If You Don’t Design Your Life, Someone Else Will
I have a confession that might surprise people who’ve watched me build a speaking career around stages and rooms full of people: For most of my life, I’ve been nervous before every single event I’ve ever planned. The same quiet question shows up every time: Will anyone actually show up?
I felt it when planning my daughter’s birthday parties at every milestone — age 2, age 13, age 16 — and every stage in between. I feel it now when planning events for my business. And here’s what I keep relearning: The fear was never true. What got me through every one of those moments was two things: support and partnerships. It was the people in my life who showed up to help and the friends with talents and skills who made each event better than I could have done alone.
This week, as we celebrate Independence Day, I keep coming back to a line from The Joyful Leader®: If you don’t design your life, someone else will.
We Are Free to Design the Life We Want
Independence Day is about freedom, and there’s a kind of freedom we don’t talk about enough: Each of us is free to design the life we want.
We don’t always use that freedom. We let urgency design our days. We let other people’s expectations design our calendars. We let the loudest demand of the week decide what we give our energy to. And slowly, without ever deciding to, we end up living inside a life someone else designed for us.
The freedom to design your own life is a gift. Like any freedom, it means something only when we begin to use it.
What “Getting Set” Really Means
In my Ready, Set, Go® framework, this is the heart of the Set stage. Ready is about looking inward and understanding yourself. Set is about moving beyond that introspection and into action, designing the environment, relationships, and landscape where you and those around you can thrive.
I describe getting Set this way: It’s preparing yourself mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for the challenges you’ll face, making sure you have the tools and mindset to navigate life’s ups and downs. When we’re Set, we handle stress better, we hold onto our joy, and we build the resilience we need to thrive. Prioritizing that internal foundation lets us move through challenges with grace and purpose.
And here’s what I’ve learned in my own life: Designing your landscape doesn’t mean doing it alone.
You Don’t Have to Design It Alone
To do something different, you must take a risk on yourself. Every time I’ve taken that risk — every event, every milestone, every new chapter of my business — what sustained me wasn’t fearlessness. What held me up was the partnerships I built.
Turning a connection into something real takes more than a handshake. It takes engaging with people meaningfully, understanding what they need, and finding the ways your strengths and theirs create something neither of you could build alone. When you do that well, each connection opens a new door: the friend who shows up early to help set up, the collaborator whose talent fills the gap in yours, the person who believes in the thing you’re building before it’s finished.
Shawn Achor’s research points to something I’ve felt deep in my bones for years: Our social connections are one of the strongest predictors of how we perform and how we sustain ourselves under pressure. We’re not built to do hard things in isolation. We’re built to do hard things together.
And now, when I plan an event and that old fear shows up — Will anyone come? — I remind myself of the partnerships I have. There’s no need for the fear anymore! And to close out the summer, for my birthday month, I’m hosting my first of what I hope will be many events. Watching everything come together has been one of the most exciting parts of this whole journey.
Guidance: How I Try to Help
My business acronym carries a G, and the G stands for guidance. Guidance, to me, is helping people see that they get to design their own landscape and that they’re free to do it on their own terms.
It connects back to my mission: to help people feel inspired to maintain their energy to engage and connect with others. That’s not an accident in my own life. It’s part of my design. When we have the energy and the partnerships to engage with the people around us, we don’t just survive our seasons of pressure. We build lives, teams, and events that are stronger than anything fear would let us imagine.
Remember, you get to write the recipe for your own joy. And if your cake crumbles, you get to make a new one by designing your landscape again.
The Quarter Ahead
This summer, I’m devoting my writing to the Set stage of resilience and how each of us designs the life we want.
July: Designing Your Landscape. The immediate environment you live and lead inside.
August: Designing Your Sphere of Influence. The relationships and connections that ripple outward from you.
September: Designing Your Future. The vision you’re building toward and the steps that get you there.
What You Can Do This Week
This Independence Day, claim a little independence over your own design.
Choose one part of your life where you’ve been letting circumstances decide and decide for yourself instead. Then notice who’s already standing beside you, ready to help you build it. You may be far less alone than the fear wants you to believe.
Call to Action
Curious where your own foundation stands right now? Take the What’s Your Sphere of Resilience® Assessment and discover what’s ready to be designed.
Keep choosing joy!
