The Life Brief: A Simple Practice to Navigate Life's Big Decisions - Softcover

Wan, Bonnie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982195525 ISBN 13: 9781982195526

Verlag: Simon Element, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Life is a creative act. Start living a meaningful life with this soul-shaking, “brilliant companion on the road to more aliveness” (Dave Evans, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Designing Your Life) to identify your core values and create the life you want.

We all have moments when we doubt the path we’re on. Am I in the right relationship? Is this the career for me? Is this as good as it gets? These questions can feel uncomfortable without a method for uncovering the answers.

Enter the USA TODAY bestseller, The Life Brief, a simple yet effective playbook for navigating life’s decisions, crossroads, and curveballs. Modeled after the creative brief, a tool used by the most innovative companies in the world to unlock clarity and unleash action, The Life Brief carves a path for living with intention and imagination.

Designed by award-winning brand strategist Bonnie Wan, The Life Brief is a practice in three parts: The first phase, Get Messy, is a set of open-ended writing prompts that cut through limiting beliefs and false assumptions about what’s possible. The second phase, Get Clear, guides you to crystal clarity so you can declare what you truly, deeply want. The third phase, Get Active, catapults you into the steps to making your desires real.

This is the “ultimate tool to set us on our true path towards success and joy” (Deepak Chopra, New York Times bestselling author) that challenges the limiting beliefs that create friction in your life. This powerfully adaptive tool has transformed thousands of lives, from refining career paths to repairing relationships, from rediscovering passion to cutting through overwhelm. Don’t let another moment pass you by. “If you want to be happier, you should write a Life Brief,” (Fast Company). Discover The Life Brief and unlock your path today.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AdAge’s 2022 Chief Strategy Officer of the Year, Bonnie Wan has helped the world’s most iconic brands align with their essential virtues using a tool called a creative brief. So, when she found herself on the precipice of her own deep dissatisfaction and doubt, Wan turned that same tool inward. What emerged was The Life Brief, a profound practice that she and thousands of others have turned to over and over. This is a strategic practice for connecting deeply to the things that create meaning, spark joy, and make life worth living. Don’t let another moment pass you by: Discover The Life Brief and find your path today.

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Chapter 1: Sitting with the Mess

CHAPTER 1 SITTING WITH THE MESS

I am ready to… drop into myself.

The question: Where do I start?

The practice: Surrender to your fear.

The action: Find Your Quiet.

That long night in my childhood bedroom was my moment to get the chaos out of my brain and onto the page.

I cried and I wrote. I scribbled and underlined, tore out pages, and kept writing. After an hour, I was exhausted, but had a confident feeling that this was the first step. I had to sit in my mess, without avoiding or denying it, in order to gain clarity on what I really wanted… what mattered most.

Practicality be damned; fear be double damned. The only way through the misery was to be uncompromisingly honest with myself, without putting boundaries on my needs. What could my life look like if I stopped dictating what was unrealistic or impossible before I’d even tried it? What could my future look like if I dared to admit what I wanted and needed without fear or shame?

I had placed boundaries on my life based on beliefs that Chip didn’t want the same things I did, that we were tethered to our existing way of life, that I could only do my job the way it had always been done by others before me, with no room to consider anything different.

But were these beliefs real? Or had my fear dreamed them up?

Many of us are hostages to fear. It’s one of our primary boundaries, what holds us back from the life we want. We fear change. We fear disappointing others or ourselves. We fear that the answers to our own questions will create disruption from which we will never recover.

Fear limits the possibilities of alternative stories and outcomes. It makes the path forward seem impossibly narrow, our lives and worlds oppressively small.

Yet getting curious about the fear is the fastest way to unshackle its binds. Accepting, embracing, and reflecting on it—rather than denying or running from it—allows life to unfold in unexpected and unimaginable new ways.

So, I faced my fears head-on. The scary stuff came out first, the anxious stories and raw emotion: fears about the way I’d shut Chip out when I was stressed, anger at how little control I seemed to have over my life and my time.

This isn’t working.

Our family is going to fracture and fall apart.

I’ve pushed him away one too many times to ever bring him back.

Then out came a lot of “if only” dreams—followed quickly by the reasons they could never happen.

If only I could quit my job and have more time with the kids. But we’ll be forced to sell the house and ask our parents for support.

If only we could move somewhere more affordable. But Chip will never go for it—he loves our community, as do I. Besides, the agency will never allow it. On and on I went, until I ran out of worries and worst-case scenarios. After I put my pen down and took a deep breath, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while.

I felt space.

Something fascinating happens when you face your deep fears and intense emotions—when you bring them out of your mind and onto the page. You see them for what they are: stories that are often distorted or disconnected from reality. Capturing them on the page somehow took their power away.

Not only that. I’d cleared up space in my mind for something else I hadn’t felt in a long time—curiosity.

It was then I asked myself: What if I could live my life in line with what matters most to me? And almost immediately, another question arose: Do I even know what matters most to me?

I didn’t, not at first. No words came. But when I asked myself again, I found they wouldn’t stop.

I scribbled furiously across the page, rewriting words and adding new phrases. What do I really want? That was the insistent question driving my mind. In my heart of hearts, what do I really, really want? I vomited every feeling out onto the page.

I’m not sure how much time passed. I was too swept up in the writing. But at a certain point, I dropped my pen, and that’s when I knew I was done.

I was empty—but in a good way, the way you feel after a challenging hike or after sitting down to a meal you’ve spent all day cooking. I’d let it all out. And when I read through my scribbles, an insight and pattern surfaced—a linchpin to everything I craved… the gulf standing between me and all that mattered most in my life, at that moment. What kept coming up, emerging as a theme, and the missing link across everything I longed for—written in various angles on the page, in letters big and small, underlined, and circled—was

TIME

Here’s what I ended up with, the five things I allowed myself to admit that I wanted.

THE ORIGINAL LIFE BRIEF: WHAT I REALLY, REALLY WANT

• Time with my kids, my husband, and for myself
• Time to lean into work that fulfills my unique strengths and gifts
• Time to create an inspiring and loving home for our growing family
• Time to travel and expose our family to the many facets of humanity
• Time to actively participate in a community that shares our values

I looked down at this list, exhausted yet elated.

I had done what had seemed impossible for so long: I had turned my agitation, frustration, and despair into a clear and tangible portrait of the life I wanted and needed. More critically, it was a bare, honest declaration, to myself, of what mattered to me and only me.

I sat back and studied the words I’d scrawled on the page. Two realizations came to me. The first was that the stress and terror I felt over the decline in my marriage could be a symptom of something far less severe than the story I was telling myself. I had been gripped by anxiety that I’d married the wrong person and that we were incapable of building a satisfying life together. But when I finally allowed myself to examine the strife surrounding my marriage, I saw something extraordinary. My Life Brief was telling me a different story than my fear had been telling me for so long.

In my heart, I was craving more time with my husband. But not just more time—more meaningful time. My Brief cut away the assumptions that my marriage was in trouble and redirected my focus to how I spend my time.

The second realization was that what I wanted most was neither extravagant nor extreme. My desire for more time was stunningly simple. Yet, it was out of my immediate grasp.

The art of the Life Brief is to cut away things that are misleading or distracting—doubts, drama, thoughts, and fears that weigh us down, fail to inspire, or detract from the essence of what matters most. When you cut that away, you create a clearing, so that you can zero in and redirect your mind, center your heart, and focus your attention. It’s here in this place where clarity appears, and change begins. Shining a light on what’s essential puts you on the path towards your unadulterated, most audacious vision.

The Life Brief becomes your constant reminder of that vision, easy to remember because it’s sharp and sticky and motivating. It’s a key that unlocks new ways of seeing your life, your relationships, your work, yourself. Once you learn to see your world and your choices through the lens of the Life Brief, it’s hard to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon Element
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982195525
• ISBN 13: 9781982195526
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar