A Simple Exercise to Help Us Find Direction

It can be hard to know what to do next in relation to many challenges we face. Maybe we’ve left our partner in a painful breakup. Now what should happen? Should we look for someone else? Should we spend time alone? Should we even try to go back to our ex? Or maybe we have difficulty with a senior colleague at work. Do we confront them? Or say nothing? Or move company?

In order to help us with such confusions, it pays to turn to a basic but highly effective thought experiment. We should pause to ask ourselves the following: ‘If my life were a film, and I was its central character, what would the audience want me to do next?’

The reason why such a question can yield especially lucid results is that it automatically clears up a many of the biases and blind spots that ordinarily mar our judgement. The familiar structure of films, ingrained in us since childhood, has a particular power to counteract our self-defeating impulses.

For a start, films have central figures that we love. We tend to deeply admire the hero and heroine. We want them to get out of whatever scrape or misery they are in – and we long for them to make the most of their lives. We’re properly on their side – in a way we’re frequently not quite on our own.

Secondly, we can’t bear reversals and meaningless detours. It’s agonising to watch a character we like make an error, go back on an ideal, betray themselves or sink further into bitterness or self-hatred. ‘No, no, don’t do that,’ we may whisper quietly to ourselves from the middle of the back row.

Thirdly, however patient we may be with some of the longueurs typically associated with art-house cinema, we want things to happen in films. We don’t want to waste time, we get restless and increasingly desperate about indolence and prevarication. It’s no fun watching someone we care for turning around in circles. ‘Come on!’ we may whisper again from the back.

In other words, we are often far more adept at discerning the best choices for a fictional character than for ourselves. 

As we think about what we might do in the film of our lives, certain options immediately appear a great deal more viable – and others less so. Of course the audience wouldn’t want us to go back to our ex. They saw the arguments, they were horrified by the final scene in which they didn’t even say a proper goodbye and left the house in chaos. They would wince and scream at the idea of us suggesting a meeting with them – or even of sending them a message. And of course the audience wouldn’t want us to appease our arrogant colleague. They’d want us to request a meeting, tell them what’s on our mind and walk away with dignity.

We should learn to perform systematic audits of our dilemmas through a cinematic lens:

— If my love life were a film, what would happen next?

— If my career were a film, what would happen next?

And so on.

It’s a humbling thought: that most of the information we need to make judicious choices is in us already; it just remains inaccessible to us due to an accumulation of self-hatred and under-confidence. We know deep down what we should do. We simply haven’t – as yet – been generous enough to imagine ourselves as the purposeful protagonists of our own stories.