8 Steps to Conquer the Beast Within

By Martha Beck

Step 5: Fill in the gaps.
Once you've marked the best and worst of times, fill in the gaps, scoring your bête noire levels at every age. You won't have total recall. The numbers will be too fuzzy for physics. But social scientists know that charts like the Lifeline can be extremely useful—and as you fill in the boxes, you'll automatically start thinking like a social scientist. Which brings us to the most powerful Lifeline step.

Step 6: Take note of correlations and casual links.
You describe correlations and causalities every time you observe, "I eat more when I'm tired" or "I feel wonderful near the ocean." Many of the causal links in your life are obvious to you, but others are invisible. The Lifeline exercise helps you see these. To begin noticing connections between your bête noire and other life experiences, answer the questions below on another sheet of paper.

A. When your bête noire was at its worst...

1. Where were you living?

2. Where were you working? (Note: Raising kids at home is work.)

3. What did you do on a typical day?

4. With whom did you spend time?

5. What did you believe?

B. Now answer the five questions above in regard to the times your bête noire was least bothersome.

C. What did your worst times have in common?

D. What did your best times have in common?

E. Other than the bête noire itself, were there any factors that were present at the worst times but not at the best times?

This exercise has sparked thousands of lightbulb moments for me and my clients. I spent years trying to figure out what triggered my fibromyalgia pain, always focusing on things like diet or medication. But creating a Lifeline revealed something surprising: Each and every time my pain flared, I was doing something that I later realized was steering me away from my life's purpose. The pain attacked when I tried to write academic journal articles, receded when I wrote books for a popular audience; worsened when I tried to be my idea of a "perfect mother," lessened when I was simply myself around my children; spiked when I taught college, vanished when I started life-coaching.

If you mull over your Lifeline, you, too, will find unexpected correlations and causalities. My client Janice realized that her beast—alcoholism—was less severe when she spent lots of time knitting. (Yes! Knitting!) Benjamin realized that he made disastrous business decisions around intellectual snobs. Colleen's self-esteem dropped like an anvil whenever she stopped doing yoga. These clients couldn't believe such factors were really aggravating their bêtes noires —until we tested them. Which brings us to... 

Live Your Best Life 

From the February 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine