Know Thyself Exercise 1: Lifeline
Summary: Go back in time to reflect on your life to identify how your past shapes you today. Go through your own personal story to identify and relive key moments, highlights & lowlights, which made you who you are today. Discover your values, your genuine interests, your self defense mechanisms.
A personal example: Through this exercise, I reconnected with my upbringing. My mother has been a strong role model for me. A devout christian, she has strong values of giving and generosity: “to give is to love” she would say. She dedicated her life to her family and her community. Still to this day, she donates bread and other food items to poorer families through her church community. I have learnt compassion, humility and giving from her in a way that defines me still today, and I am very grateful for that.
Exercise Instructions:
Get a blank A4 sheet of paper in front of you, landscape style: draw a horizontal line across the middle of it and a vertical line at the left side. The vertical line represents varying degrees of “happy / satisfied / fulfilled” on the top side (life highlights) and “unhappy / frustrated / unsatisfied” at the bottom (life lowlights). The horizontal life represents your life’s age, from being born (age 0) until now (current age). Now draw your lifeline, moving up and down as you had significant events or periods of your life that brought you life highlights or lowlights respectively.
Deepen the exercise by segmenting your life in “chunks” (i.e. every 5 years, or “childhood”, “adolescence”, etc.): write the events that characterize that segment, the highlights and lowlights and their impact on you. Alternatively, you can write down your life story: a full chronological narrative story of the moments, the people, the highlights, the lowlights and what you learned from them. As you go through these events, try to visualize yourself in them and “relive” them. Reflect on what makes you you:
Where do your values come from? Did you always have them or did you learn them?
What were you afraid of? Where did you learn your self defense mechanisms?
Where did you experience wonder, awe and thrill? When did you feel truly alive?
Where / doing what would you get infinitely lost in time as a kid? What were you interested in and passionate about?
What was easy for you and not for others? What was hard for you and not for others?
Who did you look up to? Who were your role models? What did you admire in them?
How does all this still shape your current behavior and aspirations?
Draw and write in a way that you are not afraid of how it will be perceived. You can share with others if you want (coach, therapy, close friend, etc.), but the highest value is in self reflection: is to get to know yourself better.
Resources: I did not invent the lifeline exercise: there are infinite resources describing it. Click here for a more detailed explanation. Robert Greene’s book “Mastery” has been recommended to me & is relevant.
Bonus parenting pro tip: For the past 10+ years, I keep a digital notebook of my kids’ life story, one notebook per kid, since they were born. I focus on remarkable moments: funny thing they said / did, memorable anecdote, feedback from the teachers, my own observations on the little things that make them unique. I include the date and sometimes a photo of the moment. They don't know that I do this. One day, when we have collectively survived their teens, I will give them this present: a book of their life story as seen from their dads viewpoint.Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
