As my friends and I get older, more and more of us start spending some time investigating our family tree. It seems that when we are young, we put all our energy trying to figure out where we are going. At some point that becomes somewhat obvious and it is then that we realize that where we have come from tells us a great deal about where we are headed.
Edgar Schein is feature in a previous post about Career Anchors. He urges people to spend time in a small group telling others about the key events and decisions in our past. Most people who do that re amazed at how many seemingly isolated past turning points have predicted and actually shaped where we are today and where we want to go. We have an internal navigation system that operates without our knowledge.
Some years ago, I was part of a small informal group of business coaches who occasionally met for a weekend to discuss the challenges and opportunities of our work. At one such meeting we invited a therapist to join us and lead some discussions. He proposed that although we knew a lot about each other, we should each take two hours or more telling the others our life story.
I could hardly imagine that I had enough to say to my professional colleagues to fill two whole hours. But I did. By talking about not only the events of my life but how I felt about them, I ended up sharing far more than I might have expected. And it was an amazing opportunity to increase my self-awareness and become better connected to my five colleagues.
Such an activity can only work if there is a lot of trust and openness between ALL the participants. But I did adapt the experience to an activity for a team participating in a teambuilding event. To help people get into sharing frame of mind I invited each person to see their life as a journey. It could be a journey at sea, via car, airplane or spacecraft. I asked them to consider the major forces that have helped them on their way and those that have blown them off course as well as the right and wrong turns they made. I asked each person to draw a map of their journey showing all these islands, mountains, waves or other factors appropriate to the metaphor they have chosen. After everyone has completed their Life Journey map, the members of each group of five take turns explaining their maps.
In one group with whom I was doing this exercise there was a woman who I noticed was rather quiet. She was obviously an introvert and I was informed that she had been with the team for several months and stayed to herself all the time. But I was pleased to see that she diligently prepared her life journey chart and as I watched from a distance it appeared, she was making a good presentation of it to her colleagues.
The next morning I arrived at the meeting room about 20 minutes early to prepare for the day’s activities. To my surprise, she was already there. I asked her how things were going, and she lit up with a huge smile. She explained that it wasn’t easy for her to share her life journey with the group because she thought nobody would be interested in her. But to her surprise the opposite happened. Since the others knew so little about her beforehand, her presentation was received by everyone with enthusiasm. She told me that she arrived early because she couldn’t wait to be with her teammates now that she felt she belonged.
If knowing where you came from and how you got here today can be instructive to the individual, imagine what it can do for helping to define the identity, values and goals of a whole work team. So, I sometimes ask a team to create their team story in the form of a timeline. A roll of plain white wallpaper spread across five tables often provides the canvas. I invite the team to discuss and then mark the origins of the team, each major change and achievement, the arrival of each of the current members and what they see for the team one, two and three years in the future. I invite them to discuss it among themselves and then when they are ready to present it to me with the visual aid of their timeline.
We can learn from the past, the present and the future. The past tells us how we got here. The future tells us what we see as possible and the present tells us what we need to do to get where we want to go.
Herb