Draft Your Adventure Resume

Let's have fun mining your experience

“Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing at all.” -- Helen Keller

The Adventure Resume is a powerful exercise my clients love.

This process offers a way to very clearly see what’s important to you over the course of your lifetime. This map of your decisions and choices reveals the deeper you as reflected by your values.

Think of the Adventure Resume less as a list of your jobs and the practical skills you’ve acquired, but instead as a course charting your peak experiences. Where have you taken risks? How have you created your own path and followed your original impulse?

When I did my Adventure Resume, my values emerged clearly. I noticed that underneath those adventures were my values of learning, travel, discovery and creativity. I can see that again and again, I will choose to invest in a plane ticket or a workshop instead of buying a car or a house.

How does this help me align with my authenticity? Because many of my choices - and yours, too, I bet - are not the traditional choices. There may be people in your life who don’t get you and who may judge your choices as foolish. But that’s okay.

The Adventure Resume helps you get you. This process helps you understand who you are at a fundamental level. It reveals your original impulse.

When I first did this, it completely changed how I viewed my accomplishments. I had an unexpected insight. I was about thirty-three years old at the time. I still felt like I was questing to discover who I was and what I had to offer. When I saw my adventures mapped out, I realized that I had already done a lot. My impact on the world had been positive. I felt like if I were to die then, I would be at peace. This was a big surprise for me, and a real gift.

Let me be clear: adventure isn’t just about travel. Adventure takes many forms: parenting, owning and renovating a home, starting a business, going into the armed forces. Your Adventure Resume will clearly show your own original impulse. 

INVITATION 

This is a fun process and it can go quickly.

Step One

Start by mapping a timeline in a document, or better yet, on a big piece of paper. You can go back as far as you’d like.

Generate a list of things you’ve done, adventures you’ve had, risks you’ve taken.

You can also do this in a more artful way if it suits you. Try different forms: a map, a chart, a drawing...whatever structure suits you and your unique stories is great. My first Adventure Resume was a river with my experiences mapped along it with rough drawings.

Use whatever materials you have on hand to create your own Adventure Resume. Have fun with paint, colored pencils, markers or pens.

Do not get distracted by the supplies. Writer and artist Faith McLellan reined herself in. She thought she needed a big piece of paper and a lot of Post-it notes. Before heading to the store, she came to her senses and made a list in her journal with a cheap pen. She realized this may be the way to actually get stuff done!

Step Two 

Once you’ve done this, step back. Return to the Adventure Resume a while later. What do you notice?

Step Three

Next, jot down some values you suspect lie underneath your actions. You may add them to the Adventure Resume so you can see it all in one document. We will work more on values next month, so don’t worry about getting this part ‘right.’ 

For example, travel is a big part of my experience. But travel itself isn’t a value. What fuels me about travel is discovery, challenge, learning, surprise.

Affirmation: My life as I have lived it is a daring adventure.

In the comments: What came up for you when you did this?