(uplifting music)
- This exercise is about going
back to the beginning and really finding
out what you were passionate about as a young child.
There's something that Elizabeth Gilbert,
the author of Eat, Pray, Love,
she has always say that there's no child
who doesn't know what to do with a Lego.
There's no child that isn't creative,
and I feel like this exercise is
really going back to that unselfconscious place
of just doing whatever you enjoy
and whatever your passions are.
So this exercise is split into two mini-exercises.
So the first one is all about before school,
so really looking at your early life
before school had any impact on you,
on what you enjoyed, and the reason
that's important is because, at school,
we're fed quite a lot of curriculums,
and classes, and ways to do things,
and rules to follow, and this part is
about who you were before you were following any rules.
So the first part of
this exercise is finding three family members
to talk to, to gather information,
look through photos, write down things
that they said that you really enjoyed,
and kind of dig up those old memories.
I'm gonna go through what I would write down,
and it will obviously be very different for you.
But if I was gonna talk to three family members,
I'd want different perspectives.
So I'd probably want a parent because
they were really involved in parent-sy things,
and reports, and all that stuff,
all the stuff that I probably wasn't aware of myself.
They were kind of learning about
my behavior, so I think it's important
to maybe include someone that close to you.
I would also say my sister because
she was someone who I'm quite close
to and would sort of tell her my secrets,
my hopes and dreams, all of my big ideas.
So I think she would probably be a good person
to kind of remind me of all the stuff
that I actually wanted to do.
And then you could also pick someone
who was kind of slightly removed,
someone who you catch up with every
now and again, and you fill them
in on your life and you kind of tell
them things that maybe you wouldn't tell other people.
For example, for me, I might put a cousin
or someone like that, someone who's
slightly outside of your immediate family.
So once you've spoken to them and
you've asked them what you were
like back then, and actually, it's a really nice moment
to kind of discuss all of the memories
that you have and all of the photos that you've got.
And some things that will come out will
probably be really basic creative activities.
It might be that you started to put on plays.
It might be that you were doodling.
It might be that you used to make
up silly little stories that you used to tell people about.
And all of these things are actually
really important because it really shows the things
that you navigated towards,
and things that you were really good at,
and things that people remember about you.
So for me, I know that people would say
that I was just writing.
I always used to write really bad stories,
and I would also doodle a lot alongside that.
I was someone who had loads of diaries.
I would just glue collages into notebooks,
and I don't think I was doing this at five.
I was definitely doing that around that time,
even then, just writing and drawing.
The other thing that I would do is
I would put on dance routines, because who doesn't?
And I think that all of these things,
they do show that you are an expressive person,
that you do have an element of creativity
and fun in you, and actually just remembering
these things, I think, can be really inspiring
for all of the things you want to do in the future.
Obviously these are very creative
and very obvious ones for me, someone who has ended
up being a writer, but for you,
it might be totally different.
It might be that someone really noticed that,
at an early age, you started taking things apart
and putting them back together.
It might be that you were really
into fabrics and clothes, and that you liked colors.
It might also be that you liked climbing things,
and you were very active, and you were
very kind of action-orientated.
All these things are really important,
and they're clues to what you were trying to go towards.
So for this final part of this exercise,
it's really about writing down
any heroes or influences you had
that you were really obsessed with
and you thought were the coolest things ever.
For me, I actually don't have any major ones
that spring to mind, but I think watching TV presenters kind
of light up the TV and kind of do
that sort of thing was really inspiring
to me, because they were just so full of energy
and they really liked communicating to young people.
I find that really inspiring, so I'd probably write
down something like that, but it might be different for you.
And if nothing jumps out right now,
then it's absolutely fine, because the next section,
during school, I'm sure something will come up then.
So once you've finished that, we will go
on to the second half of the exercise,
which is all about your influences
and your obsessions during school.
So this second half of the exercise,
once you've uncovered your very younger childhood self,
this is about who you were kind
of during adolescence, during your school years,
during a time where you were probably
quite impressionable and you were picking
up social cues and learning new things at all times.
So it's a very similar layout,
and we're just gonna go through each step again.
Friends at school play a really valuable role
because they saw you change throughout a 10-year period.
If you went to school for shorter amounts
of time, that's fine too, and you could maybe write
down three different friends from
your different school years and sort
of mix up those results together
to kind of figure out what you were
like during each part of your teen years.
For me, I would write down my three friends
who I had at school who really knew
me very well and would know the things
that I was saying or the hints
that I was dropping about what
I wanted to be when I was older.
So I would just write down my three
best friends from school, and I know
that they would give me very honest answers
about the things that I enjoyed,
the classes that I loved, the things
that I didn't like, and I think that
they would tell me if something didn't really feel right.
So for the second part, this is
about writing the three things down
that you loved at school,
and it doesn't have to be classes.
It doesn't have to be the exams that you were taking.
It could be anything.
It could be that you liked doing gym at lunchtime.
It might be that you liked the after school club
'cause you got to be sociable.
It could be that you liked doing the behind-the-scenes
at the theater club.
It could be anything that you enjoyed
at school, but it's really important
to write down any aspects of school,
even if you hated the whole thing,
to show where you got your energy from
and where you got your feelings of passion from.
So for me, it's quite predictable actually,
because it really links into the previous page,
which is, I liked doing drama.
I liked doing my English lessons
because I liked writing and I liked telling stories.
And actually, I probably would leave
it at that because those two were my biggest loves
at school and I don't know if I
really enjoyed anything else apart from that.
So for the third part, it's all
about writing down what you wanted
to be in your head, what you were
really inspired by, the people that you were inspired by.
For me, at the time, I was absolutely obsessed
with the Spice Girls, and I do feel
like they have a relevance in my life now
because they were the founders
and creators of the Girl Power movement.
I also really found storytelling,
as a whole, a really fun thing to do.
I don't think that's necessarily a career.
I suppose it is a career, but I would
definitely put storytelling because
that's what I wanted to do.
That's what I always did.
I would always write done stories.
And the third one was a woman called Dawn O'Porter,
who fronted lots of kind of fun documentaries on TV.
She was someone that was on TV
when I was about 15 or 16, and she was
just someone who was really fearless,
and I just remember watching her
and thinking I'd quite like to be a bit
more fearless when I was older.
And so she had quite a big impact on me.
It really can be anything.
This last section is a real mixture
of careers that you wanted,
people that you wanted to be like.
Just any inspiration at this point is really, really useful.
So this exercise is really about rediscovering a part
of yourself that might be slightly lost along the way,
and this isn't about changing up
your entire life overnight, but it's
just kind of introducing these things
that you used to love and used
to make you feel very creative and happy.
The exercise is a really good starting point
for knowing what your side hustle could be,
or your side hobby, and this really is just a starting point
so you could start introducing small things,
and you never know what might happen
or where they might end up.
But the point is that you're gonna enjoy doing them anyway.
The next exercise in the next video is
all about time-tracking and how
to really make sure that we are acknowledging
and identifying the feelings when we get them,
because in a world of constantly scrolling
on the internet, we don't really take the time
to check in with ourselves.
So that is the next exercise.