April 16, 2021 - Puerto Escondido, Mexico
In the last edition of the Humble Minds, I discussed Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life and introduced its main concepts.
This week I’ll dive a little deeper into the first step to getting our time back, namely understanding how we have spent our time in the past and how that relates to how we are currently spending it.
1. The Winding Road
Recalling back to last week, we want to understand how we are spending our time and why we have chosen to spend it that way.
Essentially we want to be familiar with our own personalities and understand why we are the way we are.
It’s easy to think of the phases of our life independently, yet the most prominent theories of personality development suggest that we develop over time based on experience1.
We’re like an old Volkswagon van that’s been picking up hitchhikers for years.
We’ve still got the original engine, but the paint job is faded and the interior is cluttered with the relics of travelers we’ve picked up along the way.
As we go, sometimes there is construction on the road, and other times we decide to take a convincing passenger in a different direction than we had planned.
In both cases, the road traveled is altered forever.
2. Your Life Story
Given that our current behavior is heavily dependent upon our past, it seems beneficial to understand that past deeply.
We can gain that understanding through an exercise I call creating your Life Story.
2.1 Benefits of Creating Your Life Story
The wide range of benefits offered from creating and internalizing our Life Story is vast.
A few of the major benefits are listed below.
Become aware of the major events that have shaped your life
Understand the motivations behind your goals
Recognize your emotional patterns
Acknowledge your coping mechanisms
Relate one time events, habitual activities, and recurring thought and emotional patterns to each other
Understand your decision-making strategies
Compare and contrast the patterns behind success and failure
2.2 A Few Words of Caution
This is an intense psychological exercise. You’re going to dig deeply into your past, starting from birth and continuing all the way to the present day.
You will recall things you hadn’t thought about in a long time or had buried deep down. You will make unexpected connections you hadn’t been aware of previously.
Make sure you are prepared for this.
Conduct this exercise in a safe place, where you feel comfortable expressing whatever emotions arise.
Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist. This should not be taken as medical advice or a recommendation for treatment of any kind. I am simply sharing an exercise I found useful in the hopes that others may benefit from it.
2.3 How to Create Your Life Story
We will perform this exercise from two different perspectives.
The first considers all of the major one-time events in our lives, while the second is focused on the activities, thought patterns, and emotional patterns that were more habitual.
There are options for how much time we dedicate to this. Limiting yourself to an hour will force you to think about the events that are top of mind, while a longer time frame will allow you to build out additional context.
For reference, I spent about 6 hours over the course of 3 days the first time I performed it. However, that may not be the best benchmark, as I’ve recently been compared to a turtle by a close friend.
The steps for the exercise are below.
Sit down in a quiet place where you have some privacy: Please don’t forget my words of caution above.
Break your life up into blocks of time: The blocks should be ordered chronologically. For me, it was easiest to think about this by the school I was attending or the place I was living. Having somewhere specific to visualize will help jog your memory.
Make a list of all major events: This includes both positive and negative events. Anything that sticks out in your mind as important will do but focus on events that seem like they might have impacted future emotions or behavior.
Take a break: Give yourself some time to process what you just went through. I took the rest of the day off at this point.
Make a list of all habits: This includes habitual activities, thought patterns, and emotional patterns. Consider what you did most often and how you were generally thinking and feeling during each block of time.
Re-read and Complete: Comb over both the list of major events and the list of habits. Did you miss anything important? Add that now if so, but mark it as a late addition.
Reflect and Ask Questions: See the next section.
2.4 Reflect and Ask Yourself Questions
When I went through this exercise, my mind was racing. The breath of insights available is immense. Yet, it’s easy to get pulled in all directions.
The spiritual side of me immediately started noticing how some of the most rewarding relationships and moments in my life sprouted from completely serendipitous experiences. Take my friend Darren who I met while staying at his ex-girlfriend’s Airbnb or the splinter in my foot that lead to a foot massage.
That’s probably too much information, and it’s also not where we want to start the exercise.
So what was the purpose of this exercise initially?
Seneca prompted us to understand how we wasted our time in the past, specifically when we lived with a lack of purpose or mismanaged our emotions.
When we live without purpose, we tend to succumb to the wills of the ego, chase our vices, or fall into idle nothingness.
When we are mismanaging our emotions, we tend to become stuck in anxious thought patterns, overreact when things don’t go as expected, or become paralyzed by fear.
In later additions of Humble Minds, we’ll get to some interesting questions around success, failure, and figuring out what works for us.
For now, let’s understand our baggage a bit. It will make everything else much easier later on.
Some questions I found helpful in doing that can be found below.
Questions to Drive Initial Understanding
What were the milestones?
Who was important?
Are there any recurring challenges?
Is there a central theme?
What were the late additions?
Questions Related to Purpose
What were your goals? Identify them, but don’t constrain yourself to goals in the way we typically think about them. They could be as simple as behaving differently in certain situations. Highlight everything that you really wanted or pushed to achieve.
What were the motivations behind your goals? Did you really set them yourself, or were they pushed on you or borrowed from others?
Which of your goals were driven by the ego?
In periods where you did not have a goal you were very passionate about, how did you spend your time?
Questions Related to Emotional Management
What drove happiness and fulfillment?
What drove emotional pain?
What vices have you relied on to manage emotional pain?
What thought patterns or emotional patterns have emerged in response to this emotional pain? How have these impacted your actions?
After asking yourself all of these questions, you can begin to paint a picture in your mind of what your internal struggle has been.
Now, put it all together and summarize the story of each of your internal struggles in a paragraph.
We’ll come back to this story again and again over the next few weeks.
Can you think of any other questions that may be useful in understanding ourselves a little more deeply? If so, please let me know, and I’ll share them with the rest of the Humble Minds readers next week.
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3. What Are You Doing?
Once we have a good understanding of our past, we are ready to consider the present.
I recommend using a time tracking app to record how you spend your time on a day-to-day basis.
Yet, it’s not quite so simple. In performing any task, there will be times where we space out or think about something unrelated. Potentially significant time.
This time matters and is likely indicative of underlying issues in lack of purpose or emotional management that we need to iron out.
Thus I recommend using a combination of time tracking apps and qualitative judgment in tracking our time, as noted below.
Record your time: There are many free time tracking apps to choose from2.
Note distractions: If you notice yourself lost in thought, note that and estimate how long the distraction lasted.
Adjust your recorded time: Use qualitative judgment to adjust your recorded time for the distractions in step 2.
It is important to note that in this phase, we are just focused on data collection. Don’t worry too much about why we behave the way we do; we’ll get to that later.
That wraps up the exercises for this week.
Carry them out when you have some free time, and I’ll be discussing how we can use the information over the coming weeks in developing our sense of purpose and emotional intelligence.
4. From the Road
Puerto Escondido just might be heaven.
With beautiful beaches, big waves, hiking, and mountain biking, this place pushes me to get out there and enjoy nature.
Last week I took the mountain bike out a few times.
I hadn't been on a serious bike track in a long time, and I was a little nervous starting out. Despite the initial hesitation, I was up and cruising along in no time. The double suspension bike could handle the bumps no problem, and I cut through the woods with ease.
I was beginning to feel alive again!
Under a tree and around the bend, this was it, baby.
Then bam! I clipped a tree with my handlebar and went over the front end of the bike. Luckily, I broke the fall with my hands and lived to fight another day.
A slight setback, but well worth the rush that came with it.
Many of us have been cooped up inside for what seems like an eternity. It can’t be good for physical and mental health, and some of us are bound to go over the handlebars as society opens up again.
We’re animals, and animals belong in the wild.
So get out there, and stay wild, man.
-Alex
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Although there is no one definitive theory of personality development, the most prominent ones agree that our personalities develop over time.
https://collegeinfogeek.com/time-tracking-app/