i used to have a saying that phone calls
don't change your life
until one day i got a phone call that
did
it was from my mother your father is
trying to kill himself
he's what my dad was a son of the
american south
a navy veteran and civic leader he was
never depressed a minute
until he got parkinson's six times
in 12 weeks my dad attempted to end his
life
we tried every solution imaginable until
one day i had a thought
maybe my dad needed a spark to restart
his life story
one morning i sent him a question tell
me about the toys you played with as a
child
what happened next changed not only him
but everyone
around him and led me to rethink how we
all achieve meaning
balance and joy in our lives
this is the story of what happened next
and what we all
can learn from it
i want you to stop for a second and
listen to the story
going on in your head it's there
somewhere in the background it's the
story you tell others
when you first meet them it's the story
you tell yourself
every day it's the story of who you are
where you came from where you're going
it's the story of your life
what we've learned from a generation of
brain research is
that story isn't just part of you it is
you
in a fundamental way life is the story
we tell ourselves but there's a question
that research hasn't much answered
what happens when we misplace the plot
of that story
when we feel sidetracked by a pitfall a
pothole
a pandemic what happens when we feel
burned out
and want a fresh start what happens when
our fairy tales
go awry that's what happened to my dad
that fall
to me around that time to all of us at
one time or another
we get stuck in the woods and can't get
out
this time though i wanted to learn how
to get
unstuck
like my dad i was born in the american
south for years i had what i now think
of
as a linear life i went to college
i started writing i did it for no money
for a while i had some success
i got married and had children but then
in my 40s i was just walloped by life
first i got cancer as a new dad of
identical twin daughters
then i almost went bankrupt then my dad
had that suicide spree for a long time
i felt shame and fear about these events
i didn't know how to tell that story and
didn't want to
when i did i discovered that everyone
feels their life has been upended in
some way
that their life is somehow off schedule
off track
of kilter that the life they're living
is not the life they expected they're
living life
out of order i wanted to do something
to help over three years i crisscrossed
the country
collecting what became hundreds of life
stories of americans
in all 50 states people who lost limbs
lost homes changed careers changed
genders
got sober got out of bad marriages
in the end i had a thousand hours of
interviews 6
000 pages of transcripts
with a team of 12 i then spent a year
coding these stories
for 57 different variables
looking for patterns that could help all
of us in times of change
i call this the life story project
and here's what i learned
lesson number one the linear life
is dead the idea that we're going to
have one job
one relationship one source of happiness
from adolescence to assisted living
is hopelessly outdated what's more
even that idea itself turns out to be a
historical anomaly
though we don't talk about it enough the
way we look at the world
affects how we look at our lives
in the ancient world they didn't have
linear time they thought life was a
cycle
because agriculture was a cycle
in the middle ages they thought life was
a staircase up to middle age
then down no new love at 60 no retiring
and opening an airbnb
at 70. not until the birth of science
150 years ago did we adopt the idea
that life proceeds in a series of stages
like an industrial factory
freud's psychosexual stages erickson's
eight stages of moral development
the five stages of grief these are all
linear
constructs this model reaches its peak
in the 1970s with the idea that
everyone does the same thing in their
20s the same thing in their 30s
then has a midlife crisis between 39
and 44 and a half it's hard
to overstate how powerful this idea was
there's only one problem it's not true
today we've updated how we look at the
world
we understand there's chaos and
complexity and networks
but we haven't updated how we look at
our lives
which leads to lesson number two
the non-linear life involves many more
life transitions i went through every
interview i conducted and created a
master list
of all the ways our lives can get
redirected
i called these events disruptors
the total was 52 so i created the deck
of disruptors
some of them are small like breaking
your ankle or a fender bender
some of them are large losing your job
moving
the average person goes through three
dozen disrupters
in the course of their lives that's one
every 12 to 18 months
now most of these we get through with
relative ease
but one in 10 becomes what i call a life
quake
a massive burst of change that leads to
a period of upheaval
transition and renewal
the average person goes through three to
five of these events
in the course of their lives their
average duration
five years do the math that means we
spend
25 years half our adult lives
in transition
and make no mistake these do not clump
exclusively
in middle age some of us are born into
life quakes
some of us have them in our 20s our 60s
forget the midlife
crisis we all face the whenever life
crisis
the pandemic has made this only worse
i craft all life quakes on two polls
voluntary
involuntary personal collective
a mere eight percent were collective
involuntary life quakes
a collective involuntary life quake is a
natural disaster
a recession what's unique about this
moment in time
the pandemic is the first time in a
century that the entire planet
is going through a collective
involuntary life quake at the same time
every single one of us is in transition
and yet no one is teaching us how to
navigate these times
which leads to lesson number three life
transitions are a skill
we can and must master
what i'd like to do for you today is to
give you five tips based on my research
for how to master a life transition tip
number one
begin with your transition superpower
one way to think about a life quake is
as a physical blow
life puts us on our heels the life
transition puts us back
on our toes and yet when most of us
enter one we feel completely overwhelmed
either we make a 212 item to-do list and
say we'll get through it in a weekend or
we lie in a fetal position and say we'll
never get through it
both of them are wrong look at enough of
these periods
and certain patterns become clear
for starters life transitions involve
three phases
i call them the long goodbye when you
mourn the past that's not coming back
the messy middle in which you shed
certain habits and create new ones
the new beginning in which you unveil
your new self
but let's be clear these phases do not
happen
in order just as life is non-linear
life transitions are non-linear too
instead each of us gravitates to the
phase we're best at
our transition superpower and gets
bogged down in the phase we're weakest
at
our transition kryptonite half of us
don't like the messy middle but others
excel at it
maybe you're good at making lists and
analyzing your options perfect
start there one in four of us
don't like the long goodbye maybe we're
people pleasers or we
are uncomfortable leaving difficult
situations
others excel at that perfect start there
the point is transitions are hard begin
with your superpower
gain confidence move on from there
tip number two accept your emotions
in addition to three phases i identified
the seven
tools we use to navigate a life
transition
the first accept that the transition is
an emotional experience
i looked hundreds of people in the eye
and asked what's the biggest
emotion you struggled with in your time
of change
number one answer fear how am i gonna
get through this how am i gonna pay my
bills
number two answer sadness i miss my
loved one i miss being able to walk
number three shame i'm ashamed i have to
ask for help i'm ashamed what i did when
i drank too much
now some of us cope with these emotions
by writing them down
others like me buckle down and try to
push through
but eighty percent of us ate zero use
rituals
we sing dance hug
after mayard howell left his job in big
pharma to open a gym
he tattooed breathe on his right hand
and happy on his left
i knew i couldn't go back to my
corporate job once i did that
lisa ray rosenberg had a horrible year
in which she lost her job
had a falling out with her mother and
went on 52 first dates
something has to change she said her
biggest fear
heights so she jumped out of an airplane
a year later she was married with a
child
rituals like these are especially
effective in the long goodbye
because they're statements to ourselves
and those around us
that i'm going through a difficult time
and i'm ready for what comes
next tip number three
try something new the messy metal is
messy
it's disorienting and destabilizing now
what
my data show we do two things during our
time in the wilderness
first we shed things mindsets routines
habits like animals who molt we cast off
parts of our personality
sparr who has ocd had to shed his
reliance on a paycheck when he left his
family's business to open a non-profit
that uses art therapy
lee winds an executive who went through
cancer career change and a divorce all
at the same time
had to shed her habit that the minute
she walked in the door she opened the
fridge
she lost 60 pounds
shedding allows us to make room for what
comes next
which is astonishing acts of creativity
at the bottom of our lives we dance cook
garden take up ukulele
army sergeant zach herrick had his face
blown off by the taliban
31 surgeries between his nose
and his chin he experienced suicide
ideation but then at his mom's
suggestion
he started to cook then write poetry
then paint i used to get out my
hostility by splattering the enemy with
bullets he told me
now i get out my hostility by
splattering the canvas
with paint what was the biggest cliche
at the start of the pandemic
baking we're going to sourdough our way
through it
i may have been the least surprised
person because the simple act of
imagining that loaf of bread
or that poem or that painting allows us
to imagine a new self
number four seek wisdom from others
perhaps the most painful part of a life
transition
is that we feel isolated and alone
in fact one under discussed reason for
the rise of loneliness
is the rise in the number of life
transitions we all face
which is why it's essential that you not
be alone
that you find a way to share your
experience with someone else
it could be a friend a neighbor a loved
one even a stranger
but here's the key not everyone craves
the same kind of response
each of us has what i call a phenotype
of feedback
a third of us like comforters i love you
susie i believe in you you'll get
through it
a quarter of us like nudgers i love you
john but
maybe you should try this or maybe you
should do that but one in six of us
likes
slappers i love you anna but get over
yourself it's time to do this
the important thing is don't assume that
the person you're asking advice or
giving advice to likes the same type of
response
ask before you advise
and that leads to tip number five
rewrite your life story
a life transition is fundamentally a
meaning making
exercise it's what i like to call an
autobiographical occasion
in which we are called on to revisit
rethink and
retell our life story adding
a new chapter for what we learned during
the life quake
that's what happened with my dad
after i sent that first story about the
toys he played with
he wrote a story about model airplanes i
had never heard before
even though he couldn't even move his
fingers at the time
i sent another tell me about the house
you grew up in
then another how'd you join the navy how
did you meet mom
until just this week
eight years after that first question
my dad who had never written anything
longer than a memo
completed a 65 000
word memoir one question
one story one life affirming memory
at a time that
is the power of storytelling
and it's a reminder that no matter how
bleak your story
gets you cannot give up on the happy
ending
you control the story you tell about
your life
even the most painful parts of your life
which is why it's so critical that we
reimagine
life transitions that we see them
not as miserable times we have to grit
and grind our
way through but we see them for what
they are
healing times that allow us to take the
wounded parts of ourselves
and begin to repair them
the italians have a wonderful expression
for this
lupus in fabula the wolf in the fairy
tale
just when life is going swimmingly along
comes a demon
a dragon a downsizing a pandemic
just when our fairy tale seems poised to
come true
a wolf shows up and threatens to destroy
it
and that's okay because if you banish
the wolf
you banish the hero and if there's one
thing i learn
we all need to be the hero of our life
story
which is why we have fairy tales after
all
and why we tell them year after year
bedtime after bedtime
they turn our nightmares into dreams
thank you