Ten Lessons for Designing a Balanced Life

Facing a big change?

Lost touch with what matters most to you?

Or maybe you are just stuck, and need unsticking.

Get ready to pursue your dreams.

Take control now.

If you’ve read the articles on Pilot Fire, you know that each and every one focuses on some aspect of Pilot Fire’s core purpose: providing tools, fuel, and steering instructions to make a life you believe in. Even small changes take some effort, and with big changes, everyone can use some help.

Amplify your efforts with the Pilot Fire webinar course Ten Lessons for Designing a Balanced Life.

Learning how you can be your best in each part of your life is much easier with a reliable system. The system I teach in the Ten Lessons course was born from my own personal needs, and it grew up over the years as I refined it and taught it to others. Now it is available online taught live and also available through recordings. Sign up to save a seat.

Origins of the course

Learning how you can be your best in each part of your life is much easier with a reliable system. I’m doing pretty darn well now, but there was a time when my vitality waned and the fires of my passion barely smoldered. I was at the peak of a crappy career, living a fairly fat life, and then I lost my job, my marriage, and my home. Have you ever crashed?

There are few moments in life which truly qualify as turning points. Failing miserably affords the best opportunity to make one.

A great blankness was laid out before me, and I stepped forward with a single resolution: I will never lead a joyless life again.

As a professional User Experience Designer, I set to redesigning the experience of my own life. And because I knew my circumstances would change, I developed a system to redesign that experience every week. I wanted to never lose touch with my body, love, and the beautiful world around me. With the base created by the works of great designers and thinkers and spiritual guides, I started with their ideas and leaned on my training to refine them: Take an idea, find its essence, make it simple, make it usable, and make sure it fits the task, which was simple enough:

Take care of this precious body.

Learn how to love.

Make the world a little more beautiful.

Make a buttload of money.

Find Flow every day.

This system I designed for myself I now teach as the Ten Lessons for Designing a Balanced Life. For years I’ve taught the lessons locally in group workshops and in private coaching sessions and know from this experience that it works very well for most of us. And now I’ve adapted it as an online webinar, so I can offer it to you wherever you happen to be.

It’s fairly simple to explain, but it takes guidance and a few months practice to get the habits in place, so the course takes about 15 weeks. You don’t have to completely reinvent your life; in fact, I suggest you take just one part at first, and learn how to make it much better. Then, take on the rest.

Through this course you will…

Develop a deeper understanding of the roles you play,
Connect with the important people in your life who help you be your best,
Learn how to set goals that keep you motivated, focused and often in Flow, and

every week, from now on,

Give yourself the opportunity to realize you are making a life you believe in.

If that sounds good to you, sign up to save a seat.

What people are saying about Designing a Balanced Life.

“I wanted to tell you that your seminar on Designing a Balanced Life has really helped me achieve several goals in my interpretation business. It got me to plan out the steps I needed to take.

“Your seminar is one of the best ones out there! Thank you David, for enhancing the quality of life of your friends and clients, as well giving us the tools to successfully pursue our dreams.”

— Ann Michels
Cultural Broker, Translator, Traveler

“This may sound funny, but working with David’s system for Designing a Balanced Life I actually discovered parts of myself that I didn’t know I had. Put another way, David helped me unpack the different ‘roles’ I play in my everyday life including the underlying narratives that influence everything from the way I teach English to the how I feel about myself at the end of the day. And, after showing me these facets of my life, David provided a unique set of skills and tools for integrating them back into the whole person, helping me find a greater sense of flow by staying focused on what matters most at any given moment.

Throughout, David was responsive to all my concerns and insightful enough to quickly design and customize exercises for me that were relevant and productive. Best of all it was really fun.”

— Craig Medvecky
Teacher, Writer

“Working with a startup company, my wife and I moved several times in a few years and I traveled a lot. Life became a continual business trip. I was pretty good at fulfilling immediate commitments at work but felt very lopsided. I was losing touch with the world outside my work.

“After witnessing the fanfare and even seeing David Allen speak, I decided to try my hand at Getting Things Done, which was helpful but focused mostly on execution. It didn’t help me prioritize. It felt like a PC, with lots of features and capabilities, but no integrated use model, no soul. David Delp’s PilotFire is the Mac to the David Allen PC. It is a simple elegant system that works at a human level, and this helps me get the right things done.

“Thinking more in depth about the roles I play in my life, why those roles are important to me, and what I aspire to be in those roles provides a clear filter for understanding what actions to take. Plus as a teacher, David isn’t afraid to ask hard questions I might rather gloss over.

“I use the Pilot Fire system to focus my day and add a broader range of actions to my week. Even if I miss a day or two, the simplicity of the system makes it easy to pick up and get focused again on purposeful living.”

– Matthew Michels
Entrepreneur, Engineer, Early Adopter

Is this course for you?

Yes, if:

You are ready to discover and pursue your passions.
You are ready to make fundamental changes to how you make plans and follow through. (This is a system to help you design your life. You need to do the work to make the change.)
You are willing to try new things and sometimes fail.
You are willing to truly focus on what’s most important to you.
You are ready to take action.
You want a cost-effective course compared to private lessons, with the benefit of group feedback.

What you get

By the end of this class you will get:

A simple, reliable, easy-to-implement system to make sure your actions align with your values.
A deep understanding of the particular roles you play in your life.
A clear map of your roles, goals, and relationships that allow you to be your best.
The regular practice of making a great Week’s Plan in 20 minutes.
The regular practice of making a great Day’s Plan in 2 minutes.
A simple method for turning your biggest desires into a plan you can implement.
Actual progress on at least one of your important goals.
Methods for getting unstuck.
A clear understanding of the tools you need to manage your attention.
Knowledge of how to harness the power of the unconscious roles you play.
Practice taking small steps that make a big difference.
Encouragement to take meaningful risks.
The support of a compassionate environment managed by a knowledgable guide (that’s me, David Delp).

How it works

Designing a Balanced Life is now being offered as a live, online course. We use a webinar system so you can watch and ask questions live. Don’t worry if you miss a class or want to review past classes. We record each one and post them all online in the class members’ area of our site. The course lasts 14 weeks with one class a week. Each class is one hour long, plus Q&A.

And here’s the best part. You pay for the course once, and you are a member for life! That’s right, the next time we hold the course, you can join live classes at any point (as long as there’s space that day) and continue to review previous classes. The course is always going through improvements. There is always more to learn.

Satisfaction + Effectiveness Guarantee

I’m very confident this course will make a big positive difference in your life, but before you put your money down, put your mind to rest. Here is a double guarantee. First, if after 30 days you have watched the first four classes, put a fair amount of effort into the accompanying exercises, and do not feel the course is exactly as described, you get your money back.

And beyond that, if you don’t also feel more clarity, confidence, and actual progress toward making a life you believe in, you deserve your money back. This is a good-faith assessment on your part. The bottom line: I don’t want to take your money if your effort + my teaching isn’t effective.

The only request I make is, if your efforts aren’t paying off, you let me help you get back on track. If after that, you are still either unsatisfied or not experiencing the positive effects, you keep everything you’ve learned, all the materials you may have downloaded, your money back, and my gratitude that we both tried.