Life Design Strategy: Using Your Problems To Redesign Your Life

Photo by  Clayton Jones  on  Scopio

In life, your problems and negative experiences do not have to just be something you endure or move past. These troubling circumstances and events can be learning tools for you that can help to design a better life moving forward. The problems in your life can be helpful and informative to help you determine how best to create your future.

Learning from negative experiences improves your future decisions. Setbacks and failures are learning opportunities, and you can apply this to your next attempt or future goals. Problems provide you with the skills and knowledge you did not have previously and improve how you decide to pursue things in the future.

The negative experiences in your life often point to areas in your skills, knowledge, or self-knowledge that need improvement. Even when the circumstances were completely random and beyond your control, you can still learn a lot about yourself, including areas for improvement.

How To Use Problems to Redesign Your Life

Designing your life means choosing between many possible futures, and then making a choice to do the work necessary to accomplish your goals. These choices define who you are and what you will become.

The first step to using your problems to help inform your life’s design is to spend some time logging all your failures and problems. Select a specific period to examine, then write down every problem or failure you experienced during that time. Focus not only on issues for yourself but how your choices created problems for others.

For each of these problems, then, you need to determine the source or type of your difficulties. Is it a minor screw-up that was easily fixable? If so, have you acknowledged this problem and either apologized if needed or otherwise moved on? These types of problems shouldn’t necessarily inform your design process, but they can tell you where you need to focus more attention in your daily life.

Is the problem a result of personal weakness? Are there mistakes that you seem to make again and again? In these cases, you may need to choose to avoid specific situations or options so as not to engage these weaknesses. Remember, avoidance is a choice, too. Not all problems require a solution. Some just need to not be repeated.

Finally, is the problem a growth opportunity? These situations invite you to improve, learn, and grow by paying attention to what went wrong, what you could have done differently, and using that knowledge to make better choices in the future.

Those areas that are growth opportunities are places where design thinking can help. These represent parts of your life where you are unhappy or can grow, and these can be used to design a life that helps you achieve all you want in life.

Become Immune to Failure

When you see your problems and failures as learning opportunities, and when you realize that designing your own life means you can’t fail, you will become immune to worry and anxiety about your problems and fears.

Your problems are what help you develop perseverance or what some call grit. When you see your problems and failures as growth experiences, instead of roadblocks, you build grit and are able to accept that life is a process, not an outcome.

There is no winning or losing when you choose to design your own life because the process means you get to keep designing and changing in pursuit of happiness.

Your problems are just the raw material for your dreams. We all have problems and make mistakes, but learning from these is what makes you a stronger, more confident person who is ready to pursue any dream you choose.