A client came to me wanting to figure out what to do with his life. He found himself completely overwhelmed by the size of the question.
Knowing that I used to be a strategy consultant, he asked if we could use the process that I used to develop corporate strategy to help him.
What always struck me about corporate strategy is that leadership teams often have more ideas of what they can do than they know what to do with. Without discipline, they end up doing many things badly at once.
At least half of strategy is choosing what not to do.
With this framing, my client began to explore what he could remove from his life.
Instead of overwhelm, he found this process fun. He kept finding more and more places where he could stop doing things. One by one, we worked on removing those parts from his life.
With less noise from his old busy-ness, his decision paralysis melted. In the process, he started to get a sense of what actually mattered to him. Working out what he wanted from life became much simpler.
If consciously designing your life feels like too big a task, start by asking what you are ready to stop.
I built a tool to explore this. Try the Energy Audit.