Reviewing Your Life Movie

PRACTICE GUIDE – Inner Director

What is a Life Movie?

Think of 5-10 specific scenes that have been memorable in your life so far. What are the high points, low points, and turning point? Recall events that were important to you. The more self-aware you are of the more detail and can now see them from different perspectives and create a map of your life journey. The emotions today may be complex, even contradictory. Perhaps it had a massive impact at the time, but you see it in a different way today. Stimulate your thoughts by using metaphors. Jerome Bruner suggests we should see our life stories as “landscapes of action” to get the sequence of events intentions and emotional reactions.

What mountains, marshlands, forests and the fast-flowing rivers did you have to cross?

What rough seas and stressful waves did you have to navigate and deal with to win through? 

What periods of isolation and slippery pathways have tested your resilience and commitment?

The value of seeing your life as chapters with key events and insights is that they stick with you.  Consider your attitude at the time and if it is reflected in your attitude today. In what way did it affect the choices you made subsequently. Do you notice any themes or consistent responses to similar situations? What do think these patterns of behaviour are telling you about who you are and what you care about.

For example, when I was a young man I found myself in situations where I enjoyed helping people and making music. Hardly surprising then that I should find myself as a community worker, musical director and as a volunteer working overseas. Here I am, some thirty or so years later, working as a coach and learning mentor. Read a summary of my “Self-Story”

So what does it mean?

The insights we gain from discovering more about ourselves from looking more closely at how our life story has unfolded so far, we can see patterns of being, seeing and feeling that we can draw from to produce a new life story to transform our future. This Life Leadership story can be created by answering the questions raised in the diagram below. They will give you clarity as you reflect on how you to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented in the past and what you have learned about yourself that you need to address to produce your desired future.

In effect, you having a conversation with yourself. Your inner Director is you acting as your own coach. Each one of the questions will give rise to more questions that only you can find the answers for. As you wrestle with those questions you open your eyes to strengths you never know you had.

Now what?

To give coherence to our experience our nervous system structures them, producing a skeleton on which we hang subsequent experiences. Inconvenient truths are reframed to create the illusion of alignment, so our stories make sense to us.  All good stories have a protagonist – us.  What we remember most vividly are events where:

• Our life was thrown out of balance by a disruption in the normal flow of daily happenings – breakdowns
• We overcome a series of barriers in pursuit of actions that will restore our sense of self – breakthroughs
• We pursue a passion or our desired Way of Being where our values, purpose. and identity is satisfied – breakpoints

David Drake suggests we should see the process of directing our story in four acts.

Act 1 – Setting the Scene. Context and concerns are all important. What is that we care about and why?  Where is the conflict or “breakdown” that we have to come to terms with?

Act 2 -Addressing the Concern. What is going on inside you that is causing you to lose balance and search for a solution to your concern? What triggered our reaction or response?  What assessments have to be grounded in evidence? What habits and beliefs are no longer working for you?  What changes will you have to make in your Way of Being?

Act 3 – Clarity of Outcome.  What is being asked of you and what are the barriers and constraints to putting it into action? What have you learned that must shape how you go about sequencing and resourcing the actions you must take?

Act 4. – Addressing the Consequences. What could happen in the “outside world” that could bring support or challenges from others? What could be lost as a result of the gains you make?  The insights could emerge from asking the “Miracle Question” to imagine what it would be like to live in your new life story. When you see pictures, hear conversations and see yourself acting in a new context you are creating a new Life Movie.

Asking the “why” questions will help you understand and give purpose to your actions when you come to consider the “how” question. You will notice how one story fits into a larger narrative that serves a deeper, soul-based intention. To help you tease out some priorities for action, you may want to explore a number of other practices that your inner Director could use to help your inner Actor imagine what to do first next to have the biggest impact.  To enhance your self-awareness and remove any self-doubt, subject your plan to a number of reality checks. Here are a few examples available in the Tools Menu. **

• Producing a Well-formed Outcome
• Using the Miracle Question and Solution-Focus Approach
• Reframing your experiences
• Grounding your assessments
• Your Hero’s Journey

Practices

1.  Think of your life as if it were scenes in a movie.  Write down some key points.

• What happened and when? Who was involved?
• What were you and others thinking, feeling and doing, and what about it was especially important to you?
• What does each event say about who you are, how you have developed over time and what you have become?

2.  Write a few paragraphs on the things you want to see happen to you in the future to enhance your satisfaction with life or to achieve a long-standing intention or something you want to leave behind to benefit others.  Put them in order of importance. This should not be a list 100 things you want to do before you die, just a few things you want to achieve to feel that your life had real meaning and was fulfilling for you.

3.  Choose one of the five “reality checkers” listed above ** and use it to explore a problem or opportunity you could face when creating and implementing your new Life Story. Go to the Tools Menu.  What did you discover about yourself?

References

Insight by Tasha Eurich. Macmillan 2017

Actual Minds, Possible Worlds by Jerome Buner.  Harvard 1986

Narrative Coaching by David Drake.  CNC Press 2015