If you've been feeling drained and unmotivated at work for months, you might be headed for burnout. Unfortunately, many people keep pushing themselves until they hit a breaking point.

The good news is that if you are a knowledge worker—someone whose work requires specialized skills or expertise, you have the power to design the life you want. The more valuable you are to your employer, the more you can work on your terms.

Although fulfilling work is vital to well-being, it must also be balanced with other pillars of well-being such as relationships, health, and play. After recognizing an imbalance in my own life, I left my full-time job to redesign my life. Since then, I've built a career I feel deeply passionate about, made more time for my loved ones, and began pursuing passion projects (like this blog!).

In this guide, I will share practical tools to help you take meaningful steps towards your ideal work and life. It's broken down into 4 sections for each pillar of well-being: work, relationships, health, and play.

But First... How Are You Doing?

Whenever I deliver a well-being talk, I ask the audience this simple question:

There is a large gap for most people, but it's never too late to take steps towards the life that you want.

1) Work

A 2018 World Happiness Report published research on which jobs had the highest worker satisfaction. It turns out that the "happiest jobs" had nothing in common, and it didn't correlate with high income or education. You can love or hate being a lawyer, doctor, homemaker, or teacher.

Research has shown that work satisfaction is more about how you integrate your job into your life, rather than the specific job itself.

Here are some common ways we fail to integrate job and life, and practical solutions to address them: