This is a copy of part of an earlier wider blog post that was posted in Q3 2017.
For clarity this relates to the Designing your Life book specifically and not the more recent Designing Your Work Life book from the same authors. However, at first sight, there is no reason why you could not usefully do the latter book as a core part of a WOL Circle goal.
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I did my first WOL Circle in Q1 2017. While doing that I stumbled over the “Designing Your Life” book and as the circle ended I decided to read that book as my next personal development “project”. As a person who loves facilitating groups with a purpose, I decided to get some fellow travellers to journey through the book with me.
I used Slack and Zoom for this group as I had done for the WOL circle.
Like a WOL Circle, I ran the book club as a 12-week programme but this time I was clear that each call was at the end of our week’s “work” and in a sense we were “showing our work” in the call at the end of the relevant week. This worked better with this timing clarity than it had done in the circle.
Sonsoles and Monette who had been part of the circle with me were also part of this book club. Whilst we tried not to make the club a “love in” for circles, circles got mentioned frequently and naturally throughout the 12 weeks.
Doing a WOL circle first and then this book in a group is a potent sequence and combination. The best example of this is the Life Design Interviews in Designing Your Life where, in prototyping your life, investigating new life choices you need to contact people to understand what they do and how they do it, their joys and challenges and so on. For those that have done a full 12-week WOL Circle knowing, or getting to know, such people in the first place is simply a matter of making increasingly powerful contributions to such people. Personally speaking, when I got to the Life Design Interview part of DYL this was second nature or even easy to do. But for others in the group, this was a real challenge.
As it happens and spelled out in DYL, this sort of contact is required increasingly in today’s job market and I would speculate also for “freelancers” and solo professional services firms winning new business and gaining incremental business from existing customers.
It really felt like I was simply using the skills learned in a WOL circle and applying them in a new and even more powerful way.
Clearly, being part of a small group doing the WOL Circle content has a similar dynamic to being part of a group doing a life choices book with practical exercises for 12 weeks.
As I went through the DYL book, I increasingly considered how you could do DYL as your WOL Circle personal goal and whether it would be better to do them back to back as two separate but connected “programmes” in series rather than doing them in parallel and ultimately make your WOL circle personal goal totally related to DYL protototyping.
My current thinking suggests that doing them in series - WOL Circle first then DYL in a group second – is likely to be the best approach given that a person would be building a strong networking skills base prior to tackling DYL.
However, if someone was particularly keen and had the time to do both the WOL Circle content and the DYL content in one circle and there was at least one other person also doing both, I could see that being a powerful combination. Time would clearly be an issue and I would say that the DYL content would take 2 hours each week to read the book and do the exercises. This would be over and above the 1 hour circle meeting and whatever other time a person would spend on WOL exercises (1 hour minimum). The following table shows the current WOL Circle week titles and the DYL split that I used in the book club:
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