Before Session 10 · Sharing Your Plans
Read this before class — 10 minutes. Bring your three finished Odyssey Plans; today is about sharing them, not making them. Come-ready is at the end.
The big idea: you are not designing your life alone
Burnett and Evans name five mindsets that make someone a life designer: curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness of the process — and a fifth one that this whole session is built on. They call it radical collaboration, and their claim is blunt: nobody designs a life alone, and the people who try are doing it the hard way for no prize. Real designers work in teams, out loud, in front of each other — because a design conversation surfaces things that solo thinking structurally cannot.
That's why the Odyssey Plans exercise doesn't end when the worksheets are full. In the book, the final instruction is explicit: present all three plans to a group, and pay attention to what happens when you do. The plans on paper were the easy half. Today is the half the exercise was actually built for.
Your triad has a real name
Here's something the course has been saving: Burnett and Evans have a name for a small group of people who meet regularly to work on their life designs together, witness each other's process, and follow shared rules of engagement. They call it a Life Design Team — and it's what your triad has been since Week 1. You've been running the book's own structure all semester without the label. Today you get the label, and their rules, which will look familiar:
Respect — what's shared in the triad is treated as the serious thing it is, even when it's tentative or half-formed. Especially then.
Confidentiality — plans, doubts, and wild cards stay in the room. Nobody's Odyssey Plan becomes a story you tell somewhere else.
Participation — everyone shares, everyone witnesses. There's no observer role on a Life Design Team.
No fixing — the team's job is generative, not corrective. You are not each other's consultants, critics, or career counselors. You already know this rule — it's been the triad check-in rule since Week 2. It matters most today.
How the sharing works
Each person gets uninterrupted time for all three plans — open each one with its six-word headline, then talk through the timeline and the questions that plan is testing. No apologizing before you start, no “this one's dumb, but.” The headline discipline from the worksheet matters here: six words forces you to say what the plan is instead of narrating around it.
This isn't a performance and it isn't a pitch. You're not trying to convince your triad that one plan is right. You're trying to notice, in real time, which version of telling it made your own energy shift — and which one went flat.
What your triad is listening for
The listeners have one job: notice, and say back afterward, where the speaker's voice or energy visibly changed — not which plan sounded “best,” not advice, not “you should.” Just: “You lit up when you got to the bar idea,” or “You slowed way down on the second one.” That's it. The speaker is the only one who gets to decide what that means. This is the same skill your triad practiced in the check-in all term — witnessing without fixing — pointed at the biggest material yet.
Reading your own reaction
As you listen to yourself talk through each plan, track the same four things from your dashboard — resources, likability, confidence, coherence — but now as a felt sense instead of a rating on paper. Which plan did you want to keep talking about after your time was up? Which one were you relieved to finish? Burnett and Evans' bet, and this course's bet, is that your voice knows things your worksheet doesn't. Today is how you find out what.
This week's belief → reframe
The belief that gets people stuck: “My life is mine to figure out — alone. Needing other people to sort it out means I'm behind.”
The designer's reframe: Burnett and Evans call it radical collaboration: nobody designs a life alone. Asking others to witness your process isn't weakness — it's the method.
Your journal
One entry after class: what did your team notice about you that you hadn't noticed yourself? You don't have to agree with it. Write down what was said, and sit with whether any part of it rings true. Then one more line: which plan do you find yourself still thinking about tonight — and is it the one you expected?
Come Ready
Bring all three finished Odyssey Plans with their six-word headlines ready to say out loud. Nothing else is needed — just the plans, your headlines, and honest telling. Your triad does the rest.
ENT 1611 Designing Your Life · FSU Innovation Hub · Sharing the three versions of you: Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016) · Worksheets and submissions on Canvas