Discover Define Design: Create Structures & Take Action

Life by Design

Hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson explore the third principle of their Discover, Define, Design Framework, Design, in this episode. Design is the culmination of the first two steps, where you’ve discovered an issue and defined what’s wrong and now need to take action to design a solution. So Jessilyn and Brian talk all about creating solutions and adding structures for success into your situation.

The three main points that Jessilyn and Brian have grounded Define in give structure to their advice and revelations. First, they ask what immediate actions you are committing to based on the Design, second, they ask what structures around the Design will make it successful, and third, they urge exploration of the different tools available to help achieve success. Within these baseline takeaways, they explain how Design works, what structures to look for, how they used the framework in their own lives, and suggest apps to assist you in moving your solution forward. It’s a key episode on how to take immediate action to improve the conflict where you started.

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Resources discussed in this episode:

• SMART goals

Contact Jessilyn and Brian Persson | Discover Life By Design:

• Website: DiscoverLifeByDesign.ca
• Instagram: DiscoverLifeByDesign
• Facebook: Discover Life By Design
• Linkedin: Discover Life By Design

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Transcript

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your host Brian and Jessilyn Persson, where we help professional couples resolve conflict and improve communication within their relationship. This episode, we're going to focus on Design. As the creators of the Discover, Define, Design Framework, we are taking you through the Design piece of the framework to help you with any of the conflicts you have in your relationship, to help resolve and improve communication. So Design, this means creating or imagining a new solution for your situation, and adding structures that will allow your situation to succeed.

Brian Persson: [00:00:44] That's right. So as per the last couple episodes we walked through Discover and Define. Those are how to explore the emotions of the situation and also uncover the facts of the situation. And we, in those episodes used a situation we had in the past, which caused a lot of tension and that was taking out the garbage. So we're going to carry forward with the Design principle of the Discover, Define, Design Framework around taking out the garbage. So one of the first questions that we ask is what immediate actions are you committing to based on your design.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:25] Yeah. And on that, so the solution for me was to have you, of course, take out the garbage before it overflowed, and preferably without me having to ask. So the immediate actions for that situation that I contributed to was agreeing to tell you if I saw the garbage overflowing in case you weren't around seeing it and asking you to put a item in your calendar to remind you that you need to take out the garbage.

Brian Persson: [00:01:58] Right, yeah. And we really lean on trying to get our Design to be immediate. So the actions that we are going to take towards anything we're going to create into our future, we really aim to have it as a quick solution so it can't, you know, wait a couple of years or wait a couple months, whatever it might look like to start acting on that design. Something has to be done immediately. And the reason is because you will succeed more if you take quicker action around whatever you're trying to create in your life. And we've experienced that because any time we move quickly towards a particular goal of ours, we will maybe not hit it out of the park, but we will always move ourselves forward more so than if we just sat on it and and tried to think of like, the perfect solution.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:54] Yeah, it's better to take action and fail than to take no action at all. That's a great segway into your goals and your vision and your dreams. It may not, your partner may not always understand what you're thinking or be on board with it. That doesn't mean you should just sit on it and not let anything happen. And I say that coming from a place of, for example, our real estate portfolio. I had a vision when we bought our first property together back in 2009, I thought it was extremely exciting. I know it's supposed to be boring, but I was just like, thrilled with the fact that we owned a property. And that day I decided every two years we're going to buy another property. And while I did not communicate that to you, I kept on that goal until 2016, I think it was when you came home and from work one day and you're like, I am maxed out, no more properties, I can't handle anymore. And I was, in my head I was like, that doesn't fit my goals or my vision. So you left that weekend because you had to go take care of a property in another province and I did some massive googling to find out how I can help you, because you didn't understand my vision of our real estate goal and why I want to go there.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:13] And I wasn't a good communicator at that time. I didn't really know how to do it effectively, and so I knew I couldn't just convince you to take on more real estate and to do this more, the more work was going to bring. So I signed you up for a real estate investing networking group. And when you came home and I told you, you absolutely were not excited. But I was. You in, as a good, you take on things as you are pretty chill at sometimes, and you went to the first networking group meeting and from there you were so excited, like you came home, I think we even talked about this in a previous episode, how you wanted to share it with me, and I was just sleeping. But from there that changed us and we bought two more properties that next year because you saw a whole different vision of what that could look like. And that was based, you know, the quick action there was me saying, that doesn't fit my goal. Boom, I'm signing you up. And that helped change your perspective.

Brian Persson: [00:05:16] Yeah. And inside of that, one of the lessons that we learned there that we maybe didn't know back then, as you said, you weren't the biggest communicator. But sometimes you can't communicate inside of the relationship. Sometimes there's literally things that the partner will not hear. And in that case, I was not hearing the fact that we needed to keep growing our real estate portfolio. All I was hearing was that tenants can be a pain, I'm I'm overworked on a lot of the management of our current portfolio, and that I don't want the future of taking on more and having more work that I have to deal with. So, but what we've learned today and what we actively employ in our relationship, is to bring others in. So we bring in other people to help us communicate amongst us. So in this case, you you brought in a real estate networking group to help communicate to me the power of real estate. And it really worked because, you know, when I walked into that room and I saw that there was every walk of life inside of what it means to be a real estate in...