Curate your life: A practical reinvention tool
Image: Jessica Ruscello
In my previous work life, I spent a lot of time around museums, news rooms, and marketing conferences. And one thing they all have in common is the concept of curating — curating collections, content, news. Pulling a collection of different items together. Finding themes. Telling a story. Preserving. Making meaning. Sharing with the rest of the world.
Curating your life can be a powerful metaphor for intentional life mapping, reinvention and developing meaningful work.
You are the “keeper” of your life. You are the subject-matter expert on you. Curating is what you do every day.
After all, you organize and arrange your life every day. You follow routines and prioritize some habits over others. You share aspects of yourself with others. You present yourself to the world. And if you’re already doing this stuff every day (as we all are!), imagine what can happen when you start to be more intentional and thoughtful about what exactly you are doing. (Small steps matter. Practice is required.)
Imagine what happens when you begin to organize, edit, focus and share around your values, your future vision, your most important dreams, your inner knowing, your desires and priorities, your goals or desire to contribute. Instead of being scattered all over the place or comparing yourself with everyone else, you lean into a focus and choose more mindfully.
Curating is practical reinvention, from the ground up.
It’s one of the most practical tools that I used to quit a stressful but perfectly fine job and take on a 9-month long “explorer mission” to hit the reset button on my life. And it's a tool I used to create what came next. Piece by piece. And to create what is coming after that (as in, right now). It’s a generative tool that I use with many of my coaching clients to tune into themselves at their most authentic, most resourceful and most sustainable. Like every practical tool, you use it when you need it.
What does it look like to “curate” your life?
You’re deciding what to create in a million tiny decisions every day. Curating means owning your decisions and having solid decision-making criteria so that those in the moment decisions are moving you closer to where you want to go. You’re writing the storyline by what you’re curating into it: what you believe, what you say, what you experience and how you make meaning of the situation you're in.
Curating means choosing the storylines that match your vision or help you to identify and build that vision in the first place. Thinking like a curator, you start to focus more around that theme (your WHY and your WHAT). What's missing? What's here that you can highlight or build around? You don’t start out with all the answers, but you use the resources that you have. You connect one thing, one idea, one action to another and in time, you’ve established meaning, purpose and a through line.
You’re creating a meaningful path where you might not have seen one before.
As curating becomes a habit, you edit. You toss out what doesn’t fit. There isn’t room for everything, and what you select needs to fit within the vision you have for your life and your work. It has to feel right. It has to make sense, to you.
You make meaning of what’s left. Again.
You pay attention to the environment you're creating and the one that is surrounding you. You take steps to develop an environment around you that brings out the best in you, in your work. Reflexively, you’re asking yourself what that environment looks like and what has to be in it.
You delete what is not working. You find ways to add what you need.
You occasionally step back and look at the big picture. Again. What is working and what is not? Where can you bring in additional ideas, support, resources?
You stay open to what presents itself because as the subject matter expert of your life, you gain confidence that you’ll recognize it when it shows up. (And you can always continue to edit later if you change your mind.)
You take excellent care of who you are and what you have. You are a steward for what really matters, as decided by you.
You take creative risks for your vision. You become more willing to leap when leaping matters, and to take a time out when you know in your bones that this is what will give you energy for the longer term.
You keep curating, opening yourself to new connections, communities, and new perspectives and unexpected ties to your vision.
You evolve. You step into the new, day by day.
