Revealing Yourself Through Design Decisions When my husband and I hired a life coach to facilitate the writing of our life mission statements, it became one of the greatest clarifying exercises I've ever done. It also enriched our marriage. The coach guided us through several exercises, peeling back our psychologi- cal layers like an onion, to reveal our core values--the most critical element of a life mission statement. At its heart, it comes down to what you value, what you do, and for whom you do it. One of the exercises involved scanning several pages of verbs to uncover how we perceived our individual moti- vations: after all, the most important component of the life statement is the verb. Out of the entire list, we were asked to narrow our selections to three. Unfortunately, after perusing the list I began to panic because I couldn't find my verbs anywhere. I always felt I was different but even with hundreds of verbs I didn't want to settle. I got a bit choked up and apologized for being odd. My husband, on the other hand, found his verb in the second column and didn't need to continue. When he revealed his verb, our worlds suddenly made sense. We're as opposite as two individuals could be. His life verb was "relax." Finally, it made sense why we both wanted to approach vacations, finances, child-rearing, and business differently. If we were to express our life mission statements visually, they would be very different. One might consider this a type of personal brand. Mine would have colors that are fiery and passionate while his would be serene. My type- face would be big block letters so the troops can read the flag in battle, whereas his would be a script font overlaying a putting green. You get the point. The design decisions you make represent you and feed your audience's per-