ThemeEnergy & Wellbeing
CardCard 31 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Lifestyle

Your way or style of living

The life you live outside work shapes what is possible inside it, and vice versa; the two are not as separate as they are often presented.

Lifestyle covers everything from where you live and who you live with, to how you spend your evenings, what you do for pleasure, how you relate to money, and what kind of pace feels right to you. These things are not trivial. They set the conditions in which your work happens.

Career choices and lifestyle choices are deeply entangled. A role that requires constant travel may be thrilling in one season of life and incompatible with another. A freelance lifestyle may feel liberating or isolating depending on what else is going on around it. Getting clear on what you actually want your life to look and feel like is an underrated form of career planning.

Many people plan their careers without much thought for the life they want those careers to serve. This card invites you to turn that around.

How to work on it

Practical ways to reflect on and develop this dimension of your working life. How it tends to look at different stages of a career, and where to put your attention.

Early career

Think about what kind of life you want your work to support, not just what kind of work you want to do. The two shape each other. This is a good moment to be honest about what matters to you before the weight of sunk costs makes it harder.

Mid career

Check whether your lifestyle is drifting in ways you did not consciously choose. Busy periods stretch into years. Financial commitments narrow what feels possible. Stepping back and looking at the whole picture can help you decide what to keep and what to renegotiate.

Later career

Think about which lifestyle choices have served you well and which you might make differently now. There is often more room to redesign than it feels like, and the experience of a long career gives you clearer sight of what actually matters to you.

A practical start

Describe your ideal working week in terms of pace, location, type of work, and how you spend your time outside work. Then describe your actual week. The gap between the two is a starting point.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does your ideal day look and feel like, including both work and the time around it?
In what ways is your current lifestyle aligned with what you actually value, and where does it feel like a mismatch?
Has your sense of what a good life looks like changed significantly in the last five years?
Are there lifestyle changes you keep postponing because of your work situation?
If your work had to fit around the life you want rather than the other way around, what would need to change?

Things to notice

Treating lifestyle as something you will address once your career is sorted. For many people, sorting the career without thinking about the life around it leads somewhere they did not intend to go.
Assuming your lifestyle preferences are fixed. What felt right at one stage of life can feel completely wrong later. Give yourself permission to want something different.
Comparing your lifestyle to others. The question of what is worth having in a life is personal. Someone else's answers, however admirable, are not necessarily yours.