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Bella | Career & Lifestyle Design

@design.with.bella

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🎯Helping drained professionals create a life-first career
💙6yrs of putting life first
✨Wake up excited on a Tuesday
👇DM me LIFEFIRST to start

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You don’t have to stay in your stressful, unfulfilling job. You can be the person who says YES to living authentically, YES to the bolder life, YES to the highest version of yourself.

Prior to working together, she described herself as:
➡️ Defeated
➡️ Hopeless
➡️ Emotionally drained

Like so many people, she thought her problem was that she didn’t know what career to pursue.

But that wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem was that her job had her stuck in survival mode.

When you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and constantly questioning yourself, it’s almost impossible to get clear on what you actually want. You can’t dream when you’re just trying to get through the week.

So before we ever talked about resumes, applications, or career paths, we focused on something deeper:

✨ Rebuilding her confidence
✨ Challenging the beliefs that were keeping her stuck
✨ Creating a vision for a life she genuinely wanted

Only then did it become clear what kind of work belonged in that life.

The result?

She quit the job that was draining her, received TWO new offers, and stepped into work that actually supports the life she wants to live.

But the job isn’t my favorite part of this story.

My favorite part is watching someone go from feeling trapped by life to realizing they have the power to create something different.

Because that’s the real transformation.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, drained, or like you’re living a life that no longer fits who you’ve become, know this:

You do not need to settle.

Comment ALIGN and I’ll send you the exact blueprint I use to help people create work that supports their life—not the other way around. by @design.with.bella

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5 months ago

🚨Saying it loud for the people in the back!!!🚨

It’s time to stop telling yourself that everything’s fine.
It’s time to stop settling for less than what you deserve. It’s time to start living a life that you love.

DM me to chat more, I’d love to see how I can help! 💕 by @design.with.bella

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7 months ago

Hi guys 🥰

This is me and my story. It’s the story of how I went from feeling stressed and unfulfilled in my 9-5, wondering - is this all there is to life??? - to feeling in control of my life, living on my own terms 💕

I hope my story can become your story, and that we collectively stop settling for anything less than the life of our dreams❤️

If you’re ready to escape stressful, unfulfilling jobs and start living life on your own terms, send me a DM 🥰 by @design.with.bella

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10 months ago

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22 days ago

Welcome to the tribe if you grew up hearing “be home by dark”, you compulsively put “haha” at the end of every text, and you still can’t figure out why a job that pays enough and doesn’t take over your life feels impossible to find.

I’ve spent years rewriting the rules of my own job and how I approach work so it actually fits my life instead of the other way around.

Going part-time.
Renegotiating my schedule.
Changing jobs.
Going remote.
Every time, life first.

I share a lot of what I’ve learned and how I approach work here already, but I’m taking it a step further.

I’m turning everything i’ve learned into The LifeFirst Toolkit: a self-paced workbook for getting a job that fits your life, not the other way around.

It’s dropping next week.

Get on the list before it’s live! Link in bio. by @design.with.bella

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25 days ago

Turns out that’s only half of the equation.

We all want to have the time, money, and energy to be fully present for the things that matter most.

Spontaneous afternoons at the beach without worrying about work piling up.

Celebrating your grandfather’s 90th birthday on a Wednesday and not stressing about the meeting you have tomorrow.

Sipping a nice cup of tea on the deck and watching the birds pass by instead of watching the clock.

But there’s another layer here too, one that’s not about more of the good times.

One that’s about having room for the hard times, too.

Space to breathe without being suffocated by a draining job.

Capacity to feel more than what the work day throws at you, or requires you to contain.

Time to heal, grow, and expand - not just someone else’s profits but your own mind, body and soul.

And right now, this is the part that I’m most grateful for.

Of course, I’m soooo grateful that I have the ability to spend so much time outside, to be spontaneous, to put my life and the things that make me feel like me first.

But lately, things have been hard.

And while having all of those things is beyond incredible, what I’m really appreciating most right now…

is that I don’t have to give everything to work, and somehow deal with life’s challenges with what little is left.

And maybe that’s part of what “life-first” means too. by @design.with.bella

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a month ago

When you’re clear on what you want AND you recognize that there are sooooo many different ways to make that happen…

You stop chasing a promotion just because that’s what you’ve been told to do.

You start fighting for whatever path is going to get you the life you actually want.

You’re calm, clear, and focused because you’ve finally made it simple.

I’m at point A.

I want to be at point B.

I’m gonna see which path works best to get me there, and not settle for the one I’ve been on just because it’s familiar.

So if you’ve been spending your energy trying to get another promotion but don’t know what your actual destination (the life you truly want) is…

Take that energy and redirect it towards figuring that out.

I promise you won’t regret it.

If you want help gaining clarity on the life you truly want, translating that into clear job requirements, and using that to actually get the damn job, you know where to find me :) by @design.with.bella

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a month ago

Pretend that your core energy is a million dollar component

(which, if you’ve been working on personal development at all, it kinda is…)

You don’t want to have to be constantly replacing a million dollar component.

In engineering, the solution is to design in an intentional wear component.

Like a shaft sleeve.

Cheap and easy to replace. Protects the expensive component.

What can be your wear component, your shaft sleeve, to protect your core energy?

Maybe it’s exercise.

Daily stressors start to creep in, threatening to wear down your core energy…

BAM.

Exercise = protective layer.

And when it starts to chip away, maybe you call your best friend.

BAM.

Shaft sleeve replaced.

This is how I think about protecting my energy, and maybe it can helpful for you too.

Follow along @design.with.bella for more like this :) by @design.with.bella

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a month ago

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

(insert scene from The Notebook)

Sometimes we think we know what we want from our job.

“More time”

“Less stress”

“More freedom”

But these things are vague, which means they’re not only hard to achieve in your current job, but also hard to evaluate for in a new job.

Because ambiguity leads to confusion, and confusion makes it hard to move forward.

So you stay stuck and think you can’t have what you actually want while working a 9-5.

But the happy truth is, you can (at the very least, it can get a whole lot better).

The trick is to be crystal clear on what you want.

And you can do that by getting clear and specific on the things that you DO want (your life design requirements)…

then translate those into clear job requirements that you can easily search for and evaluate against when looking at new opportunities.

This is a key part of the process that I teach inside of LifeFirst to get you from dreading Mondays to your dream Tuesday.

What’s one of your life design requirements? by @design.with.bella

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a month ago

It’s all about that dream Tuesday tho

It’s probably unrealistic to think that you’ll have a job where every day it’s all sunshine and rainbows.

You wake up and say, man I can’t WAIT to go to work today 1yr in.

You never feel tired.

You never have a single stressor.

But you know what IS realistic?

A job that gives you your dream Tuesday.

The slow mornings.

The fun afternoons.

The meaningful and relaxed evenings.

That is 100% possible by intentionally creating a job that meets your unique life requirements and adopting the life-first mentality.

And I think that’s what we all want anyways.

If you wanna skip the years of aches & pains figuring this out alone, DM me LIFE FIRST. I’ve got your back 💕 by @design.with.bella

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a month ago

I used to work part-time at a horse farm on top of my 9–5.

Not because I needed the money.

Because something was missing.

At the time, I was doing everything I could to figure out how to feel more fulfilled without blowing up the career I’d worked so hard to build.

I knew I loved horses.
I knew being outside made me happy.
I knew I wanted to feel like what I was doing actually mattered.

So I tried to add those things back into my life wherever I could.

And honestly, the barn helped.

But it also gave me a really important clue:

The things I kept trying to squeeze in around my career weren’t just nice-to-haves.

They were telling me something about what I actually needed.

Fulfillment mattered to me.
Direct, tangible impact mattered to me.

And once I stopped treating those things like unrealistic wants and started treating them like actual requirements, it became a lot easier to figure out what I was looking for.

For me, that eventually led to building my own business.

But that’s not the point of this story.

Because your answer might look completely different.

Maybe impact means working directly with people.
Maybe meaning comes from working with animals, creating art, solving problems you actually care about, or being part of a team you genuinely give a shit about.

Maybe you don’t need your work to be deeply meaningful at all — but you DO need it to give you enough time, money and energy to do the things that are.

That’s the whole point.

There isn’t one “fulfilling career.”

There’s a career that fits your requirements for the life you actually want.

And if you know your current job isn’t it, but you have no clue what would be…

I gotchu.

Inside Life First, we figure out what you actually need from your life and work, and use that to find your next move instead of throwing applications at random jobs and hoping one finally feels better.

DM me LIFE FIRST if you’re ready to figure out what yours looks like. by @design.with.bella

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a month ago

It sounds so simple.

Because it is 😂

The only thing getting in your way is the story you’re telling yourself about perfectionism, shame, inadequacy, or whatever else about why you can’t have an honest conversation.

One 10min conversation with my managers across different roles / times has gotten me the following:

💥Sent to Germany
💥An amazing transfer to a new role (& life tbh) in California
💥Hybrid & remote work
💥Flexible schedule
💥Reduction from 40hrs to 24hrs / week with all rates, benefits, and flexibility maintained

People spend months trying to find jobs that provide this level of alignment with their lives.

Over the course of 6yrs…I’ve spent 50 minutes.

Obviously, there was a ton of behind-the-scenes to get to this level of clarity & confidence, and to get the initial jobs in some cases.

But the point remains the same - each one of these could’ve been handled by spending weeks on end searching for a new job, or being miserable about the one I had.

Instead, I started with a conversation.

So before you go apply to your next job, ask yourself if you’ve truly exhausted the opportunities at your current role.

HavE YoU hAd thE cOnvErsAtioN wiTh yOuR mAnaGer yEt.

Don’t sit on this.

If you want more about creating a life-first career, follow along @design.with.bella by @design.with.bella

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a month ago