3 ingredients to design a life

With a dash of trust

How would you help an adolescent design a life?

You can’t give them answers. You can’t try to make master plans. But you can create the right conditions. That’s our job description. In this post we’ll explore three of those conditions in particular.

But first, an important clarification. This is not about pushing adolescents to decide what they want to do when they grow up. Those conversations, unless invited by a young person with authentic interest, all too often end up as a pipeline of adult pressures and judgments. Even if all are participating wisely and lightly, a fundamental flaw exists when long-term planning with someone as rapidly evolving as an adolescent. Poet David Whyte said it best: “what you can plan is too small for you to live.”

So if this is not about helping someone create the master plan for their life, what are we talking about here?

This is about the way all of us, at any age, try to fit ourselves to the worlds we discover inside of us and around us. We discover deep wells of purpose, desire, trauma, sensitivity, and curiosity. We navigate the complex worlds of people and money. We experiment with daily rhythms and ways of being. Life design is how we try to reconcile all these forces. It’s how an introverted kid starts to figure out how much social interaction she really wants, and when to say no. It’s how a kid who spends every off-hour watching YouTube clips about Greek mythology discovers that his curiosity has opened a door. We’re all designing and re-designing our lives, all the time.

It’s a central effort in our lives, and adolescents are the authors of their own story. But our choices as parents and educators will make their efforts easier or harder. I’d like to suggest that there are three ingredients we should make available to them, to facilitate this process of life design.

Ingredient #1: Variety

To figure out who they are, adolescents need variety. Real variety. Each different (non-traumatic) environment they can experience themselves in is a fruitful experiment, sometimes a breakthrough one. As it stands now, too often adolescents have only token variety. They generally know one, maybe two family systems, particularly in cultures that have relatively isolated, nuclear families. They probably get just one teaching style at school (even when they learn different academic subjects, likely all are taught in similar ways). What if we thought much bigger about variety?

What if they got to experience:

• A variety of adult mentors, informal or formal, who model radically different ways of looking at the world?

• A variety of teaching and learning styles, ranging from traditional lectures to tutoring, online learning, project-based learning, etc?

• A variety of family systems, through extended stays with other families whose worldviews and ways of being were quite different?

• A variety of friend groups, as some lucky kids do now when they go to sleep-away camps or other immersive programs?

• A variety of cultures, through travel and immersion when possible?

I recognize that many of these ideas are difficult to implement, but there are also relatively easy things we can do to add variety. Parents can consider how to invite their kids into immersive experiences outside of their norm—this could be a visit to an aunt you rarely see, or a travel experience if you are so fortunate, among many others. Schools can add variety by becoming more open to the world around them. They can invite in community members, experts, artists, businesspeople and the like—and invite students to get out of school for real-world learning as often as feasible.

Ingredient #2: Self-reflection

Variety is great, but without some kind of self-reflection, the insights may wash away. We need to build the habit of noticing, both during and after experiences. How did that feel? How did I experience myself—how did others experience me? What surprised me? Would I want to do more or less of that? And onward.

Self-reflection thrives with unhurried time, as I’ve written about elsewhere. While a quick reflection prompt can be helpful, often we need the space to daydream, to notice what we keep wondering about, to tinker and let our interests emerge when we ourselves witness them.

Developing a habit of self-reflection will call on us to use three fundamental roles of adulthood—to be a model, a mentor, and a mirror. We can model self-reflection with our own practices in how we talk, journal, or notice our own state or that of other’s. We can be a mentor by occasionally providing a challenge or an invitation, for example the gift of a journal. And we can be a mirror by learning how to reflect back, without judgment, what we see in the young person we care for. “I notice how peaceful you are after the camping trip.” Or, “I noticed that you had so much fun designing the video game that you lost all track of time.”

Ingredient #3: Agency

With variety and self-reflection, we begin to be able to calibrate. We discover that we would like more of this, less of that. We learn what kinds of situations make us anxious, or creative, or endlessly motivated. Sometimes, this is enough. The calibration and tinkering can begin, and each experiment sheds a little more light on these questions of life design.

But sometimes it is not enough. Implied in that tinkering is a sense of agency: the feeling that you can control your own destiny, or at least some part of it. Sometimes this sense of agency is systematically removed from students by the way we school them. If we focus them on external measurements and push them hard to achieve, it may appear that they have agency when what they really have is compliance. If we stuff their schedules full of activities they may start passively shuffling from one to the other, waiting for the next instruction. These are not situations of agency.

Simply put, young people need to experience at least one domain in their lives where they feel genuine agency. Perhaps school is traditional and makes them passive, but they have incredible summer experiences where they feel a sense of adventure and self-determination. Perhaps it’s one teacher that creates this environment, or just their home life, or their experience in a club or sport. One way or another, adolescents need to know what it feels like to have the freedom to control part of their life and live the results.

What does this add up to?

The ingredients above are starting points, and they all presume a culture of openness and acceptance around a young person. They rest on a trust that what emerges from authentic curiosity is important, valuable, and even moves us toward practical opportunities in our lives and careers.

Remember that life design is a series of experiments and adaptations, most of which are small. It may never look like bold, purposeful declarations from your child that they want to try X or Y meaningful opportunity. It may instead look like a boundary they try to set or a subtle turning of the sails in a particular direction.

In my own life, one of the most meaningful life design choices came after I read the book Quiet by Susan Cain. She explained introversion in ways that shifted my identity and made me feel confident enough to finally set some limits and reserve more alone time. I am a lover of people but also an introvert, and since I realized I could calibrate my day to find a better balance of social and alone time, I’ve been a happier person.

In some sense, the most fundamental definition of psychological health is that you are in healthy relationship with the world. Some of the world you can change, some of yourself you can change, and everything else depends on adaptation and acceptance. These three ingredients can make the process a little smoother, a little freer, for the young people we care for. And they may be what we need, too.

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Personal update: a new project!

In the spirit of surprising twists and continual experiments in life design, I’m happy to share that I’m joining the team launching Hakuba International School, a very exciting project to design and launch a school focused on environmental stewardship and well-being, in a beautiful small town in the Japanese Alps. I’m staying in California, but will have regular time in Japan. It’s a new learning adventure, a chance to test out new school models and methods with a fantastic team of educators. Check out the introductory video here for more!

Photo Credits: Nikola Afina (#1), Matteo Badini (#2), Thomas Mowe (#3)