Designing Your Life for Women, offered both in person and virtually is designed to help you learn and use the Life Design© method, popularized by the New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. You will leave with mindful awareness of where you are right now, new designs for balance and energy, new ways to frame problems you’ve been trying to solve for a while, insights on how to hone your decision making, and three possible future paths for your life.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have cancelled all of our in-person Designing Your Life for Women Workshops for 2020. Our first ever Virtual Program, featuring the Designing Your Life app and 3 highly interactive zoom workshops will be held Sept 26 – Oct 24, 2020. Although we all may not be able to travel, we will radically collaborate with other women safely from wherever we are, using Zoom and other online collaboration tools. Sign up here to join the journey!
Taught by Kathy Davies, Managing Director of the Stanford Life Design Lab and Susan Burnett, certified DYL Master Instructor and longtime business executive, this innovative digital solution gives you the opportunity to learn and practice ideas and tools contained in the NYT bestselling Designing Your Life, How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life in a life design community.
Each day you will access our DYL app to learn a life design concept or tool, take that learning into action, and use social features to share and gain insights from your community. Along the journey, you will participate in 3 highly interactive virtual workshops where we will work together real-time to reframe dysfunctional beliefs, explore the social and personal narratives that shape us, and dig into design tools to increase your creativity and confidence. We will use breakout discussions, and online ideation tools to share and collaborate. We will heighten a mindful awareness of where you are now, use design tools for balance and energy and improvements, practice ways to frame problems and get unstuck, gain insights into honing your decision making, and design three possible future paths – Odyssey Plans – for your life.
The following items are included in the experience
Session Details:
We look forward to meeting you and to engaging in this journey together!
We will:
Best of all, you will do this work in a supportive community of women with similar goals.
In 2019, I attended the Designing Your Life workshop in San Francisco to prepare for a career transition. The workshop equipped me with life design strategies and tools that enabled me to leave my job of seven years and become…
Susan’s Journey Designing a Virtual DYL Experience In our Designing Your Life (DYL) workshops, we teach participants how to identify, categorize and tackle difficult problems. My personal nemesis is anchor problems. Like a physical anchor, these problems hold us in…
AJ Bishop has worked in the financial services industry for over 15 years, leading and managing wealth management teams at top institutions like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase. Although she excelled in her field and moved up the corporate…
Christine Mosich has a passion for self-improvement. It began after a near-death experience when she was 17 years old. Preparing for the worst, she received her last rites in an intensive care unit. After recovering from the terrifying brush with…
Nirupa Umapathy is a diligent designer who isn’t afraid to take risks. In 2017, she committed to a year of unstructured play and rapid prototyping after leaving her career in finance. She focused on finding joy through travel and letting…
Can you use the life design process to navigate your way through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic? Join DYL facilitator Susan Burnett and workshop alumni Lauren Jolda for a conversation on loss, physical isolation and creating connection.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people to work remotely for the first time. When we work from home, we can feel pressured into answering emails constantly or working all hours of the day. Mental health suffers with an “always…
Think of a great invention. In most cases, all you see is the famous final product. You don’t see the trial and error that came before the success. But no good invention was perfected instantaneously. A designer used curiosity to…
Designing Your Life Workshop Leader
I am the Managing Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University, where I teach Product Design, Mechanical Engineering, and “Designing Your Life”. I have 15 years of experience developing electromechanical and software products, and proudly hold five patents. I consult with Silicon Valley companies, teach design thinking, conduct ethnographic research, and develop product strategies and concepts. My experience includes roles as Sr. Product Manager at Arena Solutions, Sr. Manager of Technical Programs at D2M, Inc, Manager of Mechanical Engineering at nLighten Technologies and Mechanical Engineer at Cardica. I am the co- creator of “Designing Your Life for Women” and a passionate advocate for design thinking as a methodology to empower social change.
Designing Your Life Workshop Leader
I have dedicated the last 35 years of my career to catalyzing individual and business transformation and growth. I have held executive positions at Hewlett Packard, Gap Inc., Deloitte, Yahoo! and BTS, where I have led large scale business changes, cultural renewal, employee engagement, leadership development, and global marketing services in the computer systems industry. I am an adjunct professor at Antioch University, teaching Women and Leadership, and I’ve taught Designing Your Life at Stanford, in companies and women’s retreats. I am a regular speaker, consultant, and author on leadership development. My Odyssey Plan for the next five years is all about empowering women to change the world!
Instructor and Owner Holistic Connections
As the founder of Holistic Connections, Inc., I have designed and taught healing workshops on forgiveness, emotional health, and all aspects of Kundalini Yoga. Through my training with some of the most highly skilled teachers on conscious living, including Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, PhD, of the Kundalini Yoga tradition and Leslie Hershberger, M.A., of the Enneagram of the Narrative Tradition, I’ve learned how to enable true healing to occur. My practice areas include: the Yoga of Authentic Relationships, Mind and Meditation, Stress and Vitality, Somatic Experiencing, the Enneagram, and the Emotional Polarity Technique. I enjoy my role in the Designing Your Life for Women workshop where we create a space for participants to unwind, and reveal a deeper awareness of themselves.
You will find women of all ages, backgrounds and career experiences participating in this retreat. Their common goal is to design a life and career with more joy, purpose and fulfillment. And they are usually at some kind of crossroad in their life, like starting their first job, or making a mid-career change, or deciding whether to leave or re-enter the workforce, or designing their retirement. The diverse group of women really brings different perspectives which makes the collaboration and community work so well.
Many women who come to our retreat have read Designing Your Life – How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life and want to do the exercises and new designs for their life in collaboration with others. It’s especially effective to be in a room with women you don’t know, as they have no history or preconceptions about you, and they have no stake in your decisions, unlike family and friends. So they can hear you and propose possibilities for you in a new and refreshing way. We work very hard to build collaboration and community in the first 30 minutes!
Women have told us its helpful to read the book in advance, and others have said they like doing the workshop first and then read the book. It’s a personal learning preference, not a requirement to read the book in advance of attending the retreat.
Check out our Workshop & Retreats page to learn more about both programs.
We include breakfast and lunch and a wine and cheese reception on Saturday, and breakfast on Sunday. We end before lunch on Sunday and you are responsible for your own dinners. We are happy to help you with recommendations and making arrangements for people who want to eat dinner together Saturday night.
You are responsible for securing your own lodging. Please see the Eventbrite registration pages for information about hotel options near each venue. You can also check travel sites, AirBnB and VRBO to find other options.
Yes, we provide a 10% discount for alumnae friends and family, for a total price of $720 (Your favorite alum will give you the promotion code.). We also provide a 50% discount to students and veterans, as well as a few scholarships. Please contact us to learn more.
We do not refund your money if you cancel, so please make sure you are able to make the date you have selected. If something unforeseen happens, please contact us about your situation, and we will see if we can transfer your registration to another workshop if one is available.