The Designing Your Life movement has connected the team to an incredible group of uniquely talented people, and engaging with Maria Shriver‘s team for their latest “Sunday Paper” is no different. Maria’s team interviewed Susan Burnett and Kathy Davies to learn more about Designing Your Life, and in particular how Designing Your Life for Women has empowered women around the globe. It’s worth checking out the full article but we’ve included few highlights below. You can learn more about our Designing Your Life for Women Virtual Journey here.
What hurdles do people, particularly women, experience when applying a Designer’s mindset to their lives?
Susan: “Women have a lot of fear. There’s a social narrative around what they’re supposed to do and so the first thing we do is talk about social narrative. What are the expectations of society, family, social media? What does a successful woman look like? And that’s important because it’s driving a lot of decisions even if its subconsciously driving them.
So we ask people to really look at their own social narrative. We see a lot of women limited by fear, fear of if they can really make a change, fear of whether they’ll ever be employed again, fear of whether they can actually have work where they thrive or will it always be a drain, fear of never having a family or a partner. Design Thinking helps with these fears because it’s a neutral process. It’s a process that starts with breaking it down to then build your way forward.”
Community as a Design Process
Kathy: “That feeling of “I’m okay, there’s nothing wrong with me, and I have agency and I have process” is transformative. I would argue that we see it in our women’s program, but we see it in our company programs as well. We see groups of people come together and realize “oh, we are all dealing with challenges.”
