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HOW TO TELL YOUR STORIES
The
Who-am-I-now Review and How To Do It
The
Who-am-I-now Review helps you discover and tell your
stories. 8 prompts awaken your memory of important details.
The Who-am-I-now Review is straight forward. Its power
comes from the processes it triggers within you.
1. Print
the Who-am-I-now Review prompts,
provided below with examples from
stories of other women.
2. Take a few days to
let your mind and heart drift back over your life. Ask
yourself which events have been most important in
shaping your identity. Your Who-am-I-now events will
come forward. Jot them down. Be patient with your memory. Your
events might:
-
Have
happened
any time in your life.
-
Have had a positive or
negative impact.
-
Be known by others or only to
you.
-
Be many or few. There’s no
magic number.
-
Involve family, friends,
colleagues, romantic relationships, education, career,
volunteer work, health, travel – any event
that was important for you.
3. When you’re ready,
look over the Who-am-I-now Review prompts and examples. Use
your favorite pen or pencil and a few sheets of paper. Make
this fun as well. You’ll
keep this material so enjoy preparing it. I like a fresh
yellow pad and a fast ballpoint. An author friend uses a
fountain pen. She loves the sound and feel of pen on paper.
If you’re confident of privacy, you may use your computer for
this. Print a copy. Remember, this is not a report or a
writing project. It does not need to be perfect.
4.
Select one event. Work
it through the 8 prompts as best you can. Record your
responses. Don’t worry if you cannot recall all details.
5. Continue working
through each event using the Who-am-I-now Review
prompts. You do not need to do all events in the same sitting,
nor do they need to be done in the order in which you
experienced them during your life.
6. Concluding When
you’ve finished, number your events in chronological order as
they took place in your life. Put the material in a folder,
envelope or other place for safe keeping. Wait a few days.
Additional details may come to you. Go back and add them. When
you’re ready, go to Learning From Your Life.
Who-am-I-now Review
Prompts with Examples
Begin with one event, your thoughts and feelings
at the time. Then move on to how you handled it, who or what
helped or hindered. The
Who-am-I-now
Review asks you to reflect on the meaning
of the event and what you learned from it. Finally, give it a
title as if it were a movie or book. Examples are drawn from
several Who-am-I-now events narrated by different women.
1. Event
What was the event?
Example: Mother’s death
2. Background
Set the stage for this event. Give a few details of circumstances.
Example: I was 26 and
living with my parents in a small town. Not much going on
there.
No guys, no jobs. Time to leave but how?
3. Feelings and Thoughts
What were your feelings and thoughts about this event?
Feelings and thoughts are not the same thing. For some,
feelings come first. Others think first. Either way works. Try
to recall both feelings and thoughts.
Example: Feelings: Excited
and scared about returning to school at my age. I allowed
myself to get angry at the expectations of my family.
Thoughts: I thought they still wanted me to do everything at
home
4. Coping Strategies
Who or what helped? Coping strategies are techniques to reduce
stress. We use different coping strategies depending on the
situation and resources available to us.
Example: I kept my social
life active and ran as often as I could.
5. Key to Movement
How did it work out? Was this event resolved so that you
could move forward? Sometimes an event cannot be resolved.
Then, finding a way to live with it may be the key to movement.
Example: I had a neighbor
I talked to. She helped me see a world beyond babies and
in-laws. This was really important for me then.
6. Roadblocks to Resolution
Who or what kept you from working it out? Even when you’ve
made a decision, there are trade-offs, things you may need to
give up or postpone. What were they?
Example: What held me back
is that I always depended on others for the right answers.
7. Meaning
What did you learn from this? How did it change you? What does
it mean to you now?
Example: It was pure hell
- a tremendous growing experience toward being an individual.
I can do things for myself, develop my own lifestyle, be
different from my family. I learned to become my own person.
8. Title
If this event were a book or a movie, what would its title be?
Example: “The Best Ways To
Postpone Making Decisions”
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