Preparing to Probe...
It's one thing to decide to probe your life's most challenging moments. It's quite another to lean into the process and prepare for what you may uncover.
After decades of running from my past and making the decision to examine what happened and what it meant, I was at a loss as to where to begin. Serendipity delivered a path for Going Public (click the link if you missed that post), but that was only the first step. To continue my journey, it became apparent I needed to prepare myself for the process.
The thought of doing the work frightened me. The only specific memory I had was of a single experience of sexual abuse (recalled in a counselor’s office). While I was vaguely aware there had been other incidents, I’d hidden them away in the recesses of my mind, pretending they never happened.
Confronting my long-suppressed memories frightened me…
Despite my desire to do the work of looking back at my past to figure out how it shaped my future, I struggled with how to begin. I couldn’t lean on the people around me who knew nothing about my adverse childhood experiences. After all, I’d kept them in the dark for as long as I’d kept myself there, and their concern for me would likely bias the process and might even prevent me from completing it.
What I needed was a safe space and people who would be able to understand—the kind of people who had been in the audience the day I went public. Those people would inherently understand the inner need and desire to share difficult moments to help others make peace with their past because they too had stories they felt compelled to share.
Fortunately, my time on stage at Heroic Public Speaking Live had presented an opportunity to engage with the kind of people who could support me. Not only that, through the process I’d learn how to shape and deliver my message in service to those it could help.
So in January of 2018 I began the Heroic Public Speaking “Grad” Program—a four-month program where I had the opportunity to engage with and be supported by others who had a message they wanted to master. Since many of the people in my class had been present when I shared my message on stage a few months earlier, they were the perfect support group and test audience as I worked through the process.
Simplifying complexity is anything but easy…
The process began simply in my head—I’d examine my life’s journey using a simple timeline and that would reveal the insights I was seeking. Seemed like a great idea, right? Not surprisingly, it turned out not to be that simple. In fact, trying to identify the key moments in our journeys can quickly become overwhelming.
It is all too easy to bog down and look for meaning in the smallest of moments, but that turns out to be a bit of a trap. The maze that emerges bogs the process down and (at least in my case) leads to overthinking, over-analyzing, and mis-diagnosing everything from cause and effect to insight and observation.
I wasn’t ready for that.
As I am prone to do, I confidently thought I could make sense of it all quickly. It was confronting to realize that would not be the case. This was hard work. Hard enough I almost quit a few times because I couldn’t discern the meaning within the moments.
So I decided to zoom out and take a higher level view—something that had long served me well in my business engagements, but wasn’t sure would work in this endeavor. Turns out I was wrong.
Once I decided to use the same framework I’d used in strategic planning for businesses, it opened the door to seeing the big picture more clearly. Ultimately that perspective revealed the patterns and insights I needed to see between the events on the timeline of my life.
Adopting a 20,000 foot perspective…
I adopted the perspective of taking the first pass at my life’s journey as though I was an observer on a flight 20,000 feet over a river. From that level the major features stand out, but you can’t identify all the smaller elements that make up the high-level overview you are seeing. You can posit what they might be, but the details cannot be discerned, so they have to be ignored until it is time to go down and take a closer look.
That framing was incredibly valuable to me.
It stopped the endless questions from distracting me and allowed me to map a high-level path of my journey. It helped me recall the bigger and more important moments without getting bogged down in cause and effect debates or shared details that might mean something.
Ultimately, the 20,000 foot examination of my life’s journey allowed me to define the ‘pivotal’ events that impacted me most. I opted to see those as moments I could define where there was a clear before and after. That path helped me know where to probe more deeply, i.e., fly the plane down to the 10,000 foot level and then the to the 5,000 foot level to support deeper examination of the events that altered my life’s path.
Acknowledging the roller coaster of emotions and realizations…
Although this probably will not come as a surprise, the process of examining your life’s journey is a bit like riding a roller. Moments arise where you smile with pride or relish the warm fuzzy feelings of a special memory. There are other moments where you are literally stopped in your tracks as minute details you’ve long forgotten (or intentionally hidden away) resurface and shake you to your core. And sometimes you’re momentarily confused, wondering what comes next, and questioning whether you can handle it.
I learned this early in my work and realized I needed a way to process these moments. I didn’t want to lose the deeper meaning, and I didn’t want them to bog me down and trigger a fall back into depression. More importantly, I wanted to track them so I could examine them when the time came to do that part of the work.
My solution was to keep a file of insights and observations from each of my work sessions. I opted to use three categorizations:
Acknowledge & Release—Events that led me to be critical of my response and my not having done better in the situation. I decided the best thing to do was accept that it happened and release the guilt so I didn’t bog down in it.
Revisit & Probe—Events where my recollection was limited but might reveal something if and when I understood the situation better. I decided to set them aside and keep moving forward, while committing to return later and go deeper.
Investigate & Understand—Events where the facts were clear, but the impacts were not, or at least I could not understand them yet. I decided to see where the process led me with regard to these (and in many cases the linkages and connections became clear and were meaningful).
The bottom line…
Leaning into the work of examining your life’s journey is not easy, but it is worth it. Before you begin, however, it is important to know what you’ll need to navigate the process. For me the three Earned Lessons below were crucial and my hope is they will serve you well if you undertake the process we’re about to delve deeper into in the weeks ahead.
Today’s Earned Lessons…
#1—Find people you trust who can and will support your journey because they understand how important it is to you.
#2—Start with the 20,000 foot perspective so you can identify the pivotal moments, then delve deeper into the ones you deem most important.
#3—Be prepared for the emotional roller coaster ride and the realizations that will arise, and plan your path for coping.
As always, if you found this post helpful, I’d love for you to like and share it with others who might benefit. Thank you for reading and following this journey. I appreciate it and welcome your feedback and ideas on making this work more valuable to you.