The holidays are upon us and soon we will be entering a new year. For those of us over 60, we have navigated countless holiday gatherings and made more New Year’s resolutions than we can remember.

So, what makes this holiday season and 2023 so important?

You are wiser today than in years past. This means there is no better time than now to write a new, more empowering narrative for your life.

To help you along this journey, I have put together a four-part series for Sixty and Me readers titled, “Six Simple Steps to Change the Narrative of Your Life In 2023.”

Here are the six steps:

1. Retrace Your Throughline
2. Undo Early Conditioning
3. Journal Pivotal Transitional Moments in Life
4. Separating the ‘What’ from the ‘Why’ of Life’s Experiences
5. Creating a New Character Arc for Yourself
6. Embody Your Superpower

For this initial article, we will cover the first three steps.

Retracing Your Throughline

Like a movie, whose theme is encapsulated in every scene, we all have a throughline that links our life experiences together. It is a core theme or predominant belief that frames your desires and connects the narrative of your life.

The first step in discovering the narrative of your life is retracing your life’s throughline.

This involves summoning your inner bravery to briefly go back to the origins of one or more deeply layered emotional wounds that may still be lingering today.

These can often be found in early childhood when you first experienced abandonment or felt you were not seen, heard, or valued. The same holds true for experiences in adulthood.

Retracing your throughline is not to relive the experiences, nor is it about blaming yourself or others. It is to identify moments where your life changed through a traumatic incident.

While you may have moved on from the experience, emotional aspects of it can unconsciously linger years later. These lingering emotional wounds can unknowingly trip you up in present moment of life, especially when you desire positive change.

In my personal experience uncovering the throughline of my life, I gained valuable levels of clarity about myself, my parents, and people in my adult life. This improved how I see myself and the world today.

These weren’t the only benefits.

I also gained a deeper sense of gratitude for life lessons that were very hard to look at growing up, let alone make peace with during my adulthood.

Undo Early Conditioning

A key indicator of creating a new narrative is undoing how you were conditioned to think about yourself.

Early conditioning creates a belief system that appears to be beneficial at one stage of life but can often hinder your sense of joy and well-being after 60.

In my case, understanding how I had been conditioned to think the way I did about myself and others, allowed me to unravel why I felt like an outsider most of my life.

I was able to also see how many of my choices in adulthood were unconsciously forsaking my emotional well-being to be loved and accepted. This helped me create healthier boundaries and become better at discerning my choices moving forward.

This may sound uneventful on the surface. But if you have ever suffered bouts of self-worth, or did not feel valued, you know how empowering it is to reclaim your power from the influence of early conditioning.

Journaling Pivotal Moments

To track down the root cause of abandonment and understand why I felt like an outsider in my life, required me to reconcile my relationship with my parents, and ultimately, make peace with my inner child.

This involved changing the narrative of my life by journaling pivotal transitional moments. This is the third step, and it became the basis for my books and courses.

I came up with journal prompts that helped me recall experiences that had a powerful impact on how I chose to see myself and relate to the world around me.

Journaling allows you to bypass the voice of your inner critic, who does not want you to delve into these areas of your life.

Journaling also provides profound clarity on recognizing and uncovering unhealthy patterns. In my case, these were limiting beliefs and behaviors I had not taken the time to acknowledge until my late 50s and early 60s.

Mind you, I didn’t have a roadmap for doing any of this when I embarked on my journey to change my life narrative. These six steps took me years to refine. It doesn’t have to take this long for you.

In the next article we are going to examine the fourth step which is separating the ‘what’ from the ‘why’ of transitional moments that shaped your life.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

As a child, what event changed your life and produced a reoccurring theme in adulthood? What beliefs and behaviors that once benefited you are now holding you back from living a more joyful life after 60? What new, loving and more empowering beliefs about yourself do you want to integrate into your life in 2023?