Life Lessons from Your Work

In today’s world most of us engage not just one job throughout our adult lives but several, from early jobs as a youth gaining some experience or training to later career work that might be better attuned to our interests and sense of purpose.

As a self-discovery exploration I invite you to make a list of your workaday jobs.  Note your age when you started and (if) finished each job, and write a brief job description. Then consider for each job:

What LIFE LESSON(s) did I take away from this activity?

To pilot this Tool, allow me to briefly engage with this myself to see where it may lead:

• Horse drawings (around 6-7 YO): I loved to draw horses (always wanted my own horse and never had one, though I did get to help with horses at local stables in Pennsylvania with my sisters and friends). After feeling I had mastered a basic horse drawing design, one day I went around the neighborhood door-to-door, offering my artwork for a dime per drawing. Neighbors were supportive and I felt a sense of accomplishment. LIFE LESSON:  It is okay to share with others your creative products.
• Ice picking at the community Peach Festival in Lewiston, NY (15 YO): First paid job, and I didn’t stay with it long enough to be paid.  Terrible work without any safety gear. I still have scars on my hands from inexpertly hacking away at a block of ice for some stall owner who did not care.  LIFE LESSON: Use proper discrimination before accepting a responsibility; be sure you will be capable and safe.
• Crab and salmon cannery, Yakutat Alaska (19 YO summer) LIFE LESSON: Life is a Great Adventure!
• Grape vineyard and peach orchard, solo farm hand (20 and 21 YO, summer work to help pay for college spending): This was my first real job, a job of choice. I knew I needed to work but did not want a “normal” job such as waitressing or secretarial labor. This was outdoors and I worked mainly alone in the fields or driving a tractor. The farmer gave me many responsibilities, which I loved! (…Until the day he became inappropriate with me; I left shortly after that, not to return.) LIFE LESSON: Follow the beat of your own Heart; Enjoy responsibility and work hard to excel.   I learned how I dearly love to work hard and produce positive results.
• Ushering and parking booth attendant at a new performing arts center (22 – 24 YO) : I enjoyed every aspect of this and was promoted to Head Usher. LIFE LESSON: Exciting opportunities abound (I almost accepted a job in NYC becoming a nanny for a world class symphony conductor’s family; loved the variety of shows and the elan of performance.)
• Tutoring English at my undergraduate college (21-22 YO): Fell in love with teaching. LIFE LESSON: I can be of positive service through sharing knowledge by helping facilitate learning in others.
• Research Associate and Teaching Assistant, and Faculty adjunct at community colleges, while in  graduate school (14 yrs in grad school). LIFE LESSONS: Many. 

• University teaching (pre-tenured and then tenured faculty, and Chair two terms), 25 years. LIFE LESSONS: The importance of following my own inner guidance and developing detachment from academic politics or personality clashes; enjoyment of working with wonderful students; also the value of maintaining my spiritual focus and creative activities separately from the academic setting.images are from pixabay.com
• Spiritual services roles (44 yrs, many different roles and opportunities). LIFE LESSONS: How to be a spiritual co-worker with others in voluntary roles; and how to stand back to help facilitate spiritual seeking and growth in others.
• Writing for publication (many years): LIFE LESSONS: Persistence, commitment, dedication, willingness to work and rework; editing; then eventually morphing the project to team-based efforts and ultimately being able to release and share the work with as broad a readership as the book may reach. (Joy and the desire to produce more in service to Life!)

So, what might your history of Life Lessons from Working reveal? I see in mine a widening arc of responsibilities and a growing love of creative expression and Service. I love the feeling of independence that comes with varying responsibilities along with the expansion of knowledge and the capacity to grow from working with others as well as alone. I can hardly separate work from life as a whole, as the lessons have abounded holistically.

As I now prepare for a fast approaching retirement from my main academic position, this exercise has helped me to understand that this process will never dissipate but will only continue to expand!

So, what is YOUR story? I invite you to engage your own reflections about your Life Lessons from Work!

Map Your Life Theme of HEALTH

This  year as we focus on Life Themes for our main topic, each month I will give you the opportunity to “Map” the monthly Theme as it has patterned in your own Life Story.  Let’s begin with HEALTH as a Life Theme.

Mapping a Life Theme is a very simple self-discovery process.  First, list a series of significant health related events in your life. Make a note about each event so you will be able to read through these sequentially. Order these Health events chronologically just by numbering them from earlier to later, and it can help to place a relative date after each one on your list.

Now then, rate the relative positive and/or negative impact of each event as it has influenced you in your life. Use a scale from -5 to +5, with a zero score representing a neutral impact score.

Use the chart shown below to PLOT the positive and/or negative impacts of each event along the five grid lines above or the five grid lines below the central line. This chart represents a time or Age line from left (earlier) to right (Later). You can mark your age or the relative date of each event along (just below) the timeline. If you rated an event with both a positive AND a negative impact (which is common and fine, e.g. +3/-2 or +5/-5), then plot both the positive and negative values for that single event vertically at the same date along the time line and connect the positive and negative values with a vertical line.

After you have plotted the relative impacts of your Health events using the Life Mapping grid above, you can also CONNECT the dots (events) to reveal the overall PATTERN of this Life Theme in your life.  Especially when some of the events that are adjacent to each other on your chart reflect a CHANGE or a STABILITY of some health factors, connecting the plotted points can reveal TRENDS in your Health Theme over time.

images are from pixabay.com

After you have plotted the Ups and Downs of your own Health related Life Theme, I invite you to contemplate and journal about what you discover from reviewing how this Theme has operated in your life over time. Has it primarily been positive/ uplifting? Or a deterring factor, or very steady? How has Health been an influential factor in your life? Would you wish to change anything about it? How might you do that?

I invite your Comments and Story!

What are Your LIFE THEMES?

Here is a very simple and effective way to identify your Life Themes, those recurring situation and relationship types that form the “stuff” of much of your life activity within the Life Chapters of your Life Story:

• Reflect and write a LIST of 10-15 significant events that have “shaped you as the person you have become.” This does not have to be an exhaustive list, and the events or situations on your list do not have to have been earth shattering, just significant.
• After you have composed your list of significant “shaping” events or situations, read back through this list several times and SORT your events into KINDS of events. Assign personally meaningful NAMES to these Kinds of Events. These are your LIFE THEMES.

You may list your LIFE THEMES below and you can print out this post to remember them:

Now if you like, you can compare your list of LIFE THEMES with the twelve monthly Themes I have selected for us to focus on this year at Better Endings for Your Life Path. (You can also find these by clicking on the Monthly Topics menu tab.)

January –     Health

February –   Romance/ Relationships

March –       Vocation

April –          Work

May –           Family

June –          Adventure/ Travel

July –           Friends

August –      Relocation/ Moves   

September– Education

October –     Spirituality

November – Pets

December – Life Lessons

images are from pixabay.com

Are some of your LIFE THEMES similar to the monthly Themes listed above? You might benefit from associating your LIFE THEMES with some of these monthly topics, then I encourage you to focus on YOUR Life Theme issues and lessons as we focus on these topics this year. I will provide active imagination and journaling prompts to help you to reflect on your own experiences.

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Lessons for Life History?

Not all stories have ‘better endings’, and some of life’s Shadow Teachers offer but bitter pills to swallow. After a long conversation with my sister, a pastor, yesterday and reading through several current blog posts around the web, I am left with some somber insights about where the recent election and anti-globalism in the world have brought us to from the point of view of lessons from history.

I am considering how American values and priorities are so focused on materiality today.  It occurs to me—and please share your Comments below to offer your own viewpoint—that as a post-World War II set of generations in America, many of us grew up believing in the idea of “progress” AS IF having defeated Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, somehow all of human consciousness had taken a positive and irreversible, ‘quantum’ leap forward as a collective species. So then after that threat was dissolved, presumably we could focus on achieving prosperity, which came to mean seeking material advantages at any cost, including massive debt and, more sadly, bigotry and mean-spirited politics. Of course there have been many instances of genocide since, not boding well for human enlightenment, and the socioeconomic imbalances can cycle around to the very sorts of conditions that gave rise to ‘a Hitler,’ again.

We are deeply impoverished if materiality is all that we aim for.  As well, social networking, “reality” TV and one-sided news stations magnify such paltry ambitions and selfish partisanship to an unprecedented magnitude, weakening the potential depth of heartfelt human relations or the capacity to sort out factual evidence and polarizing values so as to create artificial realities that fragment Truth like in a teleidoscope.

I have an inkling, at least for myself, of a strategy to combat mediocrity of experience in this physical materiopolis, to coin a Newspeak word. To counter negative cycles of History, what can I do? Well,  I can examine my own cycles of life experience and ‘fix’ the errors there that have led to unfortunate or unsatisfactory results, Now.  I believe that means—again, for me anyway—discerning and countering HABITS: habits of thought and attitude as well as health related habits. This can lead not only to my own better endings but it can also improve my relations with others in, at least, my world.

images are from pixabay.com

If many of us would choose to take to heart this opportunity to empower ourselves by overcoming negative habits accrued through our personal life histories, and if this practice of mindful self-improvement were to rise into prominence in the collective consciousness, what then?  Could we bring about a new positive cycle even whilst in the outward throes of darker tendencies playing themselves out?

This is a  more somber perspective than I usually put forth in this blog.  But to me it feels like the lessons of history are calling out now for realism and positive action.

Your Life As History

Monday I felt I just had to go out to find the film Julie & Julia, as it is an appropriate parallel story for an enterprising author and for any blogger, of course. I streamed the movie and found the most relevant element for me to absorb was about the long process Julia Child undertook to transform American sensibilities in relation to more than just French cooking.  She was introducing a style, literally making palatable an attitude as well as a culinary revolution akin to the sexual liberation movement that developed in tandem with this European flair.

What is a writer or an artist if not an innovator and somewhat of a provocateur? Julia’s persistence over many years of developing her talents and composing her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), served her well (not a pun! well, maybe so).  She merged American gastronomic desires for nouveaux choses with traditional rural French cuisine in a manner that freed not only the taste buds but as well the fertile imagination of Americans after WWII had already begun to open up for us new territories of European philosophical thought and literature/ culture. Spiritually I must infer this was no accident. Julia Child was the right person for the task she undertook with her grace and fortitude plus her special brand of loving, even lovably awkward humor.

The parallel mythic aspects of Julie and Julia in relation to my own current life activity are obvious to me but that’s personal; not worth expounding here. Her perseverance and persistence despite the opposition she first encountered to a new approach that blended sensibilities rather than merely presenting one style in a didactic way offers lessons for many of us.

It was telling to see how Nora Ephron (screenwriter) drew parallel mythic connections in her screenplay between Julie Powell and Julia Child’s lives quite explicitly, fusing two historical epochs of an American in Paris from 1944-1961 with New York City in 2002, just after the 2001 Twin Towers disaster.

Our own story can merge with history itself in fundamentally useful ways. Julie Powell’s blog about cooking all of the recipes from Julia Child’s book in a year sparked the imagination of readers ready for a fresh inspiration to go beyond routine with a license to revitalize their passions. Powell actually worked for an agency helping victims from the Twin Towers attack to recover their own lives, so it is fascinating how she was led to intersect her own life and imagination with the life and times of Julia Child. Are there any accidents? I believe in co-incidence instead.

So, where does your Life Story stand positioned in the ongoing flow of human history? I know, that’s a big question. But of course our personal life history narratives are and must be understood at some level as products of History itself.

But how to unpack this? Just a brief musing (I invite you to write your own reflections…):

Born in 1954, I experienced the 1960’s while in highschool in Lewiston, New York. I started a Human Relations Club there to honor and punctuate the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. within a mainly “Lilywhite” community. This along with a 10^th grade class by one of my best early mentors (my English teacher, Mr. Scelsa)–in which for half the year we studied the Black literary Renaissance–led me to develop a sensitivity to issues of diversity in all forms. This was at a time when openness to new ideas was beginning to flourish. The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkle, and my next and lifelong mentor (who knows whom he or she is…) led me to want to be a writer, to make a contribution, to “make a difference” really in any way I might. So that led to 21 years of college, studying literature/philosophy,linguistics and cultural anthropology and then moving on to university teaching. These multidisciplinary threads and historical influences have coalesced to an interest in the interplay between cultural psychology and personal cognition, with the notion that we can free ourselves from self-limiting thoughts and behaviors, if we so choose.

So, what about you? How does your Life Story intersect with History? What are the consequences?

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I welcome your insights and stories!

Are You on a Comic, Tragic, or an Episodic Adventure?

After over a decade of coaching people from a wide range of backgrounds to compose Life Maps that represent their Life Chapters and Life Themes, I find there are three basic narrative GENRES people might use to reconstruct their Life Stories.  Two overarching genres for Life Stories are “Epic Adventure” and “Episodic Adventure,” and within the Epic Adventure category, Life Stories might be represented either as Comic or as Tragic.  Comic Life Story narratives arrive at a state of balance or successful survival or resolution from the point of view of the Present (they do not have to be “funny”).  Tragic Life Story tales represent unresolved turmoil from a dramatic sequence of situations continuing into the Present. Episodic Life Story narratives—associated with a “picaresque” hero—represent a person’s life history not as a dramatic narrative sequence so much as simply a string of situations or event phases that are not necessarily meaningfully connected to one another.

These three LIFE STORY GENRES, of course, have recognizable frameworks from mythology and literature.  Homer’s The Odyssey, with its heroic Odysseus/Ulysses, is a Comic Epic Adventure, as are J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the film version of The Wizard of Oz.  Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex unfolds a Tragic story cycle.  Cervantes’ Don Quixote depicts the picaresque or Episodic adventures of a “man of La Mancha” who serendipitously wends his way through a series of unrelated mishap adventures which have a mix of tragic and comic outcomes along the way.

You can see which LIFE STORY GENRE you currently tend to use in thinking about your own life simply by reading across the sequence of Life Chapter titles you would use to label the meaningful phases—or Life Chapters–of your own life history. Life Chapters can be identified by considering those phases of your experience that have occurred between your most pivotal, Turning Point events. (I invite you to use last week’s Life Mapping Tool for discovering your Life Chapters in order to reconstruct your own Life Story, before proceeding.)

Now then, what sort of Life Story tale does your sequence of Life Chapters relate? Here are a few examples:

Comic Epic Adventure:

Innocence — Turmoil — Enlightenment

Tragic Epic Adventure:

Striking Out — Meeting Obstacles —  Over The Rainbow —  No Pot of Gold

Episodic Adventure:

Chicago — College Years —  Arizona —  Now

So then, what does your Life Story Genre reflect about the sort of Threshold Experience outlook you currently hold? (See last Friday’s post about being a Threshold Dweller based on reconstructing your Life Story to Now.) How might your Comic/Tragic/or Episodic Life Story influence where you perceive yourself to be “at” in life, or where you appear to be “headed”? I invite you to journal and/or to talk about and/or actively contemplate your perspective about the impact of your reconstructed Life Story genre on your life choices and attitudes.

******   ******

Reblogged from Theresa at Soul Gatherings:

One often meets their destiny on the way to somewhere else.

At first glance, it may appear too hard.
Look again…..always look again.”

~ Mary Ann Radmacher ~
__________________________

I welcome your Comments, Insights and Stories that you might wish to share with other life mappers. – Linda

 

Your Crests and Valleys

Dear All: I am posting Friday’s blog early this week due to a rather major event in my own life occurring Friday that I am preparing for this week. So this post will serve as the Friday post. 🙂 L.

There are so many different approaches people take to reconstructing their history of significant life events.  I have met a woman over 70 who recalled just seven shaping events over her rich life experience, yet I also composed a Life Map for a 21 year-old young man who identified over 130 events, with many significant events happening every year.  Next week this should start becoming more clear as we will shift to looking not just at single events or time frames but at recurring KINDS of events in your life, or Life Themes.

For now, I invite you to reflect on the list of shaping events you have thought about or charted on a timeline this week. (Please see the Life Mapping Tool in the right panel and you might wish to check Sunday’s and Tuesday’s posts this week to ‘catch up’ on what we’re up to this week if you are just joining us.)  As you reflect on this particular list of life moments or phases you have recalled as your “shaping” events, do you recognize any obvious patterns or trends?

One life mapper, Mercedes, realized as she composed a timeline of her significant life events how her most challenging times almost always culminated with an event she associated with a Life Lesson. Another person, Hope, realized she had suffered from a long series of Meltdown phases as a result of some major family dysfunction, yet she always found ways to lift herself out of these Meltdowns by engaging in a Nature related event.

What obvious trends come to light for you from reflecting on your own history of shaping factors?  Were there happier periods involving specific kinds of events? Are there trends relating to romance or family? Did your family move a lot while you were young (for example) and if so, are there patterns in the history of events associated with these moves? Overall, do you recognize patterns or changing developments over time in the overall history of your “shaping factors”?

I invite and welcome your feedback, stories and insights!

Your Chapter Turners

Last week (or now if you like) you wrote down and briefly described 12 or so events from your life history that were influential to you in “shaping the person you have become”. Now then, I invite you to read through that list and ask yourself: which of these events or situations has had such a huge impact on your life that you feel you were “not the same person” before and after that event happened? These “Critical Life Events” are your Turning Points. Usually a person might identify 2-6 or so of these.

Now that you have identified these critical events from the rest of your significant events you have listed (BTW, keep the list; we will do more with it next week too!), next I invite you to number these Turning Points, then create a brief title sort of tag to identify each event, and then arrange that set of critical events along a page. For our purpose today, you can simply place the event tags across a blank page from left to right chronologically (alternately, you could arrange them along an upward looping spiral or in other fashions, but do keep chronologically adjacent events next to each other at least for now). You might wish to place your critical event tags above or below a central (neutral) age line. This will be to represent their respective positive (Up) or negative (Down) influence on your life overall. (That’s why I chose the musical score sheet for today’s image!)

Now then, you may read over this sequence of Turning Point events and reflect about them as being like the highlights of a dramatic script. Please consider that all of your life experience occurring BETWEEN any two of these Turning Point events (including Birth as your 1st marker and Now as your final point) has been a LIFE CHAPTER. As the Author of your own life script, go ahead and create titles for each of your Life Chapters.

To illustrate with an example, let’s say you identified 3 Turning Points (before and after you feel you were ‘not quite the same person’). Perhaps when you were 6 years old your parents divorced and you moved away from home with one of your parents; then at 16 you met the love of your life but broke up two months later; and at 23 you moved to Calcutta from Colorado! So you will have identified 4 Life Chapters which you can give meaningful titles to, something like: Innocence (0-6 years old); Growing Up to Reality (6-16); Struggling (16-23); and Finding My Freedom (23-Now).  Allow your Life Chapter titles to represent your personally meaningful flow of life experience.

After you have identified and named your Life Chapters, you can think of what they represent together as your Life Story! Feel free to arrange these Life Chapters either in this chronological way or in any manner that feels meaningful to you. Welcome to the art of life mapping!

I’ll offer more activities that you can use to develop and further embellish your Life Story account as we go further with the weekly Life Path mapping activities. (Of course, I am only presenting partial material for the blog, as the self-help Handbook that will accompany the upcoming book, Life Paths, will contain all of these activities along with many more complete forms and background for each technique.)

I would love to hear from you about your results in mapping your Life Chapters! Please feel free to Comment and share (if not too private for you) your dramatic sequence of Life Chapter titles. There is still time to write a story, too, this week about Better Choices in your life. Please send that to me by Saturday night to be included in Story of the Week.

So have fun, Author! And by the way, what TITLE would you give to the series of Life Chapters that comprise your Life Story? You can write your Life Story Title at the top of your Life Chapters page.

Better Endings to You All!