AgiliZen™ is a set of emotional skills, thought processes, daily practices and principles that enable you to master the art of Agile Living and Life Design. AgiliZen life skills equip you with tools and strategies to embrace unpredictable change and confidently:
- Reduce clutter in mind, heart, body and home
- Design simple, flexible, organizing systems to serve your optimal functioning and easily change them as needed
- Teach yourself new habits and change existing habits
- Orchestrate time, money and information to enhance your overall life satisfaction and well-being
Agility itself is a foundational life skill. Agility skills are vital requirements for cultivating and sustaining healthy life functioning. Personal agility is a critical component of emotional healing, building self-worth, reducing stress, anxiety, and overwhelm and of improving quality of life.
Anyone can benefit from cultivating personal agility skills but if you experience any of the following on a fairly regular basis, you are likely to benefit significantly.
- Does life often feel like a roller coaster between having too much and feeling like you can’t seem to have, be, or do enough?
- Do you feel deeply misunderstood by the people around you and exhausted from the stress of trying to “get along”?
- Is your brilliance and high potential often overshadowed by challenges with getting things done?
- Do you find yourself getting stuck in painful patterns of overworking, fits of frustration, impatience, anxiety, depression, addictive behavior, compulsive apologizing and explaining, or “OCD” (overwhelm, clutter and disorganization)?
- Do you feel like you could be doing so much more with your life - if only you could:
- manage your time better?
- have better people skills?
- be more patient?
- go to bed or get up earlier?
- eat better?
- pick one thing and focus on it till it’s done?
- Do you struggle with conflicts between what you need, want, value and what you actually do?
- Do you have difficulty defining enough?
You are not alone. There are millions of us suffering from “stuckness” – that feeling like we are stuck in a perpetual cycle of chronic dissatisfaction, overwhelm and frustration and the chronic disorganization, relationship, health, money, career, and clutter challenges that come with it.
The quality of our relationship with ourselves is directly impacted by our ability to
- Accept ourselves as we are
- Design organizing systems that fit our needs, and
- Teach ourselves daily habits that empower us to feel good about ourselves in the present and also lead to overall health, long-term growth and wellbeing.
When our relationships with ourselves, our things, spaces, careers, money, time, information and with other people are a source of stress and overwhelm, our capacity for self-respect, self-confidence, health, and quality of life become significantly impaired.
If conventional approaches to reducing stress, organizing yourself and managing your time, money, paper and information have not worked for you, or have left you feeling bad about yourself, it’s time for a paradigm shift.
You are not hopeless!
You may be stuck in a paradigm that is biased against your brain type or level of emotional intensity, but you are not defective. The ability to organize confidently and with agility doesn’t fix everything in your life or exempt you from life’s curveballs, but it does give you a strong foundation for meeting life’s challenges.
Isn’t it time to let go of the quest to fix yourself and get started cultivating and strengthening your natural aptitude for agility instead?
Trying to fix yourself to fit your life or to fit your vision of how you “should” do things doesn’t work in the long term. What really works is learning how to flexibly design your life to fit you as you are. By understanding and respecting yourself as you are, you can more easily focus on cultivating your strengths, harnessing weaknesses, and using your creative problem solving talents to figure out your needs and design solutions that work for you.
Agile Life Design™ is about seeing your life as a learning laboratory – a kind of design studio where you get to continuously apply AgiliZen skills and experiment as you evolve yourself. It’s a life long adventure in learning about yourself and noticing how you naturally learn and organically change so that you can facilitate your personal growth and goal achievement.
When we focus on noticing what meets our needs or not instead of judging ourselves and comparing ourselves to others, we discover amazing things about ourselves. We discover than we can learn to like things that are “good for us” even if we currently dislike or resist doing them. It’s a power tool we all have, but most of don’t have an instructional manual for how to master it. Agile Life Design™ and AgiliZen provides that manual.
Agile living and learning is about implementing one small experiment at a time as we design and teach ourselves new habits. In the process, we teach ourselves new ways of seeing ourselves and our relationships with our homes, things, money, work, and time. We learn to let go of seeking to control outcomes and stop expecting things to turn out as we planned. Instead, we learn to embrace the mysteries and uncertainties of life – to expect the unexpected and be ready to adapt our plans as needed.
Agile is about learning to iterate wisely instead of repeating mistakes, and become ready to make the most of whatever comes our way in life. In the cultivation of personal agility, we discover the kind of satisfaction which only comes from restoring faith in ourselves.
Nothing can replace the kind of inner security and confidence that comes from learning how to masterfully orchestrate the 8 Dances of Life™ to serve our higher purpose and functioning needs.
We emerge victorious when we feel entitled to embrace our imperfections, release shame, and realize that we already are good enough. Winning is when we see ourselves in our wholeness, fill the holes in our souls with self-compassion, and cultivate our strengths as we create a new story about who we are.
When we make room for surprising new possibilities to reveal themselves to us, we realize that our potential is not actually “limitless,” but our limitations are often NOT permanent. We can become more organized. We can shape our own habits a little bit at a time. We can evolve in ways we can’t even imagine right now.
My life’s purpose as I understand it right now, is to share the agile paradigm and support people who have been deeply affected by the biases in our culture against “outliers” – people whose brains are different, whose thinking, learning and organizing styles are not common or average.
Simply stated, my hope is to spread the idea that “The Art of Agile Living and Life Design skills are essential to Cultivating Your Strengths, Expressing your Creativity, Accomplishing Goals, Reducing Stress and Improving Health, Well-being and Quality of Life.”
Cultivating personal agility and designing your life to fit you are also vital and necessary elements of effective treatment for anyone who has suffered trauma, anxiety, depression, or addictions. Whether a person has been labeled as ADHD, PTSD, Intense, Highly Sensitive, gifted, Asperger’s or other label that reflects brain differences, what they all have in common is a need to either harness or cultivate agility. The labels aren’t the point. Labels can help us understand ourselves better, but the real point is to improve quality of life, right? Whatever the labels are, we all need certain life skills to function in society. Today, personal agility, emotional agility and resilience, and design thinking skills are essential skills that everyone needs to truly flourish.
Today, we all need mental agility: the ability to appreciate cognitive differences, listen and communicate in ways that respect differences, and to resolve the inevitable conflicts without resorting to verbal or physical violence.
Everyone can benefit from learning to design their personal environments to fit their needs AND then adapt their environment, tools, and systems to evolve as needs change.
Agile living is not a destination. It is a way of life. It is a way of orchestrating and flexibly organizing your daily life. With practice, Agile becomes a way of being – a mindset.
I teach people how to use Agile Life Design and AgiliZen to cultivate and nurture their personal potential. How to:
- Optimize daily functioning in service of your evolving life purpose.
- Align short-term needs with long-term priorities.
- Shape daily habits to optimize overall functioning
- Facilitate and automate decision making
- Apply attention design and mindfulness principles to reduce stress, overwhelm, and frustration
- Strengthen emotional resilience, self-compassion, self-understanding
- Stabilize energy and productivity cycles.
- Incorporate agile, iterative, design principles and strategies into the way you make commitments and accomplish goals
- Design simple, fast, organic productivity and organizing systems that fit your unique life purpose, personality, drives, values and style.
- Encourage cooperation and commitment to follow-through on agreements.
- Enhance mindfulness, attention and focus.
AGILE LIFE DESIGN™
Just like a plant that stops growing – procrastination, stuckness, overwhelm, and exhaustion are all signs that you need a “course-correction.” Agile Life Design™ provides a unique set of tools for people who don’t fit the mold and weren’t born to be “followers” of other people’s systems.
Agile Life Design™ empowers you to design and tweak your relationship with yourself so that you design your lifestyle, environments and systems to serve you. Unconditional self-respect and acceptance is a required foundation for flourishing with confidence that whatever life sends your way, you can adapt, evolve and make it work.
Agile Life Design is about respecting yourself as you are, cultivating the courage to course correct as needed, and strengthening your inner source of faith to take the first step in a new direction, even though there is no certainty that things will turn out the way you expected them to. Designing your life is an adventure in learning who you really are and making the most of that, not an exercise in trying to force yourself into pre-determined, predictable and conventional molds.
Ready to get started?
Before you do anything else, if you resonate with the idea of Agile Life Design™, I suggest getting my free AgiliZen and Agile Life Design™ ToolKit. You’ll receive a couple of my most popular PDFs:
Simplifying Your Life: Agile Life Design Strategies for Doing What Matters Most 8 page Printable PDF
Myths, Facts and Agile Life Design Strategies for Thriving with Adult ADHD A 6 page Printable PDF
|
Resources for Exploring AgiliZen™ and Agile Life Design™
WARNING: I Use my Blog as an Evolutionary Writing and Design Studio
Blogging for me is like a “lab” where I learn, create, experiment, try out new ideas and share my learning in real time. The ideas here are often not 100% polished, but since I’m always learning and growing and tweaking, they are never “done” anyway. : ) I do my best to communicate clearly, but if you find something confusing or encounter a typo, let me know and I’ll correct it when I can. To help me focus and manage my own perfectionist tendencies, I purposefully apply the 80/20 rule before publishing. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have a website or blog online at all. Thanks for understanding!
A few of my articles introducing Agile Life Design…
Below are some of my most popular articles…
- Agilizing Your Mind: Unlearning Clutter Producing Thinking Habits
- 5 Steps to Cultivating the Power of Habit and Agile Thinking Habits
- Chronic Procrastination and Resistance: How we Learn to Procrastinate.
- What Causes Chronic Disorganization – How to Heal the Trauma
- Is it Adult ADHD or Creative Personality Type?
- Are you an adult with ADHD or ADDish traits?
Ever thought you might be “gifted” or Neurodiverse?
You may also want to visit
- Best of My Articles Index
- My Presentations List with Free Samples
- Agile Living Reading List Book suggestions which I feel offer empowerment rather than prescribing how you “should be” or “should do” things. There is always more than one way to fulfill a need. When you are “different” you are highly likely to be frustrated by conventional wisdom and advice. Embracing your own custom-designed, unconventional, and even counter-intuitive strategies for getting things done is a priceless key to satisfying productivity.
- Agile Learning Center {UNDER CONSTRUCTION]
Philosophical Foundations of my Approach to Coaching
I support the advancement of respect-based contextual psychology, acceptance, and education as a humane and compassionate approach to healing the emotional suffering and traumas that are associated with cognitive and neurological diversities.
In 2012, I became a Member of Association for Contextual Behavior Science which promotes the compassionate and respect-based application of functional, contextual cognitive and behavioral science to alleviate human suffering and advance human well being. This includes
- ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy) – Shares similar foundation to my approach to compassion, acceptance and respect-based coaching and organic learning.
- RFT (Relationship Frame Theory) (Simply put: We learn our sense of self and learn to define our likes, dislikes, boundaries, limits and more in relationship to our contexts / environments, the language we speak, the stories we tell, the metaphors we acquire for life, time, risk-taking, trust, organizing, motivation, and more. Because so much of ourselves is learned through unintentional shaping, becoming aware of how this works and mastering the ability to design experience that shape us consciously is our best hope for humanely changing ourselves and our habits.
- The philosophy of Functional Contextualism
(Our identities, emotions and behaviors are driven by our philosophical assumptions and metaphors about our contexts. Because people and behaviors change when their context or environment changes, people usually thrive and heal best when their environment fits their unique needs.)
Print
Facebook
Twitter
email
PDF
LinkedIn
Diigo
RSS