Welcome to Figure It Out by Lou Shackleton.
A space for people who want to get better at the changes life throws at us.
Because, everything is figure-out-able.
So, let’s figure it out together.
👋🏻 Hello. Who are you?
Hi there! I’m Lou Shackleton. I live in North Tyneside, UK, near the sea, with my childhood sweetheart and my son.
My preschooler is really teaching me to the max about adapting all the time. And I’ve been obsessed with how we know who we are and how we change (and respond to change) for as long as I can remember.
I created Design for Life, a 3- or 6- month programme that helps people to define the changes they want to see in their life, and make them happen.
If you’re stuck and frustrated, tired of life, or lost and looking for direction then Design for Life can help you to get clarity, find focus, and take actions to get things moving:
Unblock your energy.
Take control of your own wellbeing.
Find a new sense of freedom.
Whilst I’m doing that, I doodle. I doodle to make sense of what I’m learning about change in my own life and in the lives of the people that choose to work with me. I make doodles that distill key concepts or explore some of the challenges I find.
For a long while I’ve been posting these doodles on instagram. Now they get more words along with them!
And here, on Figure It Out, I also write about books that I’ve read and how I’ve incorporated their approaches or frameworks into my work.
I respond to other people’s posts about similar ideas and frameworks, to develop my thinking.
I’m looking forward to finding out what questions you have about a change you’re navigating right now. Who knows what nuggets will fall out of my brain in response!
Why should I sign up to Figure It Out?
Here you will find doodles and writings on the one constant in life: change.
There are doodles that explore some key concepts on how change happens and how we grow.
There are suggestions and recommendations of things to you can try.
There are reviews and distillations of books I’ve read that influence my approach to change and personal growth.
And there are snippets and almost-formed thoughts on my own experiences with change.
And what are we figuring out, exactly?
I’m a firm believer that everyone and anyone can get better at change - and when they do, they just feel better. More in control. More confident. More themselves.
Whether that change is driven by outside changes beyond our control, or it comes from a shift inside ourselves, there are tools and frameworks to help. And this is the place to find them.
Plus, personal growth is something that goes hand in hand with change - change is something that makes us grow. And when we grow, things change. So I’ll be sharing about personal growth here, too.
This is the stuff of life, really. And we’re all just figuring it out as we go.
📩 When you join
When you join, you will get access to all of my posts here - writings and doodles.
When I publish something new, it will automagically arrive in your inbox (in your emails, and in the substack app if you use it).
You’ll be the first to hear about when my Design for Life programme is open for new clients.
You will hear about any offers I have on.
You can chat with me and with other readers; we might be a small group right now but we are imperfectly formed (the best kind of perfect).
I’m hoping as we grow in ourselves through what I share here, we’ll grow in numbers too.
💰 Paying for it
At the moment, Figure It Out is free.
You can pledge a monthly, annual, or founding membership if you feel like you’re getting value.
If I get enough pledges, I might turn paying memberships on.
At the moment, though, my plan is to keep all posts free and invite donations. I’ll set that up later.
First, let’s make sure I create things that are helpful. That’s the most important thing.
💭 Why I started Figure It Out
I am really passionate about building our capacity for change. So that we can be calmer and more confident about change when it happens, and calmer and more confident about making it happen. (I also like to switch off and watch an old-school detective drama).
I’ve been sharing illustrations and doodles on these themes on instagram for a while now. I wanted to write more and have multiple illustrations together. So I decided to make a space for longer form content here, where it’s more comfortable to read.
I’m using substack because, having subscribed to some newsletters on this platform, I really enjoy how it feels and the kinds of spaces that are being created. It reminds me of how the internet used to be (even twitter, back in the day 🤪).
I do still love Instagram, even as it’s changing; you can find me here. I also wanted more; more of something that instagram doesn’t have. Words.
I have had an email list before but the idea of signing up for an email provider again did not fill me with joy. This space on substack feels different; more intimate, somehow. It feels like a space I can write freely, and share my doodles freely. Where we can connect over them and make connections between them.
💡 Why ‘Figure It Out”?
The single biggest thing that people come to me for is to help them to make sense of things. Make sense of a change they’re going through, or a change they want to make happen for themselves. But, they don’t know how. It can be really messy and confusing. And I found that the thing that I’m best at is helping to get untangled, and find some clarity.
Just enough clarity drives action, and that’s how change happens. The kind of change you feel in control of, anyway. For a while now I’ve been sharing a doodle that shows a tangled ball of doodle-string gradually unravelling into an arrow. Sometimes the arrow ends with a light bulb, or an exclamation mark. One time I wrote a phrase above the unravelling line: “Figure it out.” And when I sat down to create this space, that phrase popped into my head. If I can help people to figure it out when I work with them in the Design for Life programme, I hope I can do that here too.
