.

What does a life well lived look like to you? What is the evidence that it’s being lived? Do you measure it in passport stamps? Days surfed? Hours meditated? Dinners had with friends? What does it look like when you’re really LIVING?

Here are a few of my measurements:

Meaningful relationships where I feel celebrated for just being me
Nights slept under the stars
Adventures had
Books read
Days without Crohn’s flares (going on 8 years!)

What’s been your yardstick of success thus far?

What do you want to measure instead?

TIP #3: Prototype your way forward

One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we have to have it all figured out before we can step forward. Design Thinking teaches us that the best way to create is to run lots of experiments to simulate an experience and learn before locking in our decisions.

A client of mine desperately wanted to leave her tech job and travel the world, but couldn’t imagine taking a year off or convincing her husband to move. So instead they agreed to run a prototype.

They would move to Mexico for 2 months to “try on the life” and see how they liked it. He was able to get approval to work remotely (pre-COVID) and she focused on renting out their apartment.

Between the rental income and the huge drop in cost of living, she was able to quit a job she hated without much of a hit. As 2 months turned into 10 as they got to know the place, the people and themselves better, new opportunities presented themselves.

She was able to take the time to reconnect with her passion for elderly care, and has since founded a company helping adults navigate care for their aging parents.

Had she tried to design that landing from her miserable marketing job she would never have gotten there. Instead she just took the first step, started prototyping and designed her life around the learning.

Prototype examples:

Interview someone who’s made the transition you are wanting to make
Spend a weekend/week/month in a place you’re considering moving to
List your home for rent to see what would happen.

Remember that the biggest learning comes from self observation! What do you notice about your energy, your body, your mood when you’re in prototype? What does that tell you?