4 Life Plan Lessons for Living by Design, Not Default
When was the last time you sat down and actually decided what your life should look like, instead of just letting it happen?
This week on A New Direction with Coach Jay, I sat down with Rich Harris, author of Life Plan: Living by Design, Not Default. Rich is a former commercial real estate executive from right here in Chapel Hill, and he has written a 100+ page life plan every single year since 1999. That’s not a theory. That’s a lifetime of testing. Here are four life plan lessons from our conversation that I believe can change the direction of your life.
1. Autopilot Living Is Still a Choice
Most of us aren’t living a bad life. We’re living a default life. We drift into routines shaped by old habits, past experiences, and other people’s expectations. Then one day we realize something feels off, even though everything looks great on paper.
I see this all the time with high achievers. They’re winning, and they still feel lost. A life plan forces you to stop and ask the hard question: is the life I’m living the life I actually want? If you never ask, you’ve already answered.
2. Your Brain Has Competing Voices
Here’s where the psychology gets interesting. Rich explains that our brains have competing forces pulling us in different directions. Part of you wants the long-term goal. Part of you wants the comfortable habit. Lasting change isn’t just about motivation or discipline. The science tells a much more complicated story.
So stop beating yourself up for “lacking willpower.” Intentional living starts with understanding why change is hard, and then building a plan that gets those competing voices working together instead of against each other.
3. You Don’t Have to Blow Up Your Life
This one gives a lot of people permission to breathe. Living by design doesn’t mean torching everything you’ve built or chasing some mystical “life purpose.” It means making small, deliberate adjustments.
I treat life like an experiment. Form a hypothesis, test it, and if you don’t like the result, treat it as information, not failure. You don’t burn down the lab. You change one variable and test again. A good life plan works the same way.
4. The Real Power Is in Doing It Every Year
Anybody can write goals in January. The magic of a life plan comes from revisiting it year after year. Rich talks about the compounding returns that come from reviewing your priorities consistently, the same way an investment grows over time. Those yearly plans also carried him through his toughest seasons of change, including walking away from a 30-year career to write this book.
Consistency is where the transformation happens. Excellence through effort, one year at a time.
Start Designing Your Life Today
You don’t need a 100-page document to begin. You need one honest hour and one honest question: where am I living by default? Write down what matters most to you, compare it to how you actually spent last week, and look at the gap. That gap is your starting point.
Pick up Life Plan: Living by Design, Not Default by Rich Harris, and catch the full replay of our conversation on A New Direction with Coach Jay. Your life is too important to leave on autopilot.
Rich Harris’ book, “Life Plan: Live By Design, Not Default” is a book that will make you think deeply about who you are and gives sound well researched insight on how to change yourself so that you can excel. From the very beginning Rich embarks on the mission that a life plan will help make that change.
Rich starts out the book by giving us a brain anatomy lesson on how are brain is built and why it can be great, but also how it can also be deceptive. We are susceptible to illusions that that we think are real. The fact is our wiring seems fine to us, but it can be a problem.
Then Rich helps us understand that we have an operating system problem. The code has been warped by our upbringing, education, traumatic events, etc. And begins to weave in how a life plan can help rewrite some of our code.
When we start getting into the nuts and bolts of a life plan. It all starts with intention. And when we start becoming more intentional about who we are and why we do what we do we can begin to change the patterns and habits that we have built.
The life plan is more than a simple goal setting activity. It is an honest look at who we are, what we are, how we need to change and then building a life plan around the different areas of our life. Career, finances, relationships, future, are all part of what Rich’s life plan.
I found Life Plan to be such an amazing read that really made me think, and it also made me realize I have more work to do. I still have habits, and thinking, and negative narratives and self-talk that crop up from time to time that if I would dig into where they came from confront them and recognize I can change them, my life will change in a positive direction.
Further, the research for a Life Plan is so robust that actually writing it down, breaking it down into smaller parts, and publicly sharing it will increase every area of my personal life and business life, from people to profits.
Get your copy of Life Plan by clicking here!
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Your Business Isn’t Broken. It’s the Person Running It.
The marketing is fine. The team is capable. The market is there. And the business still won’t move.
You’ve read the books. Hired the consultants. Rebuilt the org chart twice. None of it touched the actual problem, because the actual problem was never in the business.
It’s fear. It’s ego. It’s the story you keep telling yourself about what you can and can’t do. It’s the “personal stuff” you’ve been leaving at the door every morning — except it doesn’t stay there. It walks in with you and runs the company.
I’m Jay Izso. I’m an Executive Performance Coach, and I work with CEOs and founders of $5M–$50M companies who’ve hit a wall they can’t explain. I don’t fix algorithms. I fix the behaviors and mindsets that are strangling your growth.
No Motivational Platitudes
I find the personal behavioral pattern that’s driving the business dysfunction. Then I help you disrupt it so the company can actually grow. That’s the whole method.
No vision boards. No affirmations on the monitor. Diagnostics, intervention, results.
If you want to feel better about your business, hire a hype man. If you want it to change, keep reading — because where I learned to do this isn’t a place most coaches have ever set foot.
Raised on the Farm. Trained in Psychology.
My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in.
The farm. I grew up a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska — population 100. I started working at nine. By fourteen I was castrating boars, and nobody was coming to do it for me if I froze. By the time I left for college I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, that pain is part of the job, and that the work gets done whether you feel like it or not.
That’s not a charming childhood story. It’s why I don’t flinch when a CEO’s real problem turns out to be uglier than the one they hired me to fix. I’ve done harder, dirtier work than a hard conversation.
The forensic unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham — co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis — in a human behavior lab built around real-world problems, not theory. I followed that into a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington: a forensic setting, evaluating people charged with the most serious criminal offenses.
Sixteen months reading human behavior at its most extreme teaches you one thing fast: how to get past what someone’s telling you and see what’s actually driving the decision. That’s not a metaphor I use with executives — it’s the literal skill I use on them. Most consultants react to what a CEO says the problem is. I was trained to find what’s underneath it.
How the Work Actually Happens
We find the pattern. Not “leadership style” — the specific behavior that shows up under pressure and quietly runs the company into a wall. The decision you keep re-making. The hire you keep avoiding. The conversation you keep having in your head instead of in the room.
We name it, out loud, without the corporate padding.
Then we disrupt it — deliberately, on purpose, on a schedule — until the new behavior is the automatic one. Not a seminar. Not a one-time breakthrough you feel good about for a month. A rebuilt habit, tested against your actual business, week over week.
If you also want to hear how this plays out in other people’s companies before you talk to me, that’s what the show is for. Every week on A New Direction, I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance — the decisions that built their companies, the mistakes that nearly ended them, and the breakthrough that changed everything. The podcast is where you can watch the diagnosis happen to someone else first.
Who This Is For
This works if you’re the CEO or founder of a $5M–$50M company, you already know — or strongly suspect — that you’re the bottleneck, and you’re willing to look at that directly instead of managing around it.
This doesn’t work if you want a quick fix. I can’t help you if what you’re after is a pep talk before your next board meeting.
I work with people who value authenticity and effort. If you’re ready to dig in, find the root cause, and grow — keep reading.
Your Growth Journey Starts Here
Big idea, bold goal, or a wall you can’t explain — start the conversation. Schedule your audio session and tell me the one thing about your business that doesn’t add up. I’ll tell you, straight, whether it’s a business problem or a personal one wearing a business costume.
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