The Chapters of My Life

This exercise is a simple biographical process, offering you the opportunity to reflect on your whole life, generate a picture of its significant moments and then engage with it with a bit of distance, to begin to clarify and perhaps make sense of things and the relationships between them. While it is very simple, and may appear undemanding, it can surface powerful memories, bring about startling insights and help you see new connections.

Ensure that when you start this exercise that you will have a good span of uninterrupted time to work through it (no less than an hour). To begin, spend some time thinking back on your life, particularly key events and also phases. ‘Map’ this out on a piece of paper. You might want to draw a time-line, from birth to the present, or simply brainstorm and see what emerges. Once you have completed this, begin to identify phases or ‘chapters’ in your life. If your life were a story, where would the chapters begin and end, and what would their titles be? You could also take this process further and assign colours to each of these phases, with the colours representing the qualities and moods that characterise each period.

When you are satisfied that you have worked ‘into’ this sufficiently, join up with your speaking partner (who should, ideally, have been working on the same task). Share elements of the story with your speaking partner. It is important in this exercise (and the ones that follow) that you share only what you are comfortable with. You might want to share only the chapters and colours but little detail. You might want to leave out whole chapters. It is up to you. The speaking partner’s role is to listen carefully to whatever you present. At the end of your presentation, your partner might ask some questions for clarity, or point out things that struck him or her particularly, but should not push any of this too far.

Swap roles. Once you have both shared, you might wish to discuss the exercise and anything that you have learnt about yourself, in particular, or the process of human growth, change and development, in general.