Live Your Dream: Designing the Life of Your Dreams

Last Updated on 7 April, 2025

The fitness industry is a busy place! As business owners and managers, your days are likely filled with managing a million things from your staff to your bottom line, and it’s easy to lose your passion as you get caught up in the day to day. If you’re ready to focus on designing the life of your dreams, Lindsey Rainwater’s got the goods with the steps to get there.

Lindsey Rainwater, founder of Third Way Advising, is a long-time executive coach and business advisor focusing on helping her clients live their dreams. She’s also the CEO and founder of The Women in Fitness Association (WIFA), a global association supporting women in their career path and helping them rise to their fullest potential in business and life. As a widely published author, Lindsey’s been featured in many podcasts, books, and she’s facilitated several keynote talks and workshops. In short, she’s seen it all and is ready to offer personal development strategies to help you design the life of your dreams.

Lindsey gets right down to business, starting off the webinar by asking our WellnessLiving audience, “Why wake up and do anything other than what you dream about?” She stresses the importance of being open to bending your mind to a new perspective. Get ready to “whitewash your brain” with a new way of thinking, as Lindsey lays out her 5 steps to designing the life of your dreams:

Step 1: Start where you are

As you start on your journey to reach your goal, be clear on your starting point. Reflect on your current reality! Know where you stand so you can disconnect your circumstances from your state of mind and unpack how to live the life of your dreams.

Just like you’ve checked stock or taken an inventory in your business, apply that process to your life! How do you get started? Lindsey sets us up with a simple technique. Look at the four main areas in your life: life, health, work, and play. Write a few sentences on each area, ranking them on a scale from 0 to 10, based on what provides energy and what drains you.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Is what you’re doing serving you?
• How is it reflecting on your calendar?
• Where are you spending your time?

Inspecting these parts of your life is how you’ll start to make changes that bring you more joy.

Design a thinking approach

With your busy life and grueling schedule, it’s easy to use excuses to continue doing the things that are stopping you from living your dreams. Lindsey recommends attacking the areas where you’re stuck, using the four steps in a design thinking approach:

1. Empathize with the problem: Connect with what’s going on at the root.
2. Define the problem: Get clear on what’s happening and give it a name.
3. Imagine solutions: Decide on a best-case scenario and work out what you want to create in your life.
4. Trial and test it: Work on some solutions to see which best works to set you on your desired path.

Audit your reality to put things into perspective so you can start to make changes!

Step 2: Build your compass

Once you’ve got a baseline, it’s time to look at baby steps to develop your plan of action. Set your direction by building your compass!

Lindsey asks, “Are you living the life of your dreams or helping someone else fulfill theirs?” You don’t have to be self-employed but if you’re working to help someone else’s company grow, you need to be aware of how you’re building your life’s dream within that. Look at the whole picture from family to financials to career! Lindsey emphasizes, “if you’re not in the driver’s seat, you’re going to be constantly disappointed because you’re not helping to manufacture your own dreams if you’re focused on being a part of someone else’s big plan.”

She recommends using questions to prompt your creativity. Ask yourself:

• Why do you do what you do?
• What gives your life meaning?

Create a conscious set of values and then look at the highest quality of life that you imagine for yourself.

Step 3: Getting unstuck

It’s time for you to get unstuck as part of your journey to living the life of your dreams, so you can progress and see success. How do you get started? Lindsey recommends going all in with a three-week, good-time journal! Build yourself a mind map with a brainstorming session. This is how you’ll identify what brings you the most joy and start to grow.

Go old school with a pen and paper! It makes a real difference to write something down. Be mindful of how the brain to hand to paper lets emotion come through the pen and gets your creative juices flowing. Here’s Lindsey’s process for creating a map for getting unstuck:

• Use the three activities that have the highest engagement rate with the highest energy for you (from the scale we referenced earlier) and map it out. Lindsey advises, “It looks like a hot mess express but when you boil it down, you can see that it’s the DNA of your perfectly designed life.” Let your thoughts flow to get the most out of the experience.
• Next, look at what’s listed at the outer ring of your session and choose the three things that jump out at you. For example, if you chose the outdoors as something that brings you joy, and led to surfing, then water, then tides, then cycles, ending with cycling. So, cycling is where you place your focus!
• With each of the three activities, create a role and a job description, so you can begin to plan to make the most out of those things in your life. Designing the life of your dreams means identifying the source of your energy and working to maximize those parts of your life.

Lindsey’s pro tip:

Apply this in all aspects of your life, from re-vamping your business to adjusting your workout routine. Success comes with this tried and true method of auditing your life to get closer to living the life of your dreams.

The concept of “time design” is key here. Time scarcity exists as a product of getting stuck doing the things that do not bring you joy, and that time seems to expand when you’re doing something you love. This is especially important for your business: you need to know where and how you’re spending your time.

You can’t know what’s working unless you analyze where you are and what you’re doing! And once you’re a pro, do the same thing with your employees. Make sure they’re doing the things that bring them the most energy and give them the chance to say what’s bogging them down and holding them back from their best performance.

You’ll have a happier team and you’ll get their highest output too, with the most ROI (return on investment) on their efforts!

Step 4: Design

You’ve audited your time and decided what provides you the most energy, now it’s time to “mess with your schedule.” Analyze the ratio of time at the office, time at the home, and anywhere else you spend your time. You need to get the highest output of enjoyment to create that dream!

Lindsey gives us the inside scoop on seeing what your future could look like, so you can start getting there. In this phase, there are three elements for you to process so you can get designing:

• Alternatives: Here’s the ‘what’ stage! Create three alternative five-year plans, with a title and include three questions that arise with that future.
• Prototyping: This is the ‘how’ phase. Get comfortable with using resources to make your dream happen. Talk to people who are ahead of you to pick their brains on what works, learn their regrets, and get valuable insight. You might have to give up some of your time to get further ahead, and that can be a tough tradeoff. You may also need to have conversations with people who are doing what you want to do to gain experience through direct encounters. This might even look like unpaid internships, volunteering or personal projects, but you need the information and experience so you can start to define your future and how you’ll get there.
• Awareness: Here’s where you look at the ‘why.’ Once you wake up and see your life for what it really is, then going back to being asleep at the wheel is impossible. Go deep with an intimate discovery of what makes you feel most alive! What do you dream about? What do you value most and why? This can be defined through your business, your relationships, your life and more!

Start designing those next steps to get where you want to go. Lindsey advises being proactive, “Design the job of your dreams, rather than waiting for someone to hand you a title so you can become that.”

Step 5: Choosing Happiness

If you’ve been searching for passion, it’s time to get real. According to Lindsey, “Passion is BS, when you seek passion, that’s not where you end up. Happiness is a choice.” The passion is in the process! Here are a few do’s and don’ts to choose happiness and get moving on your journey:

• DON’T aim to make the right choice every single time. DO make better choices informed by better self-awareness.
• DON’T confuse happiness with having it all. Often happiness means enjoying and making the most of what you already have. DO see that happiness means letting go of some things.
• DON’T agonize over every decision! DO be decisive and informed.

Personal development is hard! It’s common to rely on outside influences to bring you joy, but choosing to be happy when things are hard (and even when they’re not) is where the true answer lives.

Lindsey’s words of wisdom

Lindsey leaves us with a few last words of wisdom on handling failure and mindset. Fail fast and fail forward. Learn quickly and bounce back. With failure, comes the importance of a mindset to move on. Here are the two types of mindsets to consider:

• Fixed mindset: The belief they have been given traits and that’s just the way they are, nothing can change their talents or limitations.
• Growth mindset: The belief that qualities can be developed, and their place is a starting point where progress follows.

Work on failure immunity! Log your failures to extract the most insight from them and then get into the habit of converting failure into growth by doing this once or twice a month. Help handle failure by seeking council. Build a team of mentors, reach out for help, choose people who advocate for you, and then use those resources to improve your mindset and build your dreams.

It’s time to design your life!

Once you’ve completed these steps, it’s time to start designing the life of your dreams! Here are few of Lindsey’s final tips to set you on your path to success:

• Trust the process: Audit regularly to make sure you’re headed where you want to go. Create a reliable process that works for you to stay accountable and on track.
• Find your creativity: Get on your bike, do squats, dance around, whatever gets you moving and motivated.
• Expand your mind: Learn something new every day to get into the habit of paying attention and developing an ‘anything is possible’ mentality. It’s great to get out of your comfort zone!

“Anything that propels you into action will provide you energy.” Start macro and then go micro. Evaluate all aspects of your life to create action so you can start living the life of your dreams!

You’ve designed your life, now it’s time for the right tools to propel you forward! WellnessLiving has you covered. From our automated marketing suite, customer reviews feature, and staff and client apps, we have everything you need to design your business the right way! Want to learn more? Book a free, no-commitment demo today!