MAP: Your Master Action Pattern
The "Pattern-of-Your-Patterns" that guides your entire LifeCourse

Together, the LifeCourse Patterns form the larger, unified pattern by which you operate your life each day. We call it your Master Action Pattern (MAP). It is your plan-of-action for the rest of your life, based on what your life has been so far. The image is used to suggest how you plan to "get from here to there" on the road of life. LEAP says that, if you want to end up someplace else, you’ll need to change course. Following childhood’s ways can be like trying to find a new place on an old map. which shows old paths and narrow roads where now there are super-highways and short-cuts!

Adler created the term Life Style, the largest and most complete concept in all of psychology, to indicate the entire, unified "whole" of an individual’s life. Today the term is used in a more superficial way, so we speak of LifeCourse to mean much the same thing.

Adler also created the first holistic psychology and theory of personality. He saw a person as complete and integrated, not separate traits or "psychic parts" (such as Freud’s "Ego" and "Id"). He chose the Latin word individuum ("that which cannot be separated") when he named his approach, Individual Psychology.

In the last session, we look at your MAP, suggest revisions to work on, finish anything left from other sessions, and complete work on your Target Task.

Once done with the ten-session workshop, some people continue sessions to apply LifeCourse learnings to other life areas. Blocks of three one-hour sessions are offered at a fee of $100 per block. These sessions more closely resemble traditional psychotherapy, while still based on the LifeCourse Patterns approach.

The Life-Line chart to visualize your "Master Action Pattern"

Construct a Life-Line Chart to reveal the entire sweep of your life from birth to now and gain a visual impression of major events, changes, patterns, etc.

Get a roll of shelf paper (to write on with pencils). One foot represents one year. Add enough for a foot or two at each end. (Add extra length if you want to add to it in future years.) Starting one foot from the left end, draw a straight line the length of the paper, half-way between top and bottom. Mark the left end with a "zero" to indicate your birth. (The empty space at the left is for notes on pre-birth family influences. Mark the line every foot and draw a vertical line through each mark to show the year. Mark each line with your age that year. You’re ready to start.

Now jot down events from your life in the block for each year, as they come to mind: "good" or "happy" or "positive" events above the line (the better the higher) and "bad" or "unhappy" or "negative" events below the line (the worser the lower). Write small, the space fills up faster than you might think! An "event" is anything that happened to you or affected you, a decision; a feeling, whatever. Use whatever symbols you like to show connections, duration, emphasis, importance, etc. (Stars, underlining, lines between events, different colored pencils, etc.)

Now connect the events with a single line of a unique color, to describe the movement, the ups and downs, and patterns of your life over time.

The line is what Adler called your Guiding Line in life, the forward movement (and direction) that makes sense of everything you do throughout your life.