Journey Line — career tool [15 minutes]
A journey line is a useful way to capture key moments and insights from your life and work. This exercise can help you to:
- Identify your motivations, skills, experience, strengths and values.
- Summarise your background and journey.
Your journey line belongs to you
- You can make it high level or detailed.
- If you choose to share it with others, you don’t need to include anything you don’t want to.
Prepare by getting a piece of blank paper. Draw a line from left to right across the centre of the page. Draw another line from top to bottom and label with a happy face above and a sad face below.
Your can start the exercise from the beginning of your career or look at only a part of your career, or start from right back when you were born.
People have said after doing their own journey line exercise it’s been very helpful to repeat it for their family and ancestor journey to see the deep history that has influence their work and career motivations.
Creating a journey line
1. Think of key moments from your work and personal life.
Draw a wavy line to represent the ups and downs and make notes against the big and small moments that stand out to you.
2. Reflect on your journey line.
- What made those particular moments memorable?
What you drew is unique to your story so what made is meaningful to you?
- Were these moments about other people or yourself, growth or stagnating, surprise or choice, the type of work? Something else?
- Positive moments are encouraging and often align with what you value and what you want more of.
- Negative moments will have given you learning and insight about what you don’t want again, or want to change in your current situation.
- What themes can you identify to do with your motivations and values (remember that these things change with our life circumstances and goals.)
- Motivations can be pragmatic (e.g. to earn enough or work in a certain location) or they can be what you want more of (such as growth, challenge or being able to do what you know you’re capable of). Motivations may also be what you want less of.
- Can you identify what makes you feel energised or depleted?
- Which changes were prompted by external forces and which were your own choices?
- Change from external forces means you have experience being able to adapt or start from scratch.
- Change from choice means you have initiative and motivation
3. Use the information
- Summarise your journey in a few sentences.
- Identify your main personal and technical skills.
- Decide what you want next and add detail and context. For example, what role, team, customers or product do you want, and specific logistics or dealbreakers needed.
- Write a few notes from your insights and decide your next steps.
- Share with someone you know to get extra insights.
This exercise is inspired by Lyssa Adkins’ book “Coaching Agile Teams”
