How to use a Success Timeline to uncover your values in life
A tool to research your own life
Last week I took part in a full-day workshop called She Rises With Confidence. The course was offered to me by my work and if I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t hugely excited about it. The course name didn’t resonate with me and the thought of sitting on a Zoom call for 6 hours as someone told us to stand in a toilet cubicle and power pose sounded draining. But my preconceptions couldn’t have been more wrong, it was incredible, intimate and engaging. The two coaches Nicola and Gemma created a space where it was safe to be vulnerable as they guided our small group through theory, reflective journalling and exercises in pairs. The day flew by and I left feeling inspired and energised. When has anyone left a 6-hour Zoom call feeling energised!?
I wanted to share a tool with you that I found really powerful. It’s called the Success Timeline and it’s used to uncover your values in life. What are values? Values are the things that are most important to you in life. Values motivate you and can guide your decision-making. Some examples of values include Challenge, Honesty and Creativity. Having awareness of your values helps you to live with purpose and ultimately create a life that feels fulfilling to you.
So how does the success timeline work? Get a piece of paper and draw a horizontal line on it. Using this line, plot a timeline of all of your life successes. These don’t have to be successes in the traditional sense, e.g. passing an exam or purchasing a house, these are things that you deem to be a success, anything in your life that you look back on and feel proud of, are happy about or think went well. Put everything down that comes to mind, big and small, for as far back as you can remember. Do this for about 10 minutes or until you can’t think of anything else. Circle a few that stand out to you as your biggest successes or moments you are most proud of. Now look for themes, what commonalities tie these successes together? This is the part that the researcher in me loved, a thematic analysis of your own life! Jot down any themes you spot. These themes become your values. It sounds incredibly simple and it is, but it’s also amazingly revealing.
My strongest successes were quite surprising to me, many of them things you wouldn’t usually align with the word “success”. Things like quitting jobs I hated, ending unhappy relationships, and taking a year out of work to go travelling. I realised a strong theme tied all of these successes together: Freedom. This instantly resonated with me. It was so obvious how important this was to me now that I saw it written down, how hadn’t I realised before? As we regrouped to share our values with each other I felt sure everyone else would have come up with the same values, but I was struck by how different everyone’s values were, and as each person shared theirs aloud to the group how clear it was that their individual values resonated with them.
I can already see how having an awareness of my values will be helpful in life. When I’m stuck with a big decision I can ask myself, which path will pull me towards my values. If I’m feeling down or disconnected I can ask myself where I haven’t been living my values and what I can do to bring myself into alignment with them.
The Success Timeline is only 1 of many powerful tools the She Rises with Confidence workshop teaches. I highly recommend you sign up for the full experience.
In the meantime why don’t you try using the Success Timeline to uncover your values?