Life doesn't come with a manual.
TAIU gives you somewhere to understand your life, work through what is going on and work on what matters to you.
Something's going on
A decision, a relationship, work, money, or a feeling you cannot name yet.
I want to look at my life
You do not have to wait until something goes wrong to look at your life.
My Tree is your own map of your life. Five roots, the trunk that is you, what may still grow above, and the sunlight that reaches you from outside.
Build my TreeChoose the sun, a root, the trunk or what grows above to see what each part means. The numbers here are an illustration, not anybody's life.
How TAIU works
01
See where you are
Build your Tree. Five roots, scored by you and nobody else.
02
Work something out
Use a Session when something needs thinking through.
03
Work on something
Go further with a Workshop, an exercise, a book or a resource.
04
Keep what matters
Your journal, your plans and the moments you decide to keep.
05
Look again
Come back later and see what you thought then and what you think now.
There is a lot of life to work out.
87 specialist Sessions and 261 structured Workshops, with exercises, books and resources alongside them. You will never need all of it. You only ever need the part that fits what is happening now.
- What am I actually good at?
- How much is enough?
- Should I leave?
- Why do I care so much what people think?
- What is this job costing me?
- Who is actually in my life?
- What am I not allowing myself to want?
- What do I want to leave behind?
Two kinds of work
A Session helps you work something out.
A conversation. It asks, you answer, and it goes wherever the thing you brought needs to go. It ends when you are clearer.
Find a SessionA Workshop helps you work on something.
Structured, in three stages, usually twenty to forty minutes. You leave with something you made, in your own words.
See the WorkshopsWhere the name came from
Sometimes you just need another way of looking at it.
People who feel stuck have usually reduced the whole situation to two options.
- Stay or leave.
- Take the job or turn it down.
- Say something or keep quiet.
- Keep going or stop.
Then somebody asks a question you had not asked yourself, and a third possibility appears. Not the answer. Just an alternative you had not considered. That is where The Alternative Is Unthinkable came from.
A few things worth saying
Enough
Most people never decide what enough looks like, then wonder why more never settles it.
Time
We treat the parts of life we can measure as the parts that matter.
Change
You are allowed to want something different from what you wanted at twenty five.
Where TAIU came from
Twenty years of meeting people, in one place.
Work and curiosity took me around the world. Different countries, cultures, businesses and ways of living. I have had periods with very little money and periods with more than I needed. I have built businesses and lost them, moved countries and made plenty of decisions I would handle differently today. I have never met anyone with everything sorted. TAIU grew out of that, and out of how much can change when somebody asks you the right question at the right time.
Wherever you are
There is not a finish line.
You do not get healthy and tick Health: complete. Money changes, work changes, families change, we change. The point is knowing your own life well enough to see what needs your attention, and having somewhere useful to start.
Or look at your life as a whole instead.