Feedback on Workshop Design Your Life

Gábor says

First of all, thank you again for offering the life design workshop. It was well facilitated, well organised, a valueable workshop. I wish you will have more opportunities in the future as an elder in your community to support the others by sharing your knowledge.

While I was at Rakesh’s course, I lived in a car with Ana, and was exploring the world to find a place to settle. Compared to that, by the time I joined your workshop, we were settled down in Spain and are expecting a baby. I’m saying this because on one hand, I felt well-prepared joining your workshop and saw it rather as a second round of life-design exercises for myself. At the same, my life progressed quite a lot, so it also felt absolutely timely to do all this exercises again. In fact, this is one the lessons I took away: revisit my life design at least at every major life change. My life-design toolbox is now full of great tools, thank you!

Things resonated well with me:

• The delivery of the sessions was always very clear, straight to the point, and giving enough space for the participants to contribute.
• I enjoyed it a lot that you introduced tools from a wide range of domains, not limiting your audience to “permaculture principles” or so.
• The web of goals tool was very helpful for me. It’s a very simple visualization yet it enables me to see the relations between my needs and activities clearly. I've just done this exercise today again and found some weak links.
• The Arno’s Wheel (“Contemplaying saying”) is brilliant. Such a powerful way to connect different dimensions. It underlines that change is only possible in the here-and-now through action in a profound way.
• You managed to squeeze in quite a lot in the 80 min sessions without the feel of being rushed. Well done!
• My aha moment: I don’t have a vision statement for my life. I want to have one.
• I really appreciate your transparency about the workshop outline upfront and thank you for sharing it in you blog. You lead by example.

Things didn’t make it to the previous list (observations, feelings):

• I missed engaging more with the other participants.
• Bullet journaling didn’t work for me. What I really enjoy in keeping a journal is the extensive writing. I don’t want to be straight to the point and systematic. Usually that’s my life at work: being organized, being productive, eliminating waste. When I’m with myself (through my journal), I wanna be absolutely free of expectations. I stopped doing BJ after a week or so.
• Once or twice I got confused for what reason we were talking about a certain tool. Like what is that we want to achieve by the end of the workshop. Maybe this was just somewhat confusing for me coming from a SADIMET-driven workshop with Rakesh where each tool was clearly connected to one of the phases and it was clear that the end goal is to have the first iteration of your design that you can live.
• I wonder if it was necessary to have a group vision. There was no time for the group to form. I wonder how it would have been if in the very first session you ask us to write down our personal vision statement (dreaming phase), and iterate it during each workshop, maybe even sharing with the others to say it out loud to others to manifest it stronger.
• It sucks have a low-fi internet connection but I’m enjoying to be in nature.

Milou says

Je workshop heeft me geholpen bij bewustwording van wat ik belangrijk vind en het belang van voedende gewoontes creëren. Dankjewel. Mooi om te beseffen hoe we invloed kunnen uitoefenen op het designen van ons leven, en actie te ondernemen.

Clément says

The workshop helped me in different ways. First of all I became way more serious concerning my Journaling. After the workshop I went further into bullet journal tutorials and made a combination of the things that are valuable to me. So each day is logged, which falls into weekly sum ups falling into monthly sum ups.

The key here is that I have a rational tool to keep track of what I have done in a month and make conclusions of how I behave regarding what happened during a certain month. Applying this for a lifetime and I think I can really draw good lessons out of it! It also is a tool for making sure I keep achieve the important goals that I've set up and that can be forgotten in the chaos of life sometimes.

Concerning the tools you described in your workshops I particularly, as you know maybe, enjoyed the tools helping you sorting out what are the positive and negatives aspects of things you are doing in life. The quotes we had at the last meeting were very valuable as I write them again at the beginning of each month as a reminder of mindset to keep. Also the firsts workshops with the vision of the wheel was a great eye opener!

To me, I think a part that could really be interesting to work on during a workshop is the implementation of the tools for everyday life. I feel like we have covered very interesting topic and powerful tools. However I question the reccurence of when to work again with the tools. Obviously Journaling is a daily task, but for the rest, I haven't had a clear idea of when to use them in daily life?

I also wanted to evoke the SMART way of formulating goals. Do you know this tool? This is a tool that I use personally because it's the way we have been taught to formulate goals in Physiotherapy for our treatments. But the key of this tool is really to break down a global vision into making it specific and doable on a weekly basis. And it starts by the way we formulate our goals. This was an idea that I wanted to share.

Katharina says

Now is the time for my feedback! Still, I am very happy that you asked me to participate in your first workshop session. Thank you! I am surprised that you offered us to work on topics that I am interested in general.

The exercises are useful completions to the routines that I have and challenged me to work even more on them.

I enjoyed their diversity and to talk about them with the group. Nontheless I found it helpful that we did not have to answer each of them publicly. Some content might be too private.

For me, the structure and the content of your presentations were clear. It is great that you offer us to check the slides afterwards again! You took time to explain and answered our questions. Every session had a different topic/theme which made it different from others. Keep up with it!

Concerning the duration of the workshop: 1 ½ h were nice! If you think about changing it, I think you could try 2h to have more time to discuss, but not shorter than 1 ½ h.

There is still something which is a bit hard for me to get and to explain: the first session. As I can not explain accurately why I had difficulties, here are some of my thoughts about it:

I remember that I liked working on the saying. My interpretation was far more open and chaotic than yours. So I had difficulties to understand the wheel(rational and tidy) at first.

Maybe you prepared too much content for the first session. Maybe I was a bit overwhelmed meeting new people and seeing you again after a while... I could not always follow during the session. But when I checked your slides afterwards, everything was clear!

Let me know if you have any questions!