Things I learned about life mapping for self-awareness
“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
Self-awareness is one of the most powerful skills to acquire in life. It makes it easy to charter a career path, define relationships, and makes it easier to handle daily situations. self-awareness is the base of building good mental health hygiene.
I started my journey to self-awareness by researching and reading various blogs and articles. I got tools that I use on a daily bases to check in with myself. These tools include meditation, journaling, and gathering feedback from people close to me.
Just recently I came across life mapping. It came at a point where I noticed my goals were hurting my mental health and I needed to redefine what is important.
What is life mapping?
Life mapping involves taking your life from birth to the present day and listing out the most impactful events in your life. You can do it chronologically or randomly so that you don't get stuck trying to remember the order of events in life.
Block 20 mins in a day, get a pen and paper, sit down in a quiet place and start drawing.
Things you think are impactful
The exercise of looking back and picking up the things that changed your life gives you an idea of what you think the impact is. Very soon you will start to pick up what you think is important in your life.
It also allows you to look back and view yourself from a third-party perspective. In bad situations, you stop being a victim to someone who is going through an event. In good situations, you look to yourself as a champion and start giving yourself more credit and even celebrating your wins. When you are in a situation, all you see is the inside of the situation, stepping back allows you to zoom out. Don’t judge yourself in the process, be compassionate.
In this exercise, you will notice a lot of things that might have been small events but changed your life completely. Simple decisions that you made mindlessly might have changed your life.
What needs to change
Some of the events good or bad might have adapted you in ways that do not serve you anymore. E.g. at a younger age, things happened to you, having grown up and taken on more responsibilities, for things to happen, you have to make them happen.
In other cases, the environment changed. One might have been in environments with few resources, requiring them to compete every time, if they are in an enabling environment, the need to compete is removed.
In this case, a change of habit is needed. To set myself up for success, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear. The book gave me the tools I needed to strengthen good habits and weaken bad ones.
Ideas on your next move
Life mapping is a retrospection of your life. Doing this will give you ideas on what you should do next. You could pick up a hobby you enjoyed in the past. You could go back to a mindset you had before. E.g. I noticed how motivated and hungry I was early in my career, I had the drive to see projects and courses to the end no matter the cost. I want to go back to that.
You might want to flip negative situations you might be in right now. You might want to take back power based on your new definition of self. Or build a better understanding of where you are now.
What next?
Life mapping is impacted by perspective. Your perspective is affected by your state of mind. When sad and overwhelmed, I remembered more bad experiences as the most impactful. To balance out the change of perspective, block some time every 2 months to create a life map. Go back and notice changes in the older life maps.
Self-awareness is never a goal, it happens over a lifetime. Enjoy the process and love what you get, there is no other like you.
