Coaching practices for Best Possible Life Exercise
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Best Possible Life Exercise, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep running this other life in my head, imagining how amazing or how awful it would be, but it’s all guesswork
- I’m sitting on a real chance to do something that matters to me, and the safe, comfortable, convenient choice is quietly winning by default
- I’m basically sedentary and the idea of getting "fit enough" to matter feels so far off that I don’t even start
- I’ve quietly decided there’s only one acceptable version of my life and I’m white-knuckling toward it
- I can think of a few times in my life when I felt genuinely, fully alive, and I want to study what those moments had in common
Practices that may help
- Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures - Apply the deathbed test to current decisions
When facing a trade-off, ask which option the future you will wish you had chosen.
The Bucket List Method - Treat exercise as medicine with a specific dose prescription
The mortality benefit of exercise is front-loaded at the bottom of the fitness distribution — going from sedentary to active produces the largest returns.
Healthspan vs. Lifespan: Optimizing How Well You Age, Not Just How Long - Draft three genuinely different five-year plans
Sketch three distinct five-year lives — not variations on the same theme, but genuinely different directions.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures - Peak experience analysis
Study your life-line high points for the values and conditions they share — they reveal what fully alive looks like for you.
The Life Line Exercise - Consistent aerobic exercise as a longevity practice
Show up for aerobic exercise consistently across years — the cumulative cardiorespiratory fitness gain is what predicts mortality reduction.
VO2 Max and Longevity: The Peter Attia Framework - Run a small experiment before committing to Plan B or C
Design the smallest possible real-world experience that would tell you something true about a plan before you commit to it.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures - Write a best-possible-life narrative
Write a detailed story of your life in 10 years if everything went as well as it possibly could.
The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self - Define the ideal final result first
Describe the perfect outcome as if the solution already exists and costs nothing, then work backward to what could enable it.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - The future life line
Extend your timeline forward and sketch the peaks and turning points you want to create — then work backward to today.
The Life Line Exercise
Related concerns
- Designing Your Life For My Teenager
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Stanford method treats your life like a design problem: you don’t "find" the one right answer, you prototype your way toward several good ones. The core moves — reframing stuck beliefs, drafting multiple Odyssey Plans, and running small prototypes — are practitioner tools adapted from design thinking, well-reasoned but not formally outcome-tested as a package.
- Future Life Line Exercise
The life line exercise is a narrative reflection tool that asks you to map your life visually — high points, low points, and turning points — on a timeline. It surfaces the implicit story you have been telling yourself about your life, makes that story revisable, and identifies the experiences that most shaped your current values and patterns. Evidence is primarily clinical and observational; it is an established coaching and therapy tool with a solid mechanistic rationale.
- Life Vision Planning
Extend your timeline forward and sketch the peaks and turning points you want to create — then work backward to today.
The future life line
- Three Life Plans
Sketch three distinct five-year lives — not variations on the same theme, but genuinely different directions.
Draft three genuinely different five-year plans
- Three Life Plans Exercise
Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
Draft three Odyssey Plans
- When Odyssey Plans Prototyping Conversations
Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.