How to Curate Your Life Like a Designer

Have you ever looked at your life and felt overwhelmed by all of the things you wish you could change? What if instead of seeing the flaws, you started seeing the potential, just like a designer walking into a fixer-upper? Today we're exploring how to curate your life like a designer, focusing on vision, creativity, and making the most of what you already have. Are you ready? All right, let's do this. Let's dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where personal development meets style. Here's your hostess, master life coach, Tonya Leigh.

Hello, hello, my friends. How are you feeling on this beautiful day? I woke up this morning and there was snow on the ground, which is not something we see that often in Charlotte. And then I went and had a Pilates class. I came home and had a cup of coffee, and now I'm recording this episode for you. I'm feeling really good and really excited because I have something that I have been dying to share with you. And it's something that many of you have reached out and said, "Are we doing it this year? I've been looking for it. When are you going to announce it?"

Well, the time is now. Our most beloved workshop is happening really, really soon. I only run this workshop one time a year. Year after year, women tell me that this workshop sets them up to have amazing years. It is called Live like an Editor. It is five days of you looking at your life and yourself from a completely different perspective. This is not a workshop where you're going to come in and fix yourself. That's not what we're doing around here because you're not broken. We are going to be looking at you and your life through the lens of possibility and creativity and joy and fun. It's just a remarkable five days together.

I've had women who have done this workshop now. I think the first time we ran it was in 2021. They do this workshop every single year, and they tell me, "This workshop sets me up for the year." And I personally love doing it because it is how I think about designing my life. It's how I think about creating. It is all about looking at your life through the lens of you being the editor-in-chief of your life. You're going to be looking at your life as if you were creating it like a magazine, figuring out the essence, figuring out your brand and how you want to show up in the world, looking at how to rewrite your stories. It is so fun and so unique. There's nothing else out there like this workshop.

And when you join, you are also going to get access to my private editor's notes. These are eight practices that have elevated my life. I've been studying myself for many, many years, and I have been tweaking and experimenting and playing with what works and what doesn't. So I've drilled it down to eight practices that I'm going to be sharing with you. And here's the best news: It is only $37. I've had women say, "You should be charging 500 for this workshop," but I want to make this accessible to as many women who feel called to do this more creative, expansive work that is about possibility, not limitation. So if you want to join us, and I highly recommend that you do because we are going to have a good time, just go to schoolofselfimage.com/editor, and I will see you in the workshop.

Now, if you're wondering if this workshop is a good fit for you, I want to just let you know that if you resonate with today's episode, you are going to love the energy and the process that I teach within the Live Like an Editor workshop because today we're talking about how to curate your life like a designer. Now, I want to pull out two words that I just mentioned and look at how it applies to your life. Because many times we look at our lives through the lens of we need to fix problems. Of course, life is always giving us problems and challenges, and I think they're there for a reason, they're there for to grow us. But when you look at your life through the lens of problems, you're going to see a lot of problems because what you focus on grows.

When you curate your life like a designer, you look at possibility, you look at taking what you have and expanding upon it. A great example of this is, Fonz and I are remodeling an older home right now. I remember the first time we walked into it, where a lot of people may have seen the limitations of this house, be it the size, the old decor, the flooring that dates back to the '70s, the windows that need replacing. There's a lot of things that you could look at this house and think, "Ugh, this is just one big problem. I'm so limited in what I can do with this house." I saw so many possibilities. I was able to have a vision for this house that transcended what I was currently seeing. And that is what a designer does. A designer takes what is currently present and looks at all of the ways that she or he can expand upon it, and lift it up, elevate it, make it into something extraordinary.

So when I talk about curating your life like a designer, I want us to talk about first of all the word curate. It means to thoughtfully select, organize, and refine the elements of your life to create an experience that aligns with your values, your vision, and your desires. Curating your life means being intentional about what you allow in, whether it's people, habits or environments, and crafting a life that's beautiful and meaningful to you, one that's uniquely yours. Then we look at the word designer. A designer is a creator who envisions and shapes the future by transforming possibilities into reality. So in life, being a designer means seeing potential where others see limitations. It's about using creativity to solve problems and intentionally crafting a life that reflects your personal style, your values, and your goals and dreams.

So I want to share five specific perspectives that you need to have in order to curate your life like a designer. Some of these may be very challenging for you because it's a completely different way of you seeing yourself in the world, but I will tell you, it is a much more fun and much more effective way to create your life on purpose. So the first thing that you have to do if you want to curate your life like a designer is that you need to see the potential, not the flaws. This means you shifting your perspective to focus on what's working instead of dwelling on imperfections. Think about it. A designer sees an outdated kitchen not as a failure, but as an opportunity to highlight its original charm, whether it's tiles or maybe it's the spacious layout, maybe it's how the window is positioned in the room. A designer's always looking at what is working in this space and how can we build upon it?

Similarly, you can look at your life in the same way. Are there areas where you're overly critical, where it's never good enough, where you hold yourself back? What if you started with identifying what's good about this area of my life? In fact, here's an idea for you. I want you to take a moment and assess one area of your life. It could be your career, it could be your relationships, it could be your health, finances, and write down three things that are the bones of that area or the strengths. I want you to focus on enhancing those rather than you telling yourself, "I got to start from scratch." Because I think that's why change is often so overwhelming, is that we tell ourselves that we're too far gone. "I got to start from scratch. It's going to take too long." We psych ourselves out of just expanding upon the potential.

Let's say that you're feeling really unhappy with your health. Maybe you've gained some weight, you feel tired all the time, or you haven't been sticking to your workout routine. It's really easy to dwell on what's not working and feel stuck, but I want to encourage you to shift your perspective to focus on what is working or what you can build upon. So for example, instead of dwelling on how you haven't shown up for your workouts and what a failure you think you are, just stop and let's look for the potential here.

Let's not give the energy to your flaws, but let's look at what is working or what you would like to build upon. So you could ask yourself, do you enjoy certain activities? Do you like walking? Maybe you like dancing in your living room, maybe you like doing yoga. You can begin to ask yourself, are there certain times of the day where you feel more energized and motivated? You can look into the past to look at how perhaps you have successfully implemented new healthy habits before, like drinking more water or cutting back on sugar, to use it as evidence of like, "Oh, I can do this. There's potential here." This kind of focus is, again, way more effective than sitting around being hypercritical on yourself, focusing on everything that you think is wrong.

When you look at your life through the eyes of a designer, you're looking at what is possible. You are fighting for the evolution of this project that you're working on. You are fighting to see it come to reality, which means you can't sit around and constantly focus on everything that's wrong with it. You've got to look at what's right with it and how can I build upon it. So that's the perspective shift number one that you've got to have if you want to curate your life like a designer. You need to see the potential, not the flaws.

Number two, create a vision and anchor it. Every transformation, whether it be a room and a house or it is your life, it begins with a vision. You must define what it is that you want. I think about going into this house that we are remodeling. If I walked into it and I just said to the contractors that we're working with, "I don't know, I don't know what I want," they wouldn't be able to help me. Nothing would change because no decisions are being made, and the project just stalls because someone needs clarity. Someone needs to know, "Here's the vision, here's the feel, here's the look. Here's the walls I want to come down. Here are the ones I want to put up. Here's the paint color. Here's the lighting." Someone needs to have the vision.

When it comes to our own lives, here's what I've seen women do in all of the years that I've been coaching, almost two decades now. One, you want someone else to give you the vision. Now, really think about that. I imagine with my home, if someone came in with completely different taste, different values, a different view of the world, and designed my house, it may be beautiful, but it's not going to feel like me. I'm going to be in this house thinking, "Gosh, I'm not really fulfilled in this house." Why? Because it was someone else's vision, not mine. The second thing that I see women do is, you are so afraid of getting the vision wrong you pretend to be confused. You are afraid of choosing the wrong thing to work towards, and so therefore it's just easier to pretend that you don't know and you're confused about it because then you don't have to take action.

And then there is what I consider to be a pretty small group of women actually who generally don't know what they want. You can sit there and hold space for them and they just keep drawing a blank. I do believe deep down they do know, but maybe they have been so disconnected from their desires or they haven't been exposed to the possibility of what it is that they want, that in the moment it is very difficult for them to have a vision for their life.

If you can relate to that, here's what I want to offer you. Start with what you know you don't want. Most of us know what we don't want. We don't want to be in debt. We don't want to be in relationships where we feel underappreciated. We don't want to be in soul-sucking jobs. We can usually pretty easily define what it is that we don't want. And that's a great place to start actually, because if you don't want this, then what is the opposite of that? Use that as the jumping off board to discover what it is that you want so that you can begin to create that vision for your life. You don't need to know the specifics.

I remember when I first started this work, I didn't know. I mean, I grew up in a trailer in the deep south. My possibility was very limited, but there was an essence that I knew I was after. I knew that I was always drawn to beauty, and I loved reading inspiring books. I loved being connected to really fun and cool and optimistic people, and it turns out those are my core values. So I just started going in that direction. And the more I went in the direction of the feeling of the life I wanted, the vision became more and more clear. This is why I love the Live Like an Editor workshop, because we do this work, we start with the essence and we begin to build around it.

If you think about really great designers, one of the things that they do is they create, you can call them vision boards or mood boards before even starting a project. This is something that we're going to be doing in the Live Like an Editor workshop. You're really going to be begin to think of your life as a magazine and you're going to begin to build it out and you're going to get so much clarity. So if you want to go deeper into this work, I promise you you're going to love this workshop. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/editor and join us. So that's number two.

Number three, to curate your life like a designer, the perspective that I want you to have is to work with what you have. How often do you say, "I can't do this because of that"? And that just limits you. A designer is really good at getting creative with the budget and the resources and what they currently have. They might repurpose an old chair with a coat of paint and a new cushion, making it a standout piece. And you can do this in life. I think about when I first started my business. I didn't have any help. It was just me. I was trying to learn how to build a website. I was trying to create my own workbooks. And I used the resources that I had. Now when I go back and look at my old branding, I'm mortified, and I'm also extremely proud. I'm proud that I didn't let it stop me, that I didn't have world-class designers. I didn't let it stop me that I didn't have a lot of money to hire people. I just made the most of what I had.

Think about new designers who are just getting into the industry and they're learning and they're growing. They're probably not going to start in a palatial mansion trying to redesign it. They're going to start with something small, and they're going to learn so much with that first project. And from that first project, they are going to gain more knowledge, they're going to increase their skillset, they may increase their capital to work with, and it just spills over into the next one and the next one. And as they do that, the possibilities just keep expanding. But you've got to start with where you are and with what you have. And that is a designer mindset.

The next thing that is so important, and this is where I see a lot of you getting yourself overwhelmed and scattered and not really getting the momentum going in your life, is you're trying to redesign your whole life at once. You start the new year out with like 10 to 20 goals. You wake up in the morning not really knowing where to focus because you want to accomplish so much. Well, a designer, guess what they do? They have the vision for their life, but how does that vision come to fruition? It comes to fruition by focusing on room by room. They're not going to be remodeling the kitchen while they're also remodeling the dining room. They're going to focus on one room at a time.

The way you can apply that to your life is to think about focusing on one part of your life at a time. Now, this is very difficult for us ambitious ladies because we want to do it all at once. But I will tell you, by having one signature goal every year and not trying to do a hundred things, I have been able to create so much momentum in my life. Now, it doesn't mean that as I'm remodeling my kitchen, that I might also be putzing in the dining room and thinking about what I want to do over there and maybe even making some tweaks over there. I realize that we have more than one goal at a time, but there is something powerful about deciding what your number one priority is for the year.

One of the questions that I recently asked was, if you could give your attention to just one area of your life for a whole year, which area would have the biggest impact? Think about it. If you could choose one area of your life to focus on this year that would have the biggest impact on the rest of your life, where would you focus? Would it be your health? Would it be your finances? Would it be your relationships? Would it be your business and career? Where would you focus this year? And what if you just decided, "I'm going to reinvent my life by reinventing one room at a time"?

I do believe this is why School of Self-Image members have so much success, is that I teach them the skill. I teach them the art of focusing. Year after year, women will come to me and say, "I was able to accomplish more than a year than I was able to accomplish in the last decade." Because here's what happens. As you focus on that one room and you start to reinvent that area of your life, you're also reinventing yourself. Because that's what is required to reinvent a room of your life. You have to look at your own self-image and how you're showing up in that area. But what ends up happening is that who you're becoming in that one area automatically impacts how you're showing up in the other rooms of your house. So if you're one of those women who are very resistant to focusing, you're trying to do too much and you're overwhelmed, just please take my word for this, think like a designer. Focus room by room.

And then the last perspective shift that you have to have as a designer is, we're going to quote Marie Forleo here, you've got to cultivate a figureoutable mindset. As she says, "Everything is figureoutable." Because inevitably, when you start to redesign a house, you're going to run into some challenges. Maybe one of your subcontractors gets sick and puts you behind schedule. Or maybe you find out, God forbid, there's mold in the walls and you have to completely do mold remediation. There's going to be some challenge, and that is what happens whenever you decide to transform your life. You are going to have challenges. I've never met anyone who was going after something big that didn't encounter obstacles along the way. But when you think like a designer, you know that every challenge has a solution. And designers have the mindset of everything is figureoutable.

I think about my mom. My mother is a very creative woman, and she's always had this mindset of, "Watch me." I think my mom loves a challenge. She loves to show herself what she's capable of. And I'll never forget, she had a catering company at one time, and she would cater these big events. I think up to like a thousand people was probably her largest one. She would often cater weddings, and she would sometimes include ice sculptures as part of the service that she would offer. I'll never forget this one wedding. She had, I think it was a swan ice sculpture. And when she was cutting it out of the mold, the swan's neck broke. So there she is. It is probably about an hour before the wedding, and she's holding a swan's head in her hand.

Now, I think about this as it relates to life. There are many times that we are going after something, and something breaks. Maybe we get sick, or maybe a launch didn't go the way you had planned, or maybe you get into, God forbid, an accident, something breaks. But when you have that figureoutable mindset, you don't give up on what it is that you want. You just use your creativity to figure out how to overcome the obstacle that's facing you.

So what did my mom do with this swan that had broken? She got creative, and she figured out, "If I take a wooden dowel, and I drill a little hole in the body and the neck, I can just put the neck back on." And then she created this beautiful floral necklace to go around the swan's neck. It ended up being more beautiful with the neck broken than it would've been with it not because she got creative. She didn't let the obstacle mean there's going to be no ice sculpture here. She didn't make it mean that something was wrong with her. She didn't make it mean that she was such a failure. She just did what a designer does. She got to work and she figured it out.

That's what I want you to do. In fact, think of a challenge that you're having right now. I was just coaching one of the members not too long ago who was facing her own challenge. She has her passion goal, the goal that she really wants to go after, and she needs to have money to go after this goal of hers. The way she was thinking about it was so limited. It was like, "I either can do this or I can do that." And I was like, "You do realize there is a multitude of possibilities outside of what you are currently considering?"

I started to throw things around and offer her ideas, and she came back later and she was like, "I didn't even consider that I could apply for a grant until after that conversation." And that's the way I think. I think I got it from my mom. Whenever I'm facing a challenge, I'm like, "Oh, bring it. I'm going to figure this out." It's why I keep going. It's why I don't get threatened when I'm facing a challenge. I know that those challenges are inevitable. Every single one of us is going to face them. It is our attitude towards them that determines whether we overcome them or we just give up.

So think about a challenge that you're having right now, and I want you to pretend that you're a designer, because you are, you're designing your life. Put on that designer hat and think of some creative solutions to this challenge that you're facing. The quality of your life really does depend on the quality of your questions. When you begin to ask more of your brain, when you begin to ask more of yourself, you will come up with solutions that maybe you had never considered before that could be the very solution to help you overcome this challenge. And that's what it's like to curate your life like a designer.

So to recap, to curate your life like a designer, you need to, number one, see the potential, not the flaws. You need to create a vision for your life. You need to work with what you have, focus room by room. And then finally, cultivate a figureoutable mindset.

Have a beautiful, beautiful week, my friends. And I am on fire. I will tell you, if you join Live Like an Editor workshop, you're going to be thanking me. It's going to be so good. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/editor. You can read all about it. We are starting soon. We are going to have so much fun creating the magazine a few, because that's what we're doing. So I hope to see you at the workshop, and I hope to see you on our next episode. Cheers.