Don't Fold the Page: Blog Tour: Design The Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Meaningful Future by Ayse Birsel {Review + Giveaway!}

A joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you've always dreamed of, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer.

Life, just like a design problem, is full of constraints-time, money, age, location, and circumstances. You can’t have everything, so you have to be creative to make what you want and what you need co-exist. Design the Life You Love is a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you’ve always wanted, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer. Through four steps that reveal hidden skills and wisdom, anyone can design a life they love!

LINKS: Goodreads | Amazon | Facebook

Review:

I've been looking for something like this for some time now. I turned 27 this year and inspirational guides are a must. Most feel like a chore, like something that needs to be completed, so I've abandoned plenty of guides in the last year. Design The Life You Love is worth sticking around.

What I love about this guide is that the author tells you from the very beginning that you should spend about twenty minutes working on it and then step away for a little while or come back another day. She encourages breaks and that alone made me feel at ease. Whenever I see so much empty space or activities, I have the urge to finish them as quickly as possible. This is not the goal here. You start off taking a few minutes to draw something, anything, as a "warm up" just so that you can get in the creative mood. How awesome is that? There's plenty of space to expand your thoughts/drawings/etc at the end of the book. It has such a laid-back feel to it that I feel very relaxed whenever I pick it up and I actually look forward to the next activity.

Thinking about the future usually comes with stress/anxiety/terror but I've learned in the past few days that there are ways to break things down so that you can focus on the areas you want to improve. Design the Life You Love is an excellent concept and an easy/fun way to discover things about yourself and plan out your life. I highly recommend it.