Designing Your Life

6-week small groups program for early career employees

Creating exciting possibilities for your employees and organization

The Designing Your Life program (DYL) helps your employees apply design-thinking to their work, build engagement, and add value to your organization.

It gives them the tools to:

  • Shift from feeling stuck to taking proactive steps

  • Expand their view of what’s possible

  • Take action instead of overthinking

  • Gain clarity on what energizes them

  • Build resilience by reframing problems

  • Develop a playful, curious mindset

  • Strengthen their support networks

As a result, it opens up a world of possibility to them while equipping your organization with skills in creativity and innovation to support future growth.

As the marketplace competes for top talent, DYL sends a strong message to your young employees:

“We want you to grow – here.”

Using DYL, you can help them:

  • Feel supported in their development

  • Learn to see a future inside your organization

  • Align their values with their work

  • Become highly engaged contributors

  • Share their aspirations and design their future

  • Be part of a culture that attracts the best

And by keeping the conversation going, you can enhance employee well-being while staying ahead of any potential changes or turnover.

“But won’t it encourage our top talent to re-think their careers and leave?”

We find the opposite tends to be true.

By developing design-thinking, individuals learn to make their work work for them. And they’re better equipped to see a future that will work for them where they are.

Furthermore, when employees aren’t supported in their growth, they’re more likely to start looking elsewhere. Feeling trapped, unchallenged, or unfulfilled, they begin to disengage quietly before eventually quitting.

It’s better to empower your top talent to dream within your organization. That’s where DYL helps.

How to help your early career employees design their lives
and add value to your organization

  • SIGN UP EMPLOYEES

    Book a call to talk through the details and sign up (up to 10)

  • LEARN & APPLY

    Your employees learn design-thinking and how to use life design tools

  • GROW

    Start designing work that sparks growth for your employees and organization

BOOK A CALL

Your partners in developing your employees

As your program partners, we bring a passion to help young professionals design meaningful lives and careers. We draw on years of experience as managers, leaders, and credentialed coaches with a track record of helping hundreds of people gain clarity to move their careers forward with purpose.

What’s included in the 6-week program?

One-on-one coaching and peer-learning helps your employees develop design-thinking and apply it in their day-to-day work

  • We begin with a 1-hour intake call to discuss the program, share details of your 5-10 employees, and understand goals.

  • Format

    • Individual Coaching (2 x 1-hour sessions): A pre-program session with both coaches for personalized goal setting to maximize the program’s impact based on individual needs. A post-program review to measure outcomes and support sustained growth.

    • Group Sessions (6 x 1.5-hour sessions): Creates an intimate environment where participants can learn from peers, share experiences, and build supportive networks.

    Core Topics

    • Introduction & Designing Your Life: Debunking dysfunctional beliefs about life planning, understanding life design as a process, and learning the five mindsets of design thinking.

    • Setting Your Compass: Understanding your current situation, clarifying values and beliefs based on your "Workview" and "Lifeview", gaining alignment and direction, and knowing what matters to you.

    • Energize Me!: Discovering what activities engage and energize you, identifying patterns and insights, getting unstuck and addressing common roadblocks to life design, introducing reframing techniques to shift perspectives and find new solutions, and showing how to challenge dysfunctional beliefs and create new, empowering narratives.

    • Many lives to live: Introducing the "Odyssey Planning" exercise: creating three alternative five-year life plans, encouraging brainstorming and exploring different possibilities without judgment, focusing on creating well designed lives, not neccesarily just one perfect life, and emphasizing that you should build prototypes of your life.

    • Trying Stuff: Explaining the importance of prototyping to test ideas and gather feedback, introducing two prototyping methods: "Life Design Interviews" and "Prototype Experiences", showing how to conduct informational interviews to learn from others' experiences, and creating small, low-risk experiments to test potential paths.

    • Moving Forward: Building meaningful connections, making value-aligned decisions, embracing change, and taking action with clarity and support.

  • Each session begins with reflection and sharing, followed by introducing a key idea or skill. To help them prepare, participants are given assignments (approx. 1 hour) prior to each session.

    We draw on proven techniques and exercises from Designing Your Work Life (e.g., reframing, energy mapping) to drive transformation and engagement.

  • Each employee has:

    • Access to a secure coaching platform with weekly assignments, additional resources, and direct messaging to coaches.

    • The opportunity to make or deepen friendships within the group.

    After Week 6, we conduct a follow-up session with the HR or team leader, to review progress, provide feedback, and determine if additional support is needed.

  • We bring our passion and expertise to help your early career employees gain clarity and design meaningful careers. To make it a sustainable success, it will also require the full commitment of the employees and the organization throughout the program and beyond it:

    • Your employees will be asked to engage in the discussions and exercises in order to benefit from them. Similarly, they will need to give time and application to pre-session assignments (around 1-hour each). Finally, to stay engaged at work, they should build on what they have discovered about their values, motivations, and aspirations, and continue to develop them using life-design tools.

    • Your organization will need to provide geniune support throughout the program and beyond it. Having gained knowledge and skills in design-thinking, for example, your employees will be keen to explore how to apply them in their daily work. This enthusiasm can soon be extinguished by a lack of support or an unconducive environment. So it is important that the organization and the employees’ leaders are committed not only to the program but its application afterwards.

    With these measures in place, the program will lay a strong foundation for you to build upon to help your employees thrive.

  • The cost of the program is $300 per person (plus tax) for a group of 5-10 employees.

    To give you an idea of value this represents:

    • An individual coaching session normally costs $100 per person and a group coaching session $50 per person

    • The program includes 2 x one-on-one coaching sessions with BOTH our credentialled coaches, an equivelent of $400.

    • Together with the 6 x group sessions (an equivalent of $300), the program cost saving is just over 50%.

    • This does not factor-in the additional benefits of weekly 15-min check-ins, the CliftronStrengths report, and 24/7 access to the online platform.

    Furthermore, although difficult to quantify, consider the potential savings on the high costs of staff sickness, turnover, and hiring that the program helps to combat – as well as the positive influence on your workplace that each participant will bring upon successful completion.

    We hope the program details and cost per participant gives you a good feel for both the outstanding quality of the content and the value your organization will gain through the program.

FAQs

  • In our experience, the best group size is between 5 and 10 participants.

  • The program comprises 11 hours of coaching (2 x 1-hour one-on-one, 6 x 1.5-hour group), and approx. 6 hours of assignments through the program duration. To gain the benefits of the program, employees need to be committed and have the time available to fully participate.

  • Our program requires minimal administrative effort from your team – we provide a simple onboarding process. We then handle the program logistics, coaching, and program delivery. freeing up your staff to focus on other initiatives. Your team's primary role is promotion and communication with your employees.

  • We work with you on the program schedule and discuss how to best integrate it into your existing development initiatives.

  • The program focuses on practical application and provides proven design-thinking tools your employees can use immediately to make positive changes for long-term growth and fulfillment. We collect feedback to track progress and measure impact. We also encourage participants to stay connected with their cohort and coaches for continued support.

  • As mentioned above, we understand this concern. However, we believe the inclusion of this program is an attractive option for the employees you wish to retain and develop (please see further details above). Of course, some employees may leave eventually—but those who go are more likely to:

    ✅ Leave on good terms and remain brand advocates.

    ✅ Stay longer because they find new motivation inside the company.

    ✅ Explore internal career moves instead of quitting.

Create possibilities for your employees and organization
with design thinking

  • Build higher engagement

  • Drive professional development

  • Improve employee well-being

  • Attract and retain top talent

  • Increase creativity and innovation