Feel it to Believe it: Design Feeling for Creating the Life you Want
“What is it that you want to feel from your experience?” I asked a class of D-school students at Stanford this question during a workshop on designing their summer.
Feeling is something we become disconnected from in the barrage of our visually and intellectually driven world. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever forgotten you even have a body during a busy day… be honest).
Our bodies hold a tremendous amount of information:
- Our experience of the world around us: smell, sound, sensation inside + out
- Whether we are safe or in danger (physical or existential)
- Emotions and a constant process of making meaning
Our bodies are a super-computer, constantly processing and synthesizing multiple streams of information from the past, present and (if we can take the time to consider it) what we want from the future.
Why it’s important to design from a place of feeling
Taking the time to consider what you want reclaims authorship of your experience. Instead of being at the whim of what comes your way, you reclaim the co-creator seat.
Designing from a place of feeling gets us out of our heads. It peels back the ideas and concepts of what will make us happy and gets at the root of what it is we’re after.
Danielle Krettek of Google’s Empathy lab has recognized this, moving the lab’s work from design “thinking” to “design feeling.”
What’s more, our bodies offer a vast and complex network of senses, emotions, and connections here to offer your brain a broader palette than just reason with which to dream and experience what you want. And the more you can feel it, the more you can be it.
One more time… with feeling
Feeling can be hard sometimes. If we’ve only known urgency, it’s hard to feel spaciousness. If we’ve only known scarcity, it can be difficult to embody abundance.
Our bodies hold patterns of what we’ve known (from child-hood and present day experience) as a baseline. When you actually feel what you are welcoming in, you are rewriting that baseline.
Research already shows that if you even imagine yourself throwing a baseball successfully, it already starts re-writing the neural pathways as if you’ve already done it.
Similarly, taking the time to feel what it if you would receive from success (and the gratitude for that success) starts to wire your system to act on and receive it.
Feel it is Healing it
Bringing in that feeling can also heal the parts of us that resist or hold beliefs that keep us from what we truly want in our lives.
- The parts of us that believe we don’t deserve the love, or money, or time you want.
- That believe we aren’t supported or that we’ll be abandoned/unsafe if we actually let help in.
- That believe we need to twist ourselves into something other than who we naturally are to be accepted/rewarded.
When we allow ourselves to really feel what it would be like to receive the very thing these parts of us are so desperately wanting, we can unlock healing that allows for greater wholeness, vitality and capacity to welcome in what we want.
Design from a place of feeling
It all begins with the same question I offered those students.
“What is it that you want to feel?”
From that place, you can design how you might get there and invite learning along the way.
Reach out with your feelings, desires and stories at thisisreichou@gmail.com, on instagram or Linkedin. I’d love to hear them and to see how they we might invite them into your world together.
