The Three Lives — Inner Rooms

The Best Possible Self exercise asked you to write one future. This exercise asks you to write three.

This is adapted from the Odyssey Plans developed by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at Stanford's d.school — originally designed to help students navigate career decisions, and now used by thousands of adults redesigning their lives. The insight behind it is radical and simple: you are not choosing between one right life and several wrong ones. You are choosing between multiple lives, each of which could genuinely be yours.

For women in rebuilding, this reframe changes everything. After disruption — divorce, job loss, illness, the end of a chapter — the pressure to find "the answer" is paralysing. What should I do now? What's the right next step? What if I choose wrong? The Three Lives exercise dissolves that pressure by proving to you, on paper, that you have more than one good option. That your future is not a single narrow path you have to find. It's a landscape with multiple routes through it.

The goal is not to choose between the three lives. The goal is to discover that you have three — and to notice what each one teaches you about what you actually want.

Your Three Lives

Each life is a genuine five-year plan — not a fantasy, not a joke, not a throwaway. Each one must be something you could actually do, given your real circumstances. And each one comes from a different source:

1

The Life You're Already Building

The current path, lived well

This is the life you'd have if you took your current trajectory and made it as good as it could possibly be. Not a radical reinvention — a deepening. What does the next five years look like if you keep going in roughly the direction you're heading, but you do it with intention, alignment, and the self-knowledge you've built in this room?

What does your current path look like when you live it on purpose instead of by default?

2

The Life You'd Build If This Path Vanished

The alternative you've never let yourself plan

Imagine your current path disappears tomorrow. Your industry collapses, or your circumstances shift so completely that Plan A is no longer available. What would you do? This isn't a disaster scenario — it's a liberation exercise. When the "obvious" option is removed, what surfaces? This life often reveals the thing you've wanted but haven't given yourself permission to pursue.

What would you build if you couldn't do the thing you think you're supposed to do?

3

The Life You'd Build If No One Was Watching

The wild card — money and judgement removed

If money were handled and no one would judge you — not your parents, not your ex, not your children, not society — what would you do with the next five years? This life often feels embarrassing to write. Too small, too big, too strange, too selfish. Write it anyway. This isn't about feasibility. It's about honesty. The things that surface here are often the deepest clues to your actual purpose.

What would you choose if the only person you had to please was yourself?

The rule that makes this work

All three lives must be genuinely appealing. Not "Plan A, Plan B, and a joke." Not "the dream, the realistic one, and the fallback." Each life must be something you could honestly get excited about living. If Life 2 feels like a punishment, rewrite it. The exercise only works when all three doors are real.

1

Write Each Life

30–40 min

For each of the three lives, write a one-page description that includes:

A six-word title. What do you call this life? Make it vivid. Not "Career Change Plan" — something like "The Woman Who Built From Scratch" or "Quiet Life, Loud Mind" or "Finally Doing The Thing."

A five-year arc. Where are you in year one? Year three? Year five? What's the trajectory? You don't need monthly detail — you need the shape of the journey.

What your days look like. Describe an ordinary Wednesday in this life. Where do you wake up? What fills the morning? Who do you talk to? What kind of tired are you at the end of the day? (This is where your Best Possible Self writing feeds in — you've already practised imagining days.)

What you'd have to give up. Every life requires trade-offs. Name them honestly. Life 1 might mean giving up the dream of starting over. Life 3 might mean giving up financial security for a period. Acknowledging what each life costs makes them real.

What you'd gain. What does this life give you that you don't have now? Not just material things — how does it make you feel? What version of you does it bring forward?

2

Rate Each Life

10 min

After writing all three, rate each one on four dimensions using a simple scale of 1–5. This is the dashboard view — a way to see your three lives side by side and notice what each one offers and what it costs.

The four dimensions:

Resources — Do I have (or could I get) the time, money, skills, and support to make this happen? How feasible is it with my real circumstances?

Confidence — Do I believe I could pull this off? Not "is it guaranteed to succeed" — but do I trust myself enough to try? Where does this land on my Body Compass?

Alignment — Does this life match my values from the Bull's-Eye? Does it address the energy leaks from the Audit? Is this genuinely mine, or is it someone else's definition of a good life?

Aliveness — When I imagine living this life, does my body open or contract? Do I feel energy or obligation? This is the most important gauge. A life can be resourced, confident, and aligned — but if it doesn't make you feel alive, something essential is missing.

Here's what an honest dashboard might look like:

Example — one woman's three lives

Life 1: "Steady Rebuild, Deeper Roots"

Stays in current job but sets boundaries. Moves to a smaller flat. Focuses on the children, her health, slow financial recovery. Joins a local writing group.

Resources

Confidence

Alignment

Aliveness

Life 2: "The Leap Sideways"

Retrains as a counsellor. Takes on part-time work to fund the qualification. Harder financially for two years, but doing something she's felt pulled toward since her thirties.

Resources

Confidence

Alignment

Aliveness

Life 3: "Portugal and a Pen"

Moves abroad with the children for a year. Rents a small place. Writes the book she's been carrying. Homeschools. Lives simply. Sees if the writing leads somewhere.

Resources

Confidence

Alignment

Aliveness

Notice the pattern in the example: the most feasible life has the lowest aliveness. The most alive life has the lowest resources. This is not a problem to solve — it's information about what matters to you. The dashboard doesn't tell you which life to choose. It shows you what you're trading in each one.

3

Listen to What the Three Lives Tell You

10 min

The magic of this exercise isn't in choosing a life. It's in what the three lives reveal when you lay them side by side. Sit with these questions:

Which life made you feel most alive as you wrote it? What does that tell you about what's missing right now?

Which life scared you most? Is the fear about real danger — or about what people would think?

Is there an element that appears in all three lives? That's a non-negotiable — something your soul needs regardless of the path.

Which trade-offs feel acceptable? Which ones feel like they'd slowly kill something inside you?

Could you take one element from Life 3 and weave it into Life 1? What would that look like?

If you had to commit to one of these lives starting Monday — which one would you choose? Notice your body's response to that question.

That last question often produces the clearest signal of the entire exercise. Your mind will debate. Your body will answer.

Why Three Is the Right Number

Two options create a binary — and binaries are traps. Should I stay or should I go? Should I play it safe or take the risk? Two options force a choice between opposites and eliminate everything in between.

Three options break the binary. The third life — the wild card, the one you'd choose if no one was watching — introduces possibility you didn't know you had. It expands your sense of what's available. And it often reveals that the "choice" you were agonising over was actually a false dilemma, because there was always a third door.

Design thinking research from Stanford confirms this: when people generate multiple alternatives before deciding, they make better choices, experience less regret, and report higher satisfaction with their decisions. The act of generating options is itself therapeutic — it shifts you from the helplessness of "I don't know what to do" to the agency of "I have several things I could do, and each one teaches me something."

You don't need to know which life you'll choose. You need to know that you have choices. For a woman who's felt trapped, that knowledge alone is transformative.

Key sources: Burnett & Evans (2016) Designing Your Life — Odyssey Plans methodology; Schwartz (2004) on choice overload vs choice deprivation; research on option generation and decision quality (Johnson & Raab, 2003); Iyengar & Lepper (2000) on meaningful choice and motivation. Full citations in the Research Foundation.

You've now written three possible versions of the next five years. Three genuine, appealing, real lives — each with different costs and different gifts. You've rated them honestly. You've noticed which one made your body come alive and which one made it brace.

You don't have to choose today. The Three Lives exercise is a compass calibration, not a commitment ceremony. But something has shifted: you know you have options. You know they're real. And you know what your body thinks about each one.

The final piece of The Dream takes everything forward. The WOOP method — Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan — is where dreaming meets doing. It's where you take the life (or the elements of lives) that most align with your truth and build the bridge between where you are and where you're going. Not a five-year plan. A first step.