Unlock your potential in the final three months of the year
As we approach the final three months of the year, it’s a perfect time to reflect, set new goals, and prepare ourselves for the upcoming holiday season.
One of the most significant pre-work exercises in your Story of My Life Journal is called ‘Digging Deep’, and, here, I’ll walk you through what to expect and how to complete it using a real example from my life.
Digging Deep is the exercise most explicitly designed to help you identify the stories at your core. Other exercises support that process, particularly leading up to Digging Deep, but not as explicitly as this one.
The idea of Digging Deep is to recall those moments in your life that have left a strong emotional mark.
Psychology professor Jordan B Peterson paraphrased the founder of psychoanalytics, Carl Jung, when discussing the significance of those moments, stating that any memory we’ve retained that is older than about six months has been retained for a reason – that we haven’t yet extracted the lesson and the information that moment is trying to teach us.
The rationale behind that concept is quite common-sense: everything about us exists because the process of evolution deemed it critical for our survival.
So, when it comes to memory, we don’t simply hold on to moments to remember snapshots of our life; we hold onto them because they contain information we use in order to survive and thrive in the world.
This can include some memories that seem to have nothing to do with survival.
Let me give you an example.
When I was a journalist, I was meeting with an important contact for the first time. This person was important, not only as a potential, long-term contact, but in what they did.
We were meeting for coffee, and I was so nervous and determined not to stuff it up, that I got there about 30min early. With nothing to do while I waited, I ordered myself a coffee and took a seat.
However, the person I was meeting also arrived early – just as my coffee was brought out.
“Oh, have you been here a while?” they asked.
I immediately responded, “No, not long”, because, in my mind, I didn’t want the person to feel bad thinking they had left me waiting.
However, that’s not how it played out. The person was asking because they’d observed that we were meeting for a coffee, but there I was having ordered one for myself and not them.
When I said I hadn’t been there long, they cocked their eyebrow and said they’d go and order their own.
I cringe every time I think of that moment – which occurred more than a decade ago.
So, what does that have to do with survival?
We’re social creatures. Our position in the hierarchy of our troupe and broader community is of prime importance to our minds, because, in the past, if we were at the bottom of that hierarchy, we were most exposed to threat.
That memory sits with me as a moment filled with instructions on how to act – and how not to act – in the presence of someone higher up in the hierarchy than me.
You’re provided several pages of the Digging Deep exercise in your Story of My Life Journal, which are broken into life stages to help guide your thoughts and memory recall.
It then walks you through the recall process, with prompts to help you draw out the information they contain.
So, without further ado, let’s walk through the exercise with an example from my life, which comes from the age period of 0-7 years old.
This step is simple enough and, as the description explains, you simply need to describe the memory that comes to you.
Example: I remember a few instances of dad getting upset when I didn’t get things right in my schoolwork, such as misspelling ‘which’, my struggles with maths, and a comment he made about a project I did not being good enough, despite having followed the instructions, saying “You never do JUST enough – it’s important to do more.”
We developed emotions as a sort of feedback mechanism for our behaviours, which are driven by our goals. So, they tell us whether we’re moving towards or away from a state of being we desire.
The fact that you remember a moment makes it significant, and this step is designed to help you uncover why, by looking at your emotional response to the moment.
Example: I felt like I let him down, like I was bad and not good enough, and like there was something wrong with me, because he was upset, which told me I should have already known and understood the points he was making.
Identifying what we’re feeling sometimes can be easy, and sometimes hard, but what is undoubtedly more challenging – and often something we neglect to investigate – is why we’re feeling that way.
And this doesn’t mean you’re angry at the guy who cut you off in traffic “because he’s a jerk”. It means, what within you was triggered to make you react in that way?
Example: Because I didn’t meet his expectations and, as a young boy looking up to his dad, I just wanted to make him happy, but felt I’d instead let him down and upset him.
Your Story of My Life Journal contains extensive information that helps you understand the process of stories in your life, but, in a nutshell, it goes stories -> values -> goals -> behaviours -> emotions.
Digging Deep is effectively chasing that process back with a specific moment and your behaviours to discover the underlying stories, and this step is designed to identify the value/s that were triggered in that moment.
Example: Love; approval; self-worth.
There’s a very good reason we create narratives and stories: they instruct us on how to act and react in the world in a way that (we believe) helps us survive.
So, in understanding that, you can understand that your mind likes to know these stories are accurate, because it otherwise means you’ve got the world wrong, and panic sets in.
That means there will be several moments throughout your life that your mind has used to reinforce its story, as a sort of “SEE! I TOLD YOU!” and this step is designed to identify those moments of confirmation bias to establish the pattern.
Example: The contrasting love and care I received from mum, which never felt conditional; my constant seeking of approval and validation from those I value in my life; my sense of needing to achieve to be ‘good’.
We’re starting to paint a picture of the story underpinning the memory you’re recalling and, to better do that, Steps 6 and 7 investigate why you have reacted so strongly to it.
That process starts with the positive meaning of what you wrote in Step 4, because that will be the story you have formed around a value.
Example: Safety and security; you feel valued; you’re a good person; you’re worthwhile; you contribute positively.
We now move onto the negative meaning, and we do that because this is likely at the heart of your emotional reaction to the memory, and that is what helps us understand the story you’re holding onto from both sides – the positive and the negative.
Example: Alone; disconnected; unwanted; not worth anything to others.
Contemporary motivational psychology has identified three universal needs that underpin our sense of psychological wellbeing and safety: autonomy (people’s need to feel they have choices and are the source of their own actions); relatedness (people’s need to care about and be cared about by others, and to feel they are contributing to something greater than themselves); competence (people’s need to feel effective, demonstrate skill, and feel a sense of growth).
Remembering that you form stories as instructions on how to survive and thrive in the world, that means your stories will be linked to a key psychological need.
Identifying which need/s your story is attached to enables you to work out how to meet that need in a more positive way, or a way that you choose, or to be more aware of your reactions.
Example: Relatedness; Competence.
Your mind is designed to identify threats to your safety.
So, acknowledging your story is attached to a psychological need, it is likely that any strong emotional response comes from some sort of fear related to what is at the heart of your memory and what that could lead to.
Investigating that helps you better understand the depths of your story, which allows you to start working with it – including reframing it if you desire.
Example: That if I’m not approved of, I won’t be loved or valued by those I care about, and could be discarded because I’m not worth anything.
As you can see, if we extend the courtesy and respect our enduring and nagging memories deserve, we can identify that there’s far more beneath them than simple life occurrences.
We don’t hold onto memories for the sake of it; we hold onto memories because they have something to teach us.
Give them the time they’re asking for, and you’ll find what that something is.
Of course, if you’ve got any questions about this – or any other – exercise in your Story of My Life Journal, feel free to get in touch at support@ffpress.com.au.
All the best,
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