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‘What surprises me most is “Man”, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present; The result being he doesn’t live in the present or the future; He lives as if he’s never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.’

There is something powerfully reflective about getting roughly halfway through life and wondering to yourself, Is this as good as it gets? Am I really living the life I want from a career and family perspective? A remarkably high number of people have these thoughts – you’ve probably had them yourself. But then life gets busy again, and we park them. But those thoughts often pop back into our heads at regular intervals, and they never really go away.

You may think what I am referring to is a ‘mid-life crisis’. Others may call it that, but I don’t see it that way. I consider it more of a ‘mid-life reflection’. This is the process of wondering more often and more deeply about whether you are making the most of your life. These thoughts are most commonly about career and family life, but you may also wonder if you are doing the best you can for the people you care about, such as your children, aging parents and close friends. For many people this pondering or reflection is often triggered by challenges you or your friends and family are going through, or by hearing about or seeing others go through difficulties. Although these situations may spark thoughts about what you are all about and how to make the best of life, most people let these thoughts come and go. Most people never address, once and for all, what these ‘life’ questions actually mean for them. The questions are often asked but rarely answered.

I felt the same way about life, until one day I received a big jolt to my thinking. I was sitting in the audience at a talk and one of the panellists in a discussion on work–life balance said, ‘I don’t believe in work–life balance and that it exists; I believe in living your best life. Living your best life is really working out what you want out of life, not what you think you should want or others say you should do but what you want. Once you work that out you will be so much happier with your life.’

The concept of Best Life Design and discovering what that looks like for you and developing practical tools to get you there have been my personal focus for nearly a decade since that jolt I received listening to that panel. My journey and discoveries about how you design and live your best life had plenty of twists and turns: some things worked and some didn’t. But I have now reached the point where I feel I can share my discoveries with others, which is why I wrote Think. Plan. Live. I want to help you and others navigate Life Design and provide all the practical tools needed to do this.

Think. Plan. Live. is a workbook designed to take you on a practical and pragmatic journey, complete with tried and tested strategic frameworks, tools and practical advice that will stimulate your own thinking so that you can confidently design a best life plan for yourself as unique to you as your fingerprint.

The chapters are laid out in a 6-step approach to define your Who, What, With, Why, Where and When, giving you all the stimulus, encouragement and practical tools you need to rediscover your strengths, values and passions, and to help you steer yourself back on track or to find a new path. After completing these steps, the book explores in more detail how you can integrate your learnings into your life, career and leadership style.

The methods and approaches are tried and tested by me over many years, as the culmination of my own history to date; in fact, I left a busy executive job to write this book! After a three-decade career in the corporate world it increasingly dawned on me that people are not as happy as they could be, driven largely by the fact that they feel stressed and overworked, and are juggling building a successful and rewarding career with devoting time to a great family and personal life. I experienced first-hand that unfortunately work pressures often take over and family balance goes out the window.

The opportunity became clear: owning the design of our best life would really help. Initially I started with myself, but I then came to realise my practical thinking and planning tools and approach worked for my colleagues, teams and friends too. Through coaching and mentoring hundreds of people, my thinking and my tools have evolved into what you see here.

Do you fundamentally believe that you shouldn’t feel as though you have to choose between your career and your family, and that even though you don’t know how, it should be possible to build a more purposeful life plan that enables you to achieve success in both aspects of life? If that’s the case, that’s all you need to get started. A natural curiosity to explore who you are and your life choices and an openness to apply some thinking and some feeling to how you show up in life – based on the experiences of others in the same shoes – are the keys to developing your own Best Life Design.

Although everyone likes the idea of living their best life (who wouldn’t?), discovering practically how to achieve this is difficult and daunting at times, and without the right support it can feel like an unrealistic goal. I have written Think. Plan. Live. to be a practical ‘buddy’ to support you through the steps of designing and living your best life. To keep it practical I have included my own stories, real-life examples, tools and tips to help you think through for yourself what’s important and to help you design and plan out your own best life. After all the time and effort you have put into life so far, I think you deserve to have a rewarding career and to enjoy time to spend with the family and friends you care about.

The goal is that by the end of the book you will feel inspired and positive about what Life Design could do for your career and personal life by you playing to your strengths, living up to your values, and leading with purpose in your career. Hopefully you picked up the book out of self-motivation to make a positive change for yourself and a desire to make a difference in the world. The book will give you an extra nudge and some practical tools to help you create and work through your plan.

For Life Design to really, really work it has to be personalised and tailored 100% to you. There is way too much pressure out there to live up to the unrealistic expectations or judgements put upon us – often unwittingly – by others. A foundation principle of best life definition and design is that the only judge of whether you are living your best life or not is you, and only you. I came to the realisation through coaching and mentoring hundreds of people that no two lives on the planet are the same. We each have our own Life Fingerprint, and just as no two fingerprints are the same, your best life is completely unique to you. It is created from knowing who you are, what you love doing (that is, your purpose), and what people, places or careers bring out the best in you.

The goal of this book is to re-stimulate your own ambition to make the best out of life and to make a difference. The book has loads of practical exercises, scientific frameworks and research, plus real stories and tips, and they all have one aim, and one aim only: to enable you to think about your own Sparks and Jolts in life that got you to where you are now and to help you gather those thoughts into a practical, forward-looking best life plan for yourself.

The book is modular and easy to navigate, and focuses on experiences and practical tools that are proven to be the successful building blocks of Life Design. Think. Plan. Live. aims to help you get to know yourself, to find your sources of inspiration, to find ways to unlock time, to define and build the right next career and leadership step, and to build a rewarding personal life with your family and friends.

I am now able to look back on my journey so far and feel pride that I navigated a successful executive career in the business world while working across three continents. I did so while being a mum to now teenage twin daughters, and being a compassionate and authentic leader in my own style. My journey to create this approach to best life planning was a thread running through my nearly 30-year career working for big corporates, the last 20 years of which was with one of the biggest international companies: Coca-Cola.

The turning point for me was realising that the strategic planning and business planning approaches I used to build strategic business plans could be equally applied to Life Design planning. When I shared this philosophy and approach with others, they too started to practise parts of it. I suddenly came to a realisation that what I had come to take for granted as my way of planning out my life, others regarded as a new approach that really helped them. That created a massive Jolt in me. I realised that sharing this approach was what needed to be done, and Think. Plan. Live. was created.

What I found was that, although people find the idea of designing a rewarding career and great personal life exciting, they also feel it’s daunting and unattainable. If it was that easy, everyone would do it … right? That’s true. The problems generally stem from people deciding that they should define their best life in comparison to the lives of others. But the danger of comparing ourselves to others is that it creates unrealistic expectations; they have a better job, a more supportive family, a nicer house or car, they are smarter and luckier than me. The list goes on and on, and people end up with an unrealistic idea of what they should be aiming for in life. This is an even bigger problem today in the social media age. If you contrast that with the goal of defining your best life that is as unique to you as your fingerprint, the need for comparison goes away. Your goal becomes to make your life the best it can be for you and those you care about.

Reading and using the tools in Think. Plan. Live. will help you reconnect with what is important to you and discover what your unique talents and gifts are, and then convert these discoveries into a career, authentic leadership and a best life that ‘fits’ you.

The approach I have developed to help you discover your Life Fingerprint is, by its nature, very different to the approaches to development I have encountered during my career. Most of the tools for personal development are assessment tools which are designed to … well … assess you (or put another way, judge you …), to classify you or put you in a box. My realisation – after going through my career and experiencing and being developed by this training – is that none of them started with a discovery of ‘me’ or really helped me to amplify me … and to be truly myself. My goal is you will experience the tools developed for the Life Fingerprint as discovery rather than assessment tools. It’s all about amplifying who you are.

My hope is that Think. Plan. Live. will be a practical guide to people who want to build a life more in tune with their purpose and who have a desire to make a difference.

So let’s get started with planning your best life.

As this is the ebook version of Think. Plan. Live., as you work your way through the book, I encourage you to get a notepad, blank workbook or similar that you can write in instead. It will be very beneficial to have all of your reflections in one place. In this ebook I’ve left all the exercises to help guide you through the process in the same way as the printed book, so as you reach these sections, capture your notes and record your thoughts and ideas.

‘The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do; you can act to change and control your life.’

Amelia Earhart

I felt ‘Life Design’ was the best way to describe my approach to mapping out your ‘best life’ because it is a fully owned design job from start to finish. During the design journey you must make some choices and tradeoffs in different areas and in what you want the finished project to look like. First you make the plan, then you set about achieving it.

Where do you start when designing your best life? Before you can make any plans – in life or in business – you must first develop an accurate picture of where you are now. So, let’s get into it!

Based on this analysis I then mobilised a plan to get us to our destination, constantly honing and adapting the plan and the execution of it to get results. Business and strategic planning is proven – it works! If you are in business you will be more than familiar with this approach, and may also have many business plans under your belt. If not, the approach will hopefully sound intuitive to you. (And don’t worry – business expertise is not a prerequisite for focusing on and planning your life … everyone can do Life Design, no matter what their skills and experience.)

When I thought about my life and quizzed myself on whether I planned it with the same rigour as the business and strategic plans I was so adept at creating, of course the answer was no. So, I set about remedying that. How would I do it? What tools or frameworks would help? Where could I source inspiration from?

I was a work in progress for a while (still am …), but after developing and adapting how I felt and thought about my life, I came up with an approach that really worked. But, even though I knew it really worked for me, I didn’t initially see it could work for others too. But as I started to share my approach with other people, it really sparked interest, and this got me thinking how great it would be if I could walk people through the approach in a book. So that’s what I’ve sought to do, making Think. Plan. Live. a workbook to your journey of building a strategic plan for yourself. After all, writing a best life plan for you has to be more important than any other plan you write. No-one wants to feel life is passing them by, or be left wondering is this as good as it gets?

Before committing the approach to paper in this book, I have tried and tested the tools and frameworks on myself, plus a spectrum of other people, including senior executive coaching clients, start-up founders, workshop attendees and friends, so I can now hand on heart say and know it definitively works. The core premise of Life Design is, the only person who can design your future life is you. You are the architect and the builder.

Now I often hear people at this point saying things like:

And on and on it goes. These statements about life are true for most people, but that doesn’t mean they have to be your reality. You can of course continue to live day to day, trying to work through each challenge piecemeal as best you can. And in reality, that’s what most people do. But what I’ve found is that with a bit of thinking and reflection about your life and what’s important – and, even more critically, what’s not – we can reconnect with what really matters and design and shape our life path to be more about what we want and need.

What I have found is that often the most effective adjustments we can make are tweaks and small shifts that together create a massive difference. There is usually no need to completely re-plan your life – in design terms it’s a renovation rather than a knock down and rebuild. In most cases it’s about being honest with ourselves. When being honest, most people know where their problems lie, but just defining them and being aware of them does not create change. It takes being clear on what you’d rather life be like to create a mindset shift, and once that has happened anything is possible.

In many cases we have let some things drop off the radar that are important to us, and we may just need to reconnect with and find time for them.

Some examples from my coaching clients are:

Shifting to Life Design instead of life reactions means you get back in control and stay in the driver’s seat. It just takes a simple but critically important reframe, from life happens to me to I make life happen.

The goal is not some perfect Life Design that means you don’t have to react any more; of course life will still throw stuff at you all the time. But what I can confidently say is that if you have thought about where you are trying to head and what your life priorities are, you can react positively when problems arise and proactively recognise opportunities in a way that reflects your goals in life. As the old adage goes, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. Or another option I like even more: ‘When life gives you lemons, make gin and tonic’.

If you think about your best life you can shape your existence more into what you want it to be, and so become more resilient when facing the inevitable curve balls and difficulties along the way.

As you read this book and complete the exercises, read the stories and try out the frameworks, it is your thoughts that count. Some parts will resonate or connect more than others – that’s okay. What connects the most for you will be dependent on what’s going on for you at work or in your broader life. Pay particular attention to what you are thinking and feeling as you read through the book, and if what you read triggers something take a minute to think about it versus letting it be a passing thought (trust me – these thoughts and feelings pop into your head for a reason …). Some of these will be ‘a-ha’ moments or ‘Sparks’ in you, and for other moments the feeling will be much greater – these are our ‘Jolts’.

Please read on with the mindset that you are going to really think about what the content means to you. I wrote this book to be a collection of stimuli, to share some of what works for me and other people I have helped. But, given your unique Life Fingerprint, what resonates with you is unique to you and is all about you …

My Life Design process is an iterative one, and it seeks to uncover who we are and what we really want, versus who we are being or think we should be. My method to create Life Design is in three phases: