Life line

We are familiar with timelines, especially in history and natural science classes, they are very useful to establish a chronology and to better retain all the content. A timeline allows us to appreciate the relationship of events over time. We choose the events or phenomena we are going to study and their dates, to place them chronologically in a line.

A life line is basically that, but instead of studying historical characters, or transcendent facts of the world, we will study our own life, with us as the protagonist. The most relevant facts, our successes and failures, the decisions we have made, the circumstances that shaped us. Only that having lived it, we will add complementary information, not only what happened but how we experienced it, our feelings and thoughts at that time.

People have their history but live their present and project themselves into the future, which makes them unique. We are the sum of what has happened to us, (and as in human macro history) if we manage to order and analyze that information we can better understand the causes and consequences, to make sense of the present. It offers us an opportunity to change or modify our beliefs and behaviors.

We create our own narrative by interpreting reality, always through the prism of our beliefs and emotions. Events that for others do not have much significance can affect us and mark future actions.

People seek a coach in the hope of achieving what they think they need. A relatively clear objective or goal: improve their self-esteem, improve their communication, achieve a certain job, develop a skill. However, often the real cause that is limiting them is not clear, so it is necessary to investigate.

The goal of the coaching process is that you can discover for yourself what you need to get to where you want to be. This is another tool used in coaching (and in psychology) to facilitate that process. It helps both the coach to better understand his client and the client to get closer to knowing and understanding himself. Something that will help him/her to achieve any goal he/she sets for him/herself.

Benefits you can get by doing the life line.

Identify important situations in your life and how they have influenced your decisions:

• Clearly recognize why and how you have arrived at your current situation.

• Recognize the people who have influenced you.

• Achieve a higher level of self-acceptance.

• Explore, retrieve, record and preserve memories and emotions from childhood and important events in your life.

• To turn the line into a resource with which you can more easily access all that information.

• Analyze all the personal and social circumstances that influenced the events of your life.

• Reflect on the level of objectivity of your memories.

• Channel emotions and work to process them constructively.

• Close stages, make a cut and start again.

• Make peace with the present and project yourself into the future.

• Create new experiences tailored to you, more adapted to your values and the reality around you.

• Understand our vision of life.

What does it take to make a life line?

This tool offers you many advantages and benefits but it is not easy to do. It is more than just ordering chronologically the events that we consider important. It is necessary to accompany each step of the process with a lot of reflection and concentration. Being able to go to the essence and synthesize the information is also important. You must go deep into each event and its circumstances.

The assistance of a coach is invaluable as he/she knows what questions to ask to bring out all the details and guide our reflection. Questions about the facts but also about the feelings that accompany them and our current assessment of the past.

However it is a good exercise to do independently at any time we need a change in our life.

It is not advisable to do it in a painful moment or in a state of depression, as the result will be tainted by those thoughts and feelings and may do more harm than help.

It is inevitable that in the process the ifs and buts will arise, but this exercise is not to judge or regret but to be able to build a better future. To be able to wipe the slate clean and achieve our goals.

Steps to make the life line

It is a graphic representation of your life, where you can place spatially and visually everything significant that has happened to you. For this you can face the task in two stages if you wish. The first is the creation of the line as such, that is, identifying and placing the events in order. The second and more complicated one is to reflect and critically analyze each event.

First step:

• Step No. 1: This is simple, the materials paper, pencil and colors is more than enough. Of course you can download a template from the Internet if you feel more comfortable with digital resources.
• Step No. 2: Separate the line into periods of years to make it easier for you, perhaps by quinquennia or decades and you can allocate a sheet of paper to each one. You can put at the end the present, point out the current moment and the reason why you decided to do the exercise (this is optional).
• Step No. 3: Start placing the events in chronological order. The level of detail is up to you. Generally only the ones you consider important are identified, but you can expand during the process.

Once all these events have been identified and marked on the line, proceed to classify them. You can use different colors so that you can visualize the information more clearly.

You can classify them as follows:

• Those that represent events: events such as births, deaths, studies, work, marriages in the family, social and cultural circumstances