Your Life Plan

How to set yourself on the right path and take charge of your life

Erica Sosna

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780857084866
• eBook ISBN: 9780857084897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Meet the challenges of life and master your future

Do you ever feel like you're just floating through life with a lack of direction? Or get that nagging feeling that things could be better? Then it's time you thought about your life plan.

Our lives can be thought of as stories – as narratives and adventures – and nearly all classic stories share certain universal characteristics.Our lives should be seen as a hero's journey, a quest filled with challenges, turbulence and adventure.

By appreciating this pattern, and understanding where you are on your own personal journey, you'll get the perspective needed to write your own life story and set yourself on the right path.

Be the hero of your own life

In Your Life Plan, Erica Sosna shows you how to choose and live a life that is truly meaningful, exciting and adventurous. Having a life project – a dream or goal that feels like a real challenge, can give you focus, energy and purpose.

This book offers practical solutions and guidance for dealing with difficult personal challenges and becoming the victorious hero who achieves happiness and fulfilment.

Go. Stand for something. Take up the charge and move into a purposeful and positive future.

1

The Hero's Journey

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Mahatma Gandhi

The art of a telling a good story is to keep the audience rapt and engaged – lost in the moment. There are a couple of skills that all storytellers have up their sleeves which will be really important for you to get to grips with to see yourself as the hero in your own life. The first skill is being able to recognize a polarity. The second is the ability to master and respect narrative flow.

The word “polarity” comes from the same root as the North and South Poles. A polarity means a contrast of opposites like hot and cold, dark and light or night and day. As human beings, our storytelling has focused on the contrast of good and evil, and love and loss. We recognize that to know what is good we must also know what is evil. To know happiness we must also know sorrow, one cannot make any sense of one without the other. We cannot always be happy, nor should we strive to be. When we look at any story of success, it always includes a period of doubt or of trial. This polarity is the nature of life and to avoid this is unhealthy. If we were always happy and had no polarity, life would be very boring indeed.

Have you noticed that all stories follow the same basic narrative? There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. We follow a character during a snapshot of their life. Sometimes their journey is tense and tight, at other times joyful and expansive. For example, the narrative flow of Shrek is broadly similar to that of James Bond. There is a universal structure to stories which doesn't change whether the tale is told by the fireside or as a 3D blockbuster at the local cinema. This chapter will introduce you to this secret story structure and help you align it with your own life experience. Once we know the rules in which we operate, we can begin to play a bigger game.

The Hero's Journey

Once, not all that long ago, there was an American professor called Joseph Campbell. Joseph was a professor of literature and one of the pre-eminent thinkers on myth and legend. He was an expert in stories and collected them from all over the world, examining them to find out what they had in common. From the fairy stories in the UK to the Green Man stories of Arabia, and from the religious tales of the Buddha to the teaching stories of the Aborigines, there was no storytelling tradition in the whole of the world that Joseph didn't know about. When he looked at all these tales, he found something very interesting. Everyone, everywhere, seemed to know what a hero or heroine was. And these heroes were the focus of all kinds of stories, of battle, of adventure, of love, of learning.

Not only that, everywhere you went in the world, people also knew what a “Hero's Quest” was. The idea of going on a great journey, undertaking challenges and coming back transformed by your experience. Wherever you were in the world, local people recognized what a Quest involved.

The most interesting thing he learned was that really, when you looked at it, there was only ONE story. In all the stories from different cultures, belief systems and heroes, the essential structure of the tale told about the hero was the same. Because there was only one story, Joseph called this structure the “monomyth.” The myth from which all other tales are derived. This structure eventually became known as “The Hero's Journey.”

Why is this relevant to us, here in the real world, I hear you cry? Well, apart from the fact that this structure makes for a super story, the Hero's Journey relates not just to fantasy and imaginary characters, but to REAL ones. This structure is actually a map for HOW LIFE HAPPENS. Once you can read this map, you are in a much stronger place to understand where you are in the process of change. We have a tendency to think that when things get hard, we are in the wrong place. We become uncomfortable. We want to stop or give up. We become disorientated. When you know where you are and appreciate that the polarity of easy/hard, strong/weak, lost/found is in operation, you can feel a lot more relaxed about the journey, knowing you are exactly where you should be and pressing on until the polarity in your story changes.

Not one to take things as given, I tested this idea out. Is it really true that anyone, anywhere can understand the Hero's Journey and relate it to their own feelings and their own lives? I have now run workshops on this model for seven years sharing these ideas with hundreds of people across several continents here in the UK, in India, New Zealand, the USA and Kosovo. Every single person who I showed it to, from the very young to the very old, could relate it to their lives and experience.

Let's take a look at the structure. To help us, let's call on one of the best-loved cinematic stories ever told. The original Star Wars. In developing what was to become a film classic, George Lucas hired Joseph Campbell as a consultant to give him advice on the monomyth. No doubt the special effects, the whopping budget and some marvellous acting helped to make the film such a success. But it was the Hero's Journey structure that made it possible to create such a memorable film. Lucas claimed that he knew the pieces of what made a classic tale, but wasn't clear about the order they came in or how to make the most of them. Star Wars combines many of the key elements of great storytelling – the hero we can relate to, enjoyable and likeable sidekicks, the rescue of a princess, the defeat of evil and the surprising turn of events. Let's look in more detail at what Campbell and Lucas created as we break down the Hero's Journey.

The Headlines of the Hero's Journey – the Path to the Quest

Part One – the Call

The hero is looking for something – either to leave an unsuitable situation or to move toward an exciting dream or goal. But they feel stuck. They know there is more out there for them – they want to stretch beyond the known, but it feels frightening. Then one day, for whatever reason, they are “Called” – something happens that makes them decide they must commit and take action. This usually takes quite a bit of courage.

Luke Skywalker is cleaning the robot R2-D2 when he accidentally triggers a hidden message from Princess Leia, who has been kidnapped by Darth Vader. The message begs for help and rescue. When Luke visits Obi-Wan Kenobi to tell him about the message, he asks about his father – who is he? Luke is now “Called” to rescue the princess.

Part Two – the Commitment

The hero crosses the threshold into the unknown. They leave behind what is familiar and commit to their Quest. In this time they receive support, mentoring and assistance. They make a plan and pull together the resources to get started.

Luke hires Hans Solo and Chewbacca to transport him to Alderaan, Leia's home world. Obi-wan Kenobi serves as his mentor and sidekick.

Part Three – the Quest

The Belly of the Whale: It gets dark and lonely, the hero feels lost. They wonder why they ever started and if they can ever complete their Quest. There are tests and trials that prove they are up to the Quest.

The Supreme Ordeal: They face a final battle or challenge that is often life threatening, or they do battle with their own limitations or fears. The hero's commitment and integrity is put to the test.

Obi-Wan Kenobi gets killed in a battle with Darth Vader. He makes the ultimate sacrifice to help the higher cause. Luke faces Darth Vader, in a great lightsaber duel and Darth reveals that he is Luke's father attempting to lure him to the Dark Side (Belly of the Whale). Luke returns to Yoda (his mentor) to complete his training and it is revealed that he will have to face his father to become a true Jedi. He discovers that Leia is his sister. A final battle ensues (Supreme Ordeal) and Luke overpowers Darth, but refrains from killing him. His father then saves him in a final act of heroism before he dies.

Part Four – the Return

Transformed by their experience, the heroic character needs time to recover. They then return across the threshold back into the “ordinary” world, able to share the gifts and wisdom they have accumulated through their Heroes' Journey. They are greeted with great joy and fanfare.

Anakin Skywalker (aka Darth Vader) dies in his son's arms. Luke graduates to become a Jedi Knight and the Death Star is destroyed. Luke returns home, a very different man to the one who began the Quest.

This structure can be found in any of the religious stories, fairy tales, in Disney and in Dickens. Writers have used it for centuries. Why? Because it echoes our own life experience. The Heroes' Journey is the structure of our life – when we change and learn, we move from highs to lows, from confidence to anxiety and we have to be persistent, against all odds or face giving up on our dreams.

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My grandmother was born in Russia and in spite of being a Jewish woman in a Communist state, became a very successful physicist. She loved her job. She was the only woman in Russia responsible for a scientific institute. But she, her husband, her mother and her son, dreamed of the freedom they might have if they lived in the West. Her husband, my grandfather, had lost his whole family in World War II in Poland. He was a Zionist and wanted the family to move to Israel where they could live safe from persecution. The family took the opportunity to apply to leave Russia. This was their Call. Everyone applied, steadily going through the paperwork and bureaucracy that was designed by the Communist regime to wear you down and make you give up. They waited and waited. The answer finally came back; only my father, her son, had permission to leave. The rest of the family were now “traitors” to the regime. There was a family conference and they agreed that my father, who was only 21 years old, would leave Russia. He began his own Hero's Quest that took him to Israel and then to England.

Life now became very difficult for my grandparents. My grandmother lost the job she loved. One day shortly after my father left, she went to work and there was someone else sitting at her desk. She was barred from the building and the world of work. My grandfather was accused of “making up” his medals won for courageous fighting on behalf of the Soviets. They were exiled from their country whilst still living there. With nowhere to go and in the Belly of the Whale, my grandmother joined the resistance movement, the Refuseniks, a community of activists who had been refused permission to leave Russia. She fought for the rights of others to leave the country, was arrested by the KGB and often did not know whether she would “disappear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1: The Hero's Journey
• 2: What Kind of Hero Are You Anyway?
• Your Hero Self
• Part One: The Call
• Part Two: The Commitment
• Part Three: The Quest
• Part Four: The Return
• Further Reading and References
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author