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How To Tell If You Are Living By Design Or Default

Writer's picture: Tony RichardsTony Richards

We live our lives in one of two ways.

Design or default.

Most of us understand when a setting is set to the default position. Default means the setting is determined as how most people would use it. There is not enough understanding of the various parameters in order to determine a more customized and high performing set point. This is what happens when we don’t understand our potential. When we are not sure or can not imagine what we are actually capable of achieving, we continue to live our lives on the default setting. We keep doing what we’ve been doing to try our best to maintain our current performance.

The truth is, life is not freeze-dried. When we choose to continue our setting on default, we are actually losing momentum and our trajectory is declining. It’s very much like a plane landing. The aircraft is actually decreasing at a fairly substantial rate, but by what we can see, until we are very close to the landing strip, it’s hard to actually process the true amount of the descent, then we are on the ground. The same is true in default mode. It’s difficult to process the amount of momentum we are actually losing, because we’re trying our best to just hold on where we feel comfortable.

Living your life by design is just the same in the opposite direction. Living your life by design is all about course corrections. It’s about identifying obstacles and constraints and navigating them in order to reach a pre-determined destination. It’s about breaking things that seemingly are not broken.

Here are some examples:

Default: There’s nothing I can do      Design: Let’s look at options

Default: That’s the way I am             Design: I can work on myself

Default: He makes me mad               Design: I am responsible for my feelings

Default: They won’t allow that         Design: I can influence

Default: I have to do that                  Design: I am responsible for my actions

Default: I can’t                                    Design: I choose

Default: If only….                               Design: I will…..

What would have to happen for us to commit to a customized setting for our lives we design, rather than continuing in the default position?

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