Hour 1

With William Damon     

Hour 2

Peter Wood     

About William Damon

William Damon is a professor at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.  He is the author of the new book, A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present.

 As William Damon demonstrates: Viewing our past through the eyes of maturity can reveal insights that our younger selves could not see.  Lessons that eluded us become apparent.  Encounters that once felt like misfortunes now become understood as valued parts of who we are.  We realize what we’ve learned and what we have to teach.  And we’re encouraged to chart a future that is rich with purpose.

In A Round of Golf with My Father, William Damon introduces us to the “life review.”  This is a process of looking with clarity and curiosity at the paths we’ve traveled, examining our pasts in a frank yet positive manner, and using what we’ve learned to write purposeful next chapters for our lives.

For Damon, that process began by uncovering the mysterious life of his father, whom he never met and never gave much thought to.  What he discovered surprised him so greatly that he was moved to reassess the events of his own life, including the choices he made, the relationships he forged, and the career he pursued.

Early in his life, Damon was led to believe that his father had been killed in World War II.  But the man survived and went on to live a second life abroad.  He married a French ballerina, started a new family, and forged a significant Foreign Service career.  He also was an excellent golfer, a bittersweet revelation for Damon, who wishes that his father had been around to teach him the game.

We follow Damon as he struggles to make sense of his father’s contradictions and how his father, even though living a world apart, influenced Damon’s own development in crucial ways.  In his life review, Damon uses what he learned about his father to enhance his own newly emerging self-knowledge.

Readers of this book may come away inspired to conduct informal life reviews for themselves.  By uncovering and assembling the often overlooked puzzle pieces of their pasts, readers can seek present-day contentment and look with growing optimism to the years ahead.

https://spectator.org/why-everyone-could-benefit-from-a-life-review/

Why Everyone Could Benefit From a “Life Review”

by William Damon

A “don’t look back!” approach to life has lots of appeal. We aim for bright futures. Why not focus all our mental energies on plowing ahead with vigor? Preoccupations with the past can slow us down. Future-mindedness, for good reason, is deemed a character strength for people of all ages.

Yet totally turning away from the past is not the best way to build a well-directed future. We can’t learn lessons from past mistakes unless we openly recognize them. We can’t unburden ourselves from old regrets and resentments unless we confront them. In a positive sense, our past accomplishments contain rich troves of ideas about what we’re capable of doing, what’s given us satisfaction, who we’ve become, and who we can aspire to be in the years to come. This is what Soren Kierkegaard meant when he wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; and then it must be lived forwards.” A contemporary version of this insight was offered by Steve Jobs at a Stanford commencement address in 2005: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

 When thinking about our past, we often recall the high points with nostalgia and the low points with regret. While these are natural emotional inclinations, they are not particularly useful because neither nostalgia nor regret help us with the challenges of coping with the present and preparing for the future. They may even stop us from confronting these challenges by disguising what actually happened and obscuring important lessons we otherwise would have taken to heart.

In my life, a dramatic phone call from my daughter triggered in me a burning desire to take a new look at my past and the people that shaped it. I had grown up without a father, and when I was young I was led to believe that he was killed during World War II. When I later found out that he survived the war and abandoned my mother and me before I was born, I deduced that he was a scoundrel and I wanted to hear no more about him. But my daughter’s phone call revealed a different story that, to my surprise, affected me deeply.

My daughter had taken an interest in her grandfather and discovered that, after disappearing from my life, my father forged a distinguished Foreign Service career and established a second family with daughters who were my unknown half-sisters. He passed away before I heard this, but he left a trail of records, friends, and relatives that I could explore for further discoveries. I had never seen a picture of him or knew anything about what he was like. Now, fired with curiosity, I found out everything I could. In the process, I gained an understanding of how he had influenced my own life in ways I never imagined.

The revelations of my father’s life moved me to conduct a “life review,” a method of self-analysis developed by the legendary psychiatrist Robert Butler. A life review involves searching our memories, interviewing old friends and relatives, and retrieving school records and archival documents. With it, we can reconstruct our pasts in a manner that can provide three benefits: 1) acceptance of the events and choices that shaped our lives, fostering gratitude for the life we’ve been given, in place of self-doubt, regret, and resentment; 2) an authentic understanding of who we are and how we got to be that way, leading to a well-grounded self-identity; and 3) a clarity in the directions we wish to take our lives, reflecting what we have learned from what has given our lives meaning in the past.

By finding the positive in earlier experiences—including experiences that may have appeared unfortunate at the time—we can affirm the value of our lives and chart a hopeful path forward. As Butler wrote: “One’s life does not have to have been a ‘success’ in the popular sense of the word. People take pride in a feeling of having done their best … and sometimes from simply having survived against terrible odds.” Butler believed that life reviews would promote “intellectual and personal growth, and wisdom” throughout the lifespan. He noted many psychological benefits, including the capacity to enjoy pleasures such as humor, love, nature, and contemplation; and “an acceptance of the life cycle, the universe, and the generations.” This, of course, is a list of the pillars of psychological health.