A ‘Life Review’ Can Be Powerful, at Any Age

Jodi Wellman was devastated when her mother died of a heart attack at age 58. Cleaning out her apartment made her feel even worse. Drawers and closets overflowed with abandoned projects: unpublished manuscripts and business cards for ventures that had never gotten started.

“My mom was a wake-up call for me,” Ms. Wellman said. “She had these dreams that she didn’t act on.”

At the time, Ms. Wellman was in her early 30s, living in Chicago and working her way up the corporate rungs at a fitness club chain. But, over the course of five years, that work began to feel empty.

Determined not to stagnate like her mother, Ms. Wellman quit her job to become an executive coach, eventually entering a master’s degree program in positive psychology. There, she developed a strategy for living fully: Think about death, a lot.

Now also a speaker and the author of “You Only Die Once,” Ms. Wellman, 48, believes that focusing on how short life is makes you less likely to squander it. To help her clients figure out how to spend their limited time, she asks them dozens of questions, organized by life phase — things like what activities made them happiest as a child, and what they would change about their 40s and 50s.

Her approach is a twist on something called “life review,” where people systematically reflect on their past, through conversations or in writing, to identify character strengths and develop self-awareness and acceptance. The process can occur both with a partner or in small groups, and it typically unfolds in six to 10 weekly sessions.