We at Reimaginez are proud to work with Founders and CEOs who are leading the way to a better world. These ambitious changemakers are driven by the desire to generate a positive impact: purpose is at the forefront of their priorities, and it is the North Star guiding every one of their entrepreneurial pursuits.
Being the heroes in such great quests calls for maximization of every single resource in Founders’ lives, catering to the needs of their challenging ventures. In that light, time and attention are two of the most valuable foundational assets that they have. Because of their limited nature, it is essential for Founders to be intentional about their use of these resources.
We strongly believe that companies reap immeasurable benefits from crafting their strategies in alignment with their values and their cultural foundation at large. Now, we are presenting an actionable way of applying that principle to Founders’ lives as a whole.
As an ambitious Leader, having your purpose as the cornerstone to design a profoundly intentional lifestyle will maximize your time, energy, and attention, allowing you to thrive in the journey towards your remarkable goals.
Join us in this article for a starter’s guide on how to step into the next level of your potential as a Founder.
A Magnificent Tool to Tap Into Your Full Potential
Although a powerful tool, Lifestyle Design is still unexplored territory for many Founders and Leaders who would greatly benefit from implementing it in their day-to-day lives. So, to start off, we would like to address some possible misconceptions by defining exactly what Lifestyle Design is — and what it isn’t.
Lifestyle Design is NOT about catering to anyone else’s ideas of what success and fulfillment look like. It is not setting your alarm at the crack of dawn if your internal body clock is at its prime during the night hours. It is not following a schedule that fulfills external, conventional representations of what a happy and balanced life should be.
Lifestyle Design is all about alignment with Your Purpose, Your Values, and Your Priorities. It is the tool to build a life that supports those values and goals that matter the most to you. Just like a company benefits from having its strategies designed in alignment with its cultural foundation, it is immensely valuable for a Founder to design a lifestyle with purpose as the ultimate fundament.
Lifestyle Design is the key to mastering a purposeful life as an impact-driven Founder, as it can help you ensure that every moment is spent in the most valuable way possible — on your terms. So, let’s explore the starting point of Lifestyle Design and how to act upon it.
Four Steps to Unlock a Thriving Lifestyle
1. Intent
Living as a Founder can often feel like driving a Formula One car at a speed of 350km per hour while, at the same time, playing eight opponents at simultaneous chess. It’s exciting and extremely rewarding when things turn out right, but it’s also intense and challenging, and the slightest misstep can have an enormous impact on the outcome of your pursuit.
In the middle of such a buzzing lifestyle, it is common for Founders to get caught up in priorities, goals and needs that belong to other people. It can be easy to divert from our core path if we are not fully checking in with our own values at every step and turn of the way. This is why the first step into Lifestyle Design is to be clear on what your intent is.
As a High-Achieving Founder, your purpose is at the forefront of every single one of your entrepreneurial ventures. Now, you need to know which values you mean to live by and embody in your day-to-day life. The essence of this phase is defining the principles that serve as the cornerstones to your company and to your life as a Founder, and why these principles matter to you.
What are the values you most resonate with, and why do they hold significance in your life?
How do your values support everything you care deeply about?
When you have a solid definition of the things that matter to you, you will be able to assess in detail how much you are living in alignment with your purpose.
2. Awareness
Once you are set on the values you aim to live by, it’s time for observation and evaluation. Like we mentioned before, life as a Founder is testing, and even purpose-driven entrepreneurs can sometimes engage with habits that do not necessarily represent the best use of our time and attention. That is why it is important to assess to what extent you are letting your values guide how you are spending your time and how you are building your company.
Building awareness around how you are showing up in your day-to-day life will help you understand in-depth how your use of your time, energy, and attention are playing in interaction with your purpose and your values. After a week or two of rigorously tracking what you are investing your time into, you will have a baseline of what your starting point is. This will help you identify any disconnects between your resource usage and the things that matter the most to you.
An actionable step to analyzing how your schedule aligns with your values is to observe how you are spending your time through techniques like time tracking. Do a quick check-in every 15 to 30 minutes or every time you engage with a new activity. The check-in shouldn’t take longer than 20 seconds, so it is helpful to build a tracking instrument that works for you and allows you to conduct this observation without interrupting your flow.
These are some of the relevant aspects to keep track of:
- What you are doing
- What project this activity belongs to
- How long you are spending on it
- Priority level, on a scale of 1–100, with 100 being high-impact, high-value activities
- What emotions it fosters in you, on a scale of 1–10.
- As an example, do you feel energized or drained? Does engaging with this make you all pumped up, or rather annoyed
- Bonus: what success looks like in this activity, other notes you might want to add.
After conducting a thorough observation and analysis of these elements, you will be able to take action smartly towards a better-aligned Founder’s schedule. That’s why our next step involves strategy.
3. Planning
With a solid idea of your core values and a detailed record of how you are spending your time, you are now aware of your current situation. The next step, then, is to craft and plan a more intentional lifestyle.
Much like when we are working to turn our core company values into actions, the essential question here is: What does success look like? For example, if you want to have more presence in a specific area of your life, what does that look like? If you want to have a stronger, more cohesive, more supportive morning or night routine, what would that look like?
What’s essential in this phase of Lifestyle Design is to define in extreme detail what success looks like to you. As we were assessing our use of time, it was significant to have an in-depth insight into how those daily activities were playing towards our goals, how they were making us feel, and how much time we were investing into them. Now that we are planning a new, intentional routine, all those details have to show up in ways that actively support our values and our purpose.
4. Action
It’s showtime. Your values are top-of-mind, you have extensively observed and analyzed how you were spending your time, and you have crafted a schedule in full awareness and alignment with your values and purpose. Now, it’s time to get to the action.
Pick one to three things you want to implement first, and try out your new schedule for two to four weeks. As the weeks go by, your strength will increase as you adjust to your new alignment, allowing you to gradually introduce more changes.
On a biweekly or monthly basis, it is beneficial to reassess and evaluate how your schedule is working out and make any necessary adjustments to ensure that you are investing yourself in the activities that really matter the most to you.
Ready to Thrive?
When you are pursuing purpose-centric, world-changing achievements, there are always more things to take care of than time, energy, and attention to spend on them. That’s why it is essential to have a lifestyle that supports your journey. Lifestyle Design is one of the core instruments for High-Achieving Founders to keep in their toolkits, as it has the power to maximize their potential and help them fully benefit from their most scarce yet most valuable resources.
If you are yet to begin your path into Lifestyle Design, these actionable steps are a great starting point to put your schedule back into alignment. Keeping track of every element as you move forward in your plan will allow you to analyze your time usage, to identify exactly what are those activities that are not the highest value to you, and which ones you should be doubling down on because of their outsized positive impact and relevance.
However, if you have already gone over the basics, you might be looking to take your Lifestyle Design to the next level. As we mentioned in a previous article, building a Founder’s Tribe is a great way of aligning your surroundings with the things that matter to you the most and ensuring that your social circle will support you and add extraordinary value to your journey. And there is one specific person who can join your inner tribe in the role of a trusted guide, with the knowledge to help you figure out your ideal Founder’s schedule — and so much more.
Founder/Executive Coaching At a Glance
Have you ever wished to have Yoda by your side, helping you choose between the million paths ahead?
Have you ever wanted a co-founder to magically appear to help you make the hard decisions that keep you up all night? Have you ever wanted someone to do for you what you do for everyone else? Someone who sees your potential and has your back?
These are just some of the ways Therése has been described by her founder and C-level clients on the journey they have taken together, as she made sure they received the support they needed.
Therése has been empowering High Achieving individuals for 20 years through her transformative change programs where everything is done with a purpose.
Each journey starts with a first step based on your dreams and goals.
So the question is, whom do you wish was on your side, as you make your way through your own hero’s journey?
