ABOUT KIM
That morning, I was driving to a coaching workshop. When it was my turn to introduce myself to a room of strangers, I shared the choice I’d made and the pain surrounding it.
During our morning break, a woman named Donna approached me. Our connection led to consulting opportunities, new relationships and experiences I couldn’t have anticipated.
“As we make conscious choices and take deliberate actions, how does our life unfold?”
Those words stayed with me.
I began wondering what it would look like to explore the progression from making a choice, to taking action, to observing what unfolds and takes our lives in directions we couldn’t have foreseen or imagined.
Being a visual thinker, I created a mind map of the people, experiences and opportunities that had come into my life following my choice to attend that workshop.
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As I reviewed my map, I recognized two strikingly different vantage points.
Looking backward across the branches, I felt immense gratitude for everything that had become part of my life.
Looking forward, beyond the final branches into the future yet to happen, I felt giddy with excitement about the possibilities I couldn’t yet see.
That was the beginning of Choice Mapping.
When I shared my first map with my friend Nancy, she asked if I’d create one for her. We spent two hours exploring a meaningful choice she’d made years earlier and what had unfolded because of it.
That conversation led to another, and another. Over the following year, I explored choices with 29 people. Those experiences deepened my curiosity and eventually led me to write The Book of Choice and develop Choice Mapping™.
Discover The Book of Choice →Long before Choice Mapping became part of my life, I’d made decisions that shaped who I was and the direction my life would take.
I added art history to my college major.
I moved from New York City to San Francisco for an opportunity with The Gap.
I cancelled a wedding two weeks before the date.
I chose to pursue an entrepreneurial venture.
I made the difficult choice to divorce.
Looking back today, I can appreciate what I understood at the time, what I couldn’t yet see and how those experiences influenced the choices I made afterward.
Even the decision to end my relationship with my mother has a much larger story. We eventually found our way back to each other, and our relationship today is something I couldn’t have imagined when I made that choice.
It’s one of the things I find most interesting about looking back at our lives. A choice we made years ago can take on new meaning when we see it through the perspective of who we are today.
After reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, I became fascinated by the choices that shaped her life.
I explored five defining choices across thirty years, then created Choice Maps to look more closely at what influenced those decisions and what unfolded because of them.
The result is a four-part series that invites you to see a familiar life from a different perspective.
I’m Kim DeYoung, a choice coach, author of The Book of Choice and creator of Choice Mapping™.
My professional life has taken me through corporate fashion, entrepreneurship, marketing, organizational leadership and coaching. Through it all, I’ve loved working with people.
For more than a decade, I’ve been fascinated by the choices we make and how they shape our lives. Today, the work that brings me the greatest joy is meaningful conversation.
I love listening closely to someone’s story, noticing the words they use, the details they mention almost in passing and the connections that may not have been apparent before.
I might stop at one word and ask what they mean by it, or return to something they mentioned twenty minutes earlier. Sometimes we’ll discover there’s another choice worth exploring inside the one they originally brought to our conversation.
My work takes many forms, from private coaching and Choice Mapping to group experiences, speaking and organizational facilitation. I also write Beneath the Choice, sharing stories and observations about the choices we make.
On a personal note, I’m a mother of three young adults, married to Rich, and someone who finds tremendous joy in bringing people together. We live in Connecticut.
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