What if You Could Design Your Life?

As ‘Malik The Kin’ Carby Corbett and I met with our Kin School students for the very first time last week, one thing became clear - kin students and practicing kinesiologists didn’t realize that only they were in charge of their life! 

As kinesiologists, we are often put in a place of being an assistant to another health care professional, underpaid and undervalued, not realizing the depth and breadth of our skill set and quickly feeling like we aren’t in charge of our days. We find ourselves put into particular boxes, offered low salaries with poor to no benefits, with our careers defined for us by others that don’t truly understand our potential.

What if that were different? What if, through a change of mindset, it WAS different? What if you could design your life? 

What if your biggest question every day was, ‘What is possible?’

Imagine if you sat down and ‘reverse engineered’ what your life was going to be like at the end of your career. Where would you be living? How much money would you be making? Would you have a mate? A family? A pet?

Who would you still have as friends? Where would your favourite vacation spot be? Are you travelling regularly, or do you prefer to go to your cottage on a quiet lake and split your time with life in the city? Are you taking care of your parents or siblings? What kind of volunteer work would you be doing? What special projects would you be working on?

To think about your ‘ideal life’ and to make a deliberate future plan is an empowering thing to do. It puts you in the driver’s seat, instead of you feeling as if you were constantly being pushed around by circumstances that feel out of your control.

What if you had a vision for your life that became a filter for every decision you made? How easy would it be to decide if opportunities would be aligned with your vision then? How might you better be able to prioritize how you spend your time? Wouldn’t it be easier to turn down jobs that wouldn’t fuel your dreams? Create work that would fuel your passions? Choosing who you spend your time with clarity and purpose?

Set aside a few minutes today to journal what you want to be doing on the other side of your life. It doesn’t matter where you start from. Keep adding to this vision until it becomes crystal clear. Reach out to life in your eighties and work back deliberately. Then try it again from your 60s, 40s and then your 20s. Start wherever you are.

Don’t look back - it doesn’t serve you. Don’t let prior decisions colour your tomorrows.

Each day you have the chance to make new choices, and now you have a plan! You’ll revisit this plan, tinker with it, and probably make it bigger as life moves forward. Remember to ask yourself, ‘What is possible?’ What could your opportunities look like if you had all the money you needed and all your bills were easily paid?

What if your filter for every new possibility had a lens of your own unique creation? What if you realized that the decisions you made weren’t made from a position of lack, scarcity and fear, but from a place of confidence, certainty and power?

You can do this. It’s your life and no one else’s, so take charge, take control and make every decision a choice that moves you forward towards the life that you’ve already created for yourself - a life you’ve chosen in advance.

Don’t let life happen to you. Hop in the driver’s seat!