A part of our Club of Peren Sessions. Each month another member introduces oneself more deeply by presenting their Life Line with the group.
Purpose:
Gaining insights in your own life and personality, by reflecting in a structured manner and mapping all your life’s important events.
Taking dedicated time each session to quickly get a deep sense of what has shaped you.
Understanding each other creates trust. And by openly sharing - potentially vulnerable situations - you set a contagious example.
Overview
Your life line is a visual representation of your life, filled with the most important events and influences that have shaped you.
The suggestion or default option is to create a graph of sorts. A graph with an x-axis for time (thus listing your life chronologically from left to right) and a y-axis for the happiness of your life (with the highs high, and the lows low).
It’s best to first draft to create a large list of what to include, and then pick and choose what to include and draw.
NB: You can choose to expand your life line to include a) your family history from before you were born, and b) the future you have yet to live.
Step 1: Drafting
Think of your life from your birth until now. Think of all the important events - highs and lows - that have shaped you and made you who you are today.
Think of:
People. Who have been important in your life? What was their rol? How have they impacted you? Focus on the ones who’ve been of real impact.
Places: Where have you lived? Been to on travels? What places have shaped you?
Events & Experiences: Education, travels, sports, weddings (or divorce), births (or deaths). Go over your resume to see if you’ve missed any. Not all impactful moments have to be big. Some that seem inconsequential can just as well have been profound.
Projects & Companies: What were the big projects that you’ve worked on, the companies that you have build or helped shape? What did these experiences teach or cost you?
Take a big piece of paper and start writing a looooong list. Or a mind-map where you group them in these 4 categories.
Now go through your long list that comprises your life. Look at everything you’ve written down through the following lenses:
Wealth: Livelihood, work, projects, network, skills.
Health: Fitness, wellbeing, mental state, sport.
Happiness: Relationships, fun, friends, holidays, trips, activities, fulfilment, emotions.
2 additional lenses could be:
Growth & Creativity: Artistic and self-expression, interests, education, hobbies.
Impact & Contribution: Community, causes, helping, movements.
(A simpler way to hand our grades is to score on Enjoyment, Satisfaction and Meaning. These can be seen as the macronutrients of Happiness)
How were you doing in these 3-5 different domains over the course of your life? Try “grading” the experiences on the axis of these domains. No need to start handing out scores 1-10. A simple ++ to - - will do.
(You can go super granular and do it separately for each domain. But general grades are more than good enough.)
Note that sometimes, an experience can be both good and bad in different domains (the good well-paying job that make you sick).
What were the people, places, experiences, or projects teaching you?
What are beliefs you now hold because of them?
Step 2: Drawing
The previous step was about volume. Potentially even being “complete” in your exploration. But now, it’s time to start drilling down by focusing on what has been most important or impactful.
Go through your big list and highlight the most 10-15 most important ones.
Take a big piece of paper, preferably A3 or bigger. Put it down with the long side at the botton. Draw a horizontal line through the middle. Left is the beginning of your life, right is now.
(keep a little more space left and right if you wanted to expand the Life Line to include ancestors and your future self)
Add your most important People, Places, Events and Project. Decide on a place from left to right based on when it happened. Decide on a place from top to bottom based on how positively or negatively it influenced your life.
You can be visual and create little drawings. You can work more with text. The form is completely up to you. You could color-code events by type (work/projects/private or the lenses below). Options enough, and everyone creates his/hers differently.
When you’re done, connect the separate event with a line, going from left to right.
Take a moment to have a look at your life line.
During the Session
Every session, one of you will present their life line. You get about 15 minutes to present and we’ll have a some space for questions and remarks.
