It takes a certain amount of courage to set aside your defenses and take a long, honest look at yourself. If you’re ready to break free into a life of abundance and prosperity, it’s time to release the justifications, the illusions, the compliments that people have paid you and the insulting labeling they’ve smeared on you. It time to take in the real you, without judgment or fear. Let’s start by looking at your life so far:
• Fold a sheet of paper long ways, then open it and trace the crease with your pencil. Hold the paper horizontally and write “birth” on the left end of the line and “today” on the right end. This is your life line.• Now I want you to use this graph to tell your life story. Put a date on the line for each significant, life-defining that you’ve experience, and determine whether it was a valley (dropping below the line) or peak (rising above the line). Don’t try to create a coherent fact sheet of the biographically significant dates. On this diagram, you’re making note of the events that changed or defined you, even if they would seem insignificant to someone else (“conned my brother into giving me his caramel apple even though he didn’t want to”).
• Spend some time reflecting on this sheet. If you’d like, redraw it, make it more decorative with colors or pictures, break the line down into meaningful segments of time with vertical lines. Do whatever you need to do to take it in and identify patterns and themes that have made you into the person you see in your mirror today.
“A warrior,” says Nick Nolte, “. . . is about absolute vulnerability. That’s the only true courage.” It’s frighteningly easy to see the weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and negative patterns in others’ lives. It’s shockingly difficult to fact them in ourselves. But if you are genuinely ready to change your life of mediocrity, unfulfilled passions or fizzled dreams into one of abundance and prosperity, then this is the kind of courage you’re going to need. In my next blog, we’re going to work more with this life story graph, so keep it handy, and let it play in your head. As you go about your activities today, you may realize that you’ve overlooked an important defining moment, or that you see a pattern in your relationships that you’d never noticed before.
You may even feel a little dejected at some of the realities that you’ve exposed. Make sure that you don’t do the pendulum swing from complete denial to self-contempt. If you’re being honest in this process, you are going to find the flaws, weaknesses and negative patterns that you were previously only able to see in others. Acknowledge the truth in what you see – you are an amazing creation, born into in imperfect world, and inevitably flawed . . . but still amazing!
Roger K. Allen, Ph.D. is an expert in personal growth, family life, leadership and organizational development. His programs and tools have helped hundreds of thousands of people live richer, more fulfilling lives. Learn more at https://www.rogerkallen.com//.
