The Workshop Recap

As I mentioned, I attended a ‘Design Your Life‘ workshop this past weekend.  I blame the sugar high from that cookie ice cream sandwich for allowing me to reveal that little piece of information. And, now that it’s out there, I guess I will recap it.  For those of you rolling your eyes and thinking ‘too much info’, I did make a few rules.  First, no evangelizing, positive or negative.  So, I am not going to mention the company’s name.  If you are interested, inbox me.  Second, I am not going to dive into feelings and my personal secrets.  Get over it, this ain’t that kind of blog, baby.

In my post-workshop fog, I am trying to figure out what drew me to the workshop in the first place. I’ve been thinking about changing careers for a long time, but actually taking action didn’t really start to foment until this year.  In the middle of all this thinking, attending an introductory workshop called ‘Design Your Life’ seemed like a good idea.  It was fun too.  The leader was awesome.  While completing her PhD at MIT, it occurred to her she didn’t really want to be a scientist and engineer.  She really wanted to be a life coach.  So, she did it.  How could that not be appealing to me in middle of my career changing existential crisis?  How did that not sound exactly like what I going going through.

During the intro workshop, we wrote down dreams related to one of 18 aspects of life.  Yes, that was 18 aspects.  I left will all kinds of inspiration about my next move. I was going to wait until the start of 2014, but shortly after the workshop, I applied to BU. There is a whole host of other reasons I accelerated those plans, but the workshop timing seemed, I dunno, serendipitous.  It was fun. I figured the longer workshop would just build on that.  Oh, rosy colored glasses, indeed.

Fast forward to the weekend workshop.  Ahead of the workshop, participants complete a rather extensive homework.  They write about the dreams, realities and excuses related to those 18 aspects of life.  Yes, that was 18 aspects and yes, it is a lot of writing.  In addition, they reveal their parent traits and life haunts.   It is a somewhat cathartic activity to put all this stuff into one place.

At the workshop, the basic method is based on building your personal integrity. First, you recognize you are not where you want to be in a particular aspect of life – dreams versus reality.  You identify the ‘shortcomings’ – excuses for dream versus reality.  You take ownership of the ‘real’ shortcomings – they are YOUR excuses.  You pinpoint the traits, habits and patterns driving excuses – what do parent traits, your traits and haunts reveal.  Then you build your personal integrity. You identify traits, habits and patterns to address the shortcomings and use promises and consequences to cultivate them.  As I learned, this personal integrity method is related to the Landmark Education method (Originally EST Training) developed by Werner Erhard.  That guy even wrote a paper called “Integrity” (well, the full name is” Integrity: A Positive Model that Incorporates the Normative Phenomena of Morality, Ethics, and Legality”).

So, basically, integrity is this. . .

Yep, at the core, the workshop can be summed up in an inspirational poster.

All kidding aside, general idea behind this is good stuff, right?  Absolutely!  So, here’s where integrity starts.  Remember when I ‘blamed’ that cookie ice cream sandwich for revealing I was going to a ‘Design Your Life’ workshop.  Well, it wasn’t really the cookie ice cream sandwich that caused that little reveal. Okay, so I did attend a self-help workshop because this whole changing my life is, indeed, freaking me out.  I blamed that helpless cookie ice cream sandwich because I am a bit embarrassed that I already admitted it and I admitted it in the first place because I was trying to not be embarrassed about it.  And the circle goes around and around.

All in all, I am glad I went. There were some good lessons in the weekend.  There are also some not-so-good things about the weekend.  Actually, most of it was a bust except for that ice cream sandwich and chilling in New York.

Of course, the premise of workshop is that to succeed in ‘designing your life’, you have to apply all the lessons and dive in head first.  Oh yeah, you also should do it under the supervision of a DYL coach for an additional $4k over four months.  I think I will pass on that and keep moving forward in my own way. This self-help evangelizing cult crap isn’t really for this Atheist even if it tries to be secular and introspective.

By the way, yes, I know my smart-assed-ness is one of those traits.  Can’t overload working on too many things at once.

Happy cooking