I’ve been writing about my journey through reinventing my personal bio story, based on a series of webinars presented by Michael Margolis. The journey began here.

In the next part of the journey, which I described here, Michael described an exercise, which we are to have completed for tomorrow’s next part of the journey, “Synthesizing: Finding the Through-Line Arc.”

We were to create a graph in which the X axis represents our age, broken down in decades. On the Y axis, we were to plot five experiences in which we felt most connected and five in which we felt most disconnected with our values. Michael’s own graph appears at right.

My graph appears below. We weren’t asked to label our plot points, but I thought as long as I’m sharing, my graph might be more meaningful with labels, most of which are self-explanatory, and some of which I’ve written about in this space. “The Alligator” refers to The Independent Florida Alligator, the campus newspaper at the University of Florida. I worked at the Alligator for two years in my late 20s and treasure that time as one of the rare periods in my life in which I felt a sense of belonging. I also met my husband there, had my first child there (used to bring her into the newsroom when she was an infant). I realized after creating this graphic that the word “Falls” got cut off from the label “The Good Life in Kettle Falls.”

Did I find this exercise helpful? Yes and no. I found it a little difficult to limit the positive experiences, in which I felt connected to my values, to just five, while happily, I found it difficult to come up with five negative experiences in which I felt disconnected from my values. I also found it challenging to gauge on a 10-point scale exactly where each experience fell. The exercise also might have been more valuable had I not recently gone through a similar exercise of identifying good experiences through the Dependable Strengths training I underwent last fall.

Michael had asked us to think about the story that goes with each plot point. “What core value is being represented by each point?” he asked, and “Why was that moment so important?” We were then to connect the dots and look for themes and patterns. I think my graph is fairly consistent in showing that I value writing and teaching, and the experiences that disconnected me from my values were those in which I was unproductive and neither writing nor teaching (or doing so with a dark cloud over me). The good life in Kettle Falls (WA) nurtures my writing and the teaching I do through my writing.

In theory, Michael said, we would see a pattern showing “what we geek out on.” As I wrote after the last session, I already had a pretty good idea that what I geek out of — everything I love doing can be summarized as “sending content (a.k.a., information) out into the world.” That applies to teaching, blogging, book and article writing, presenting, emailing and social-media-ing with friends.

The plot-point exercise affirms that passion.