When planning for the future one must be careful not to get bogged down and burdened by prior experiences, beliefs, and biases. However, with proper context, looking back into our past can provide us with insights into how to plan our future.
In this third exercise of our Relevant Living™ series, you’ll plot your most important and significant life events on a Lifetime Chronology Grid™, documenting the activities that have previously brought purpose and fulfillment into your life.
Dedicating time to reflect on your life is an opportunity to re-experience past successes and revisit failures and losses with a new perspective. You’ll also unwrap positive and negative surprises about long-forgotten events and circumstances. After finishing this exercise you’ll have a comprehensive view of what’s gone well and poorly in your life.
I found this exercise to be fun and enlightening.
Creating Your Lifetime Chronology Grid™
Your Lifetime Chronology Grid™ will contain the components shown in the image below.
In my experience, a much larger rendering of this image worked well. I created my grid using two sheets of “flip chart” paper, it measured 32” x 28”.
On this grid the horizontal or X-axis is your age. The right border on the horizontal axis is your current age, “Halftime” is your current age divided by two, and the left border is the date of your birth, age 0. I suggest setting up the horizontal hashmarks as three-year increments. I found it quite easy to think back to three-year periods of time and consider what was going on in life during those periods.
I created my grid when I was sixty. Therefore, Halftime was age 30 and I added nine hashmarks to both sides of the center line, with each hashmark representing three years.
The vertical or Y-axis represents the impact of positive and negative events (milestones, achievements, setbacks) on your life.
I plotted my lifetime events in pencil, allowing me to change the magnitude of impact later.
This is your life…
The first events to plot are those on the extremes that had the most impact on your life, your biggest milestones and disappointments. These entries will be easy to remember, things like graduating from college, starting your business, selling your business, bankruptcy, getting married, getting divorced, the birth of your first child.
Jog your memory by asking yourself a few questions:
What have you done in the past that’s made you the happiest?
What are the top experiences you’d like to repeat?
When have you felt most proud of an achievement?
What are your life’s low points to avoid in the future?
After recording these major events, go back to your birth and reconstruct your life in three-year increments. If you’re fully engaged in this project, this is where you’ll recall events and circumstances lodged deep in your memory.
The childhood events that re-surface are important for their immediate impact, as well as laying the foundation for your core beliefs and attitudes. Early lifetime events often set the tone and trajectory for some aspect of your life or career.
While plotting your important and significant events, reflect upon how you were directly influenced by doing or not doing something. You can also include big events from your life that were mostly due to outside influences, taking special note of how you responded to those events.
I suggest your last entry on your grid be a plot of where you are today.
What is your current trajectory?
Is your trend improving or declining?
As you finish your grid, you’ll likely be able to identify common threads and cycles among your events. Your Business/Career cycle, a Relationships cycle, a Health cycle, as well as cycles for Parenthood, Personal & Professional Development, Fitness, Spiritual, and so on.
Finally, to integrate this exercise into the rest of the Relevant Living™ process, document your feelings, emotions, and circumstances of highest and lowest events.
Which of the Core Values you identified in the previous exercise were most active during your lifetime high points?
Were you able to maintain your lifetime milestones for an extended period of time, or did the good times end abruptly?
Were any of your Core Values missing or ignored during the lowest periods of your life?
How did you prevent a low point from spiraling further downward?
What personal characteristics and factors played a role in turning around your negative circumstances?
In next week’s Relevant Living™ series exercise, Inventory Your Uniqueness, we’re going to focus on the positives as we determine the characteristics, accomplishments, and achievements that make you different, separating you from the herd in our society.