Stage 3: Vision & Direction | Ideal Lifestyle

Most people, when asked to picture their ideal life, go straight to the highlights reel: the big house, the travel, the career title that sounds good at dinner parties. And then they work backwards from that image, building goals around a life that would look great in a magazine but might not feel like much from the inside.

This exercise asks a different question. Instead of "what does your dream life look like from the outside?" it asks: what does an ordinary day feel like when your life actually fits you?

Daniel Kahneman spent decades studying the gap between how people remember their experiences and how they actually live them moment to moment. And he found that we are genuinely bad at predicting what will make us happy on a regular afternoon. We build lives optimised for the highlight reel while neglecting the person who has to live through the actual hours.

Laura King's research on "best possible selves" showed that people who spend time writing in detail about their ideal future life (not goals, not achievements, but the texture of daily living) show measurable increases in well-being and goal progress over the following weeks. The writing itself is what matters - it makes the vague desire concrete, and concrete desires are easier to move toward.

Sheldon and Lyubomirsky's work on self-concordant goals adds another layer. Goals that come from genuine personal interest and values produce more sustained effort and more satisfaction than goals chosen because they sound impressive or because someone else expects them. So the question underneath every lifestyle choice is: "Is this actually mine, or did I absorb it from somewhere?"

Peace of mind is a strange thing to put at the centre of a life design exercise, because we are trained to reach for ambition, growth, and impact. But when you ask people what they actually want their days to feel like, the answer that keeps showing up is: calm, settled, like things are where they should be, and there are no urgent tasks to run to. Peace of mind is a valid organising principle for how you build your life, it seems.

So this step has three exercises. First, you'll visualise a single ideal day in real detail. Second, you'll compare your ideal lifestyle elements to your current reality. Third, you'll run each element through a simple honesty test: does this give me peace of mind, or does it just sound impressive?

Exercises

Access your Notion workbook here.

Exercise 1: Your ideal day

Pick a random day, let's say a Wednesday. An ordinary one, not a vacation day, not a birthday, not the day you win an award. A very regular day in the life you want.

Write about it in present tense, as if it's happening right now and be very specific. What time do you wake up? What does the room look like? Is someone next to you? What do you smell? How does your body feel?

The details matter because they reveal your real preferences, not the ones you think you should have. If your ideal morning starts at 10am with a slow coffee and no alarms, that tells you something concrete about what you need. If it starts at 6am with a run, that tells you something different. Neither is better, it's just important information.

Write in first person, present tense. Be as specific as you can. Don't edit yourself - let the details flow as they come.

Morning

What time do you wake up? How do you wake up? What's the first thing you do? Where are you? Who's around? What does breakfast look like? How does your body feel?

Midday

What are you doing between late morning and early afternoon? Are you working? On what? Where are you working from? Who are you with? What does lunch look like? How's your energy?

Afternoon

How do you spend the middle of the day? Is there a shift in your energy or activity? Do you move your body? Do you see people? Are you alone? What does the environment look like?

Evening

How does the day wind down? What's dinner like, and who's there? What do you do with your evening? How do you feel at the end of the day? When do you go to bed?

After you've written it

Read through your ideal day once. and then sit with these questions:

• What surprised you about what you wrote?

• Which details felt most alive, most real?

• What's missing from your current life that showed up here?

• What's already present in your current life that you included?

• Did peace of mind appear anywhere in your ideal day? Where?

Exercise 2: The lifestyle audit

Your ideal Wednesday gave you the feeling, and this exercise will give you the structure.
Below is a table of 10 lifestyle elements. For each one, describe your ideal version, then describe your current reality, then rate the gap between them on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 means "basically there" and 10 means "completely different from what I want").

Be honest in the "current reality" column. The point here is clarity, not judgment. A big gap on something you care about is useful information. A small gap on something you don't care about is also useful information.

Note your ideal, your current reality, and the gap (1-10) between the two for the following elements: morning routine, work/creative time, physical movement, social connection, alone time, evening wind-down, weekend rhythm, environment/space, financial rhythm, and pace of life.

Reading your audit

Look at your gap scores. Which elements have the widest gaps? Those are your pressure points, the places where your daily life feels most out of alignment with what you actually want.

But also look at the elements with small gaps. Those are your anchors. They're already working. Knowing what's already in place is just as useful as knowing what's missing, because it shows you what to protect as you make changes.

• Which 2 or 3 elements have the widest gaps?

• Which elements are already close to your ideal?

• Is there one element that, if you fixed it, would improve several others?

Exercise 3: The peace of mind test

Here's the question that cuts through a lot of noise: would this give me peace of mind, or would it just look impressive?

People skip this question constantly. We reach for goals that sound good when we describe them to other people (the job title, the income number, the city, the schedule) without stopping to ask whether living inside that reality would actually make us feel settled, calm, and at ease.

Peace of mind is not the same as comfort. It's about whether the life you're building will let you sleep well. Whether the trade-offs you're making are ones you can live with over years, not just ones that sound brave in a conversation.

For each lifestyle element from your audit (exercise 2), ask yourself: "Does my ideal version give me peace of mind, or just look impressive? Why?"

Sitting with the results

If you found that several of your "ideal" lifestyle elements are more about looking impressive than feeling peaceful, that's normal. We absorb other people's definitions of a good life without realising it. The point of this test is to catch those borrowed desires before you build a life around them.

You might find that your real ideal is quieter than you expected. It might be simpler and less dramatic. That's very useful to know. Remember, a life that gives you genuine peace of mind will sustain you in ways that an impressive-sounding life won't.

• Where did you notice a gap between "sounds impressive" and "feels peaceful"?

• Were there any elements where peace of mind and impressiveness lined up naturally?

• What would change in your plans if peace of mind were the primary filter?

Reflection

Spend a few minutes with the questions below. Write your answers quickly, without overthinking.

• What does your ideal Tuesday tell you about the kind of person you want to be, day to day?

• Where are you already living parts of your ideal life? How can you protect those parts?

• What's one lifestyle element you could change in the next 30 days?

• If peace of mind were your only metric, what would you stop doing?

• What would you start doing?

• Who in your life is already living in a way that gives them visible peace of mind? What can you learn from how they've set things up?

• Write one sentence that captures the feeling of your ideal ordinary day.

AI companion (optional)

How to use: Paste your ideal day writing and your lifestyle audit results into the prompt where indicated. The AI will help you spot patterns, contradictions, and borrowed desires you might have missed.

Copy and paste the prompt below into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant:

I've been working through a lifestyle design exercise. I wrote a detailed description of my ideal ordinary day (my "ideal day") and completed a lifestyle audit comparing my ideal to my current reality across 10 elements: morning routine, work/creative time, physical movement, social connection, alone time, evening wind-down, weekend rhythm, environment/space, financial rhythm, and pace of life.
Here is my ideal day writing: [paste your ideal day text here]
Here are my lifestyle audit results: [paste or describe your audit results here]
I'd like you to help me:
(1) Notice patterns in what I described. What themes keep showing up? What seems to matter most to me based on what I wrote, not what I said matters?
(2) Identify the 2-3 biggest gaps between my ideal and my current reality. For each gap, help me think about what one concrete step I could take in the next month.
(3) Run the "peace of mind test" with me. For any lifestyle element where my ideal sounds more impressive than peaceful, help me dig into what I actually want versus what I think I should want.
(4) Point out anything that surprised you or seemed contradictory in what I wrote. Sometimes our real desires show up in the details we didn't plan to include.
Be direct. Don't flatter. If something I wrote sounds borrowed or performative, say so. I want honesty, not encouragement.