Coaching practices for Prototype Your Career
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Prototype Your Career, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- There’s this other life I daydream about constantly, but it stays a fantasy in my head
- I keep running this other life in my head, imagining how amazing or how awful it would be, but it’s all guesswork
- I feel like I should already know my one thing and lock in, but honestly I’ve barely tried anything
- I’m about to pour a year into learning something, and I keep second-guessing whether I’m betting everything on one narrow outcome or building something that would still pay off no matter which way the future breaks.
- I’m paralyzed between two paths, treating it as this irreversible all-or-nothing leap I have to be certain about first
Practices that may help
- Prototype with conversations and experiences
Test a possible path cheaply — talk to someone living it, or try a small slice — before betting on it.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - 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 - Sample widely before committing to a niche
Premature specialization forecloses interests you haven’t discovered yet.
Passion vs Interest: How to Actually Find Work You Love - Platform thinking: build capabilities that enable many futures rather than optimizing for one
Invest in skills, tools, and relationships that expand your adjacent possible in multiple directions rather than optimizing for a single outcome.
The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical - 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 - 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 - Express work in reusable intermediate packets
Break your creative output into small, reusable units — outlines, summaries, frameworks — that can be combined and repurposed.
Building a Second Brain (BASB), Made Practical - Draft three Odyssey Plans
Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - Use genius mapping in onboarding
Surface a new hire’s geniuses early so you design their role around energy, not just skills.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Build and work a target list of roles and organisations
Replace passive job board browsing with active research into specific organisations you want to understand.
Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
Related concerns
- Design Thinking Life Planning
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.
- Designing Your Life During A Big Change
Treat approaching life changes as scheduled opportunities for habit installation — plan before the transition, not after.
Identify and anticipate upcoming transition windows
- 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.
- Designing Your Life When Starting Out
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.
- Designing Your Life With My Team
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.
- Multiple Life Paths
Sketch three distinct five-year lives — not variations on the same theme, but genuinely different directions.
Draft three genuinely different five-year plans
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.