Season 1 focused on noticing change in our lives, and recognizing different types of change. The goal there, as with the entire “No Other Life” project, was to understand a small concept fully so as to be of greater use to the world, help more people, and be a better you.
For Season 2 we move in a more introspective direction, beginning to talk about ourselves. We’ll examine our pasts in order to help us better navigate the path to our chosen future. But we’ll also live in the present, so that we may better understand the future that actually comes into being.
For starters, we take a moment to think about how we see ourselves today.
Step 1: What is your standard “elevator pitch”, that is, how do you describe yourself at the beginning of a meeting, or when joining a new social group, and you are given 30 seconds to “tell us about yourself”? Write that down (not to hand it in to anyone, but so that you don’t lose your original ideas as you meld them into something potentially different over the course of these episodes).
Step 2: Take the necessary time to write out your more in-depth thoughts, what you might tell someone if you were given 8-10 minutes to talk exclusively about yourself. Continue to “tell us about yourself” but go deeper. You can organize this however you want, but make sure that you go wide and shallow, rather than deep into one arena. You likely operate in a variety of realms and you want to capture as many of them as possible. Don’t judge any of this blank-slate task. Just get it out and into print.
Step 3: Now that you have a list of ways to describe yourself, take a look at how it has come together. Did you instinctively create buckets? If not, do you see how they could coalesce now? What are those buckets?
There are many ways in which you can think about the term “self”. You may have come up with descriptive elements regarding your physical self, vocational self, intellectual self, avocational self, spiritual self, ideological self, and more. Take a moment to reassess your list in light of this bucket thinking, and update accordingly.
Your 10 minute speech is obviously more robust than your 30 second pitch. Do you stand by each? What made something eligible for the highlight reel?
As we move through this season we will return to these self-impressions from time to time.