Where and who do you want to go in the future? This is a question that we often answer by looking forward. Our guest would argue that you can find the best answer by looking back. William Damon is a Stanford psychologist and author of A Round of Golf with With My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace With Your Present.
He explains why you should consider doing something like a “life review,” a process you can initiate at any age in order to get greater clarity on what is now probably a blur of memories around how you ended up who and where you are today.
Psychologist explains the two main steps of doing a life review, and how doing one can do two things for you:
- help you think more positively and be grateful to everything happened with you in your life — even its regrets — and understand why you made certain choices and developed as you did,
- help you refine your life’s purpose and make a recognition that you can change and grow no matter where you are in the life cycle, and chart a course for further development in the future.
Professor do this through the lens of the fascinating story around how he came to do his own life review, in order to better get to know himself, by getting to know his father, who he was told growing up was killed in World War II, but, he would discover, in fact survived the war and led a more complex life than he could have imagined.
