What If You Wrote Requirements for Your Life?
8 min read
Engineers are trained to write precise specifications for complex systems. We define inputs, outputs, constraints, and success criteria. We build testing frameworks and acceptance criteria. We know that a system without clear requirements will drift, underperform, or fail silently.
What happens when you apply the same rigor to the system that matters most — your life?
Most of us inherited our life requirements from parents, culture, or the inertia of early career choices. We optimize for metrics someone else defined: prestige, compensation, title, publication count. We are running someone else's test suite and wondering why we feel like we are failing.
The Essential Self Diagnostic is built on this premise: before you can optimize, you need to know what you are optimizing for. The five dimensions — Body Connection, Boundaries, Work, Relationships, and Creativity — are not abstract categories. They are the requirements specification for a life that is genuinely yours.
When an engineer tells me they feel "stuck," I ask them to describe the system. What are the inputs? What are the constraints? What does "working correctly" look like? Usually, they cannot answer — not because they lack intelligence, but because they have never written the spec.
That is where coaching begins. Not with answers, but with better questions. Not with fixing what is broken, but with defining what "working" means in the first place.