A different kind of biography
Your pivots are your methodology.
A Life Strip is a collection of the moments that made you, and the lesson each one left behind. Not a resume. Not a highlight reel. The actual path.
Free while we're in beta.
Your story, reframed
Eight frames, or five, or whatever you have. The wins, the pivots, the seasons that taught you everything you now know without asking your permission first.
Lessons, not regrets
Every frame asks one question: what did you learn? There is no such thing as a wasted year, only information pointing somewhere you hadn't looked yet.
Built to be shared
Your strip gets its own link. Put it on LinkedIn, or your website, or send it to one person who you'd like to actually know you.
The gallery
Every Life Strip here belongs to a real person with a real path. Read a few before you write your own. It helps.
The stories you tell over and over are not a burden. They are your folklore. They are how people learn to love you.
Jeannie Sullivan
Rather start on paper?
The Life Strip Journal walks you through all eight frames with prompts and examples. Print it, fill it in by hand, and build your strip in minutes when you're ready.
The moments that made you.
Fill in at least five frames. Be specific: the details are what make it real. You can come back and add more whenever another one surfaces.
Like: “I have a powerful voice.” Or: “Freedom is a design choice.”
Write one frame and walk away if you like. Your writing is kept as you type, and the builder picks up where you left off.
Welcome back.
Your Life Strip lives here. Edit it whenever the story changes, which it will.
Your strip
Go deeper.
Three ways to build a strip. Choose the one that matches how you think.
Three paths
Every story finds its own way in.
Some people think best alone with a pen. Others need a conversation. Some want a guide and a room full of people doing the same brave thing. All three work.
The stories you tell over and over are not a burden. They are your folklore. They are how people learn to love you.
Jeannie Sullivan
Path two
The Thought Partner
For the person who thinks out loud. Copy the instructions below into Claude or ChatGPT and it will interview you, one frame at a time, the way I would across a table.
It runs in your own account, which means nothing you say passes through this site. Given what you are about to talk about, that seemed like the right way around.
The instructions
You are going to help me write my Life Strip: eight frames, each one a moment from my life and the lesson it left behind. You are interviewing me. You are not writing it for me.
How to behave:
1. Ask about ONE frame at a time, and ask ONE question at a time. Never send me a list of questions.
2. When I answer in generalities ("college was hard", "I learned a lot there"), do not accept it. Ask for a single specific moment: a day, a room, a conversation, something with a time and a place.
3. Follow the detail I skip past. If I mention something in passing and move on quickly, come back to it. That is usually the real story.
4. Reflect my own words back to me. Quote the phrase I used, not a tidier version of it.
5. Do NOT tell me what the lesson is. This is the most important rule. When I finish a story, ask me what I take from it. If I struggle, read my own words back and ask which phrase feels the most true. Never offer "it sounds like you learned resilience" or anything of that kind. Let me arrive at it. Wait longer than feels comfortable.
6. Keep the lesson short when I find it. One sentence. Starting with "I" often helps.
7. If a frame is genuinely empty for me, let it go and move on. Five real frames beat eight polite ones.
8. Do not compliment my stories. Do not tell me I am brave. Just keep asking good questions.
The eight frames, though I can start anywhere:
1. Childhood and early years: the stories that shaped me before I knew I was being shaped.
2. School days: the lessons the classroom never planned to teach me.
3. First steps: my first real job, my first real failure, my first real win.
4. The pivot: the moment everything changed, or the moment I finally changed it.
5. Rock bottom, or breakthrough: the hardest season, and what it gave me.
6. Becoming: when I started to understand who I actually am.
7. The risk: the thing I did that scared me, and what happened after.
8. Right now: the chapter I am living, and what is true today.
When we have at least five frames, do two things.
First, list only my lesson lines, in order, and ask me what keeps repeating across them. Do not answer that question yourself. It is mine.
Second, output my finished frames in exactly this format, so I can paste them into the builder at lifestrip.bio:
CHAPTER: (what I called this season)
MOMENT: (my story, in my words, lightly tidied for typos only)
LESSON: (my lesson, exactly as I said it)
Begin by asking me which frame is already tapping me on the shoulder.
Works in Claude, ChatGPT, or anything similar. Expect it to take thirty to forty minutes if you let it.
When you have your frames, bring them here and the strip takes about two minutes.
How Life Strip came to be
This morning, I launched a website.
But the idea is thirteen years old.
In 2013, I wrote something I called a Learning Bio: a running reflection of the moments that made me, and the lessons each one left behind. I built it into a program I was designing for coaches and entrepreneurs. I loved it. My clients loved it. And then life moved on, the way life does, and the Learning Bio lived quietly in a folder on my hard drive.
I never forgot it.
Every few years it would surface: in a conversation, in a coaching session, in that particular feeling of this should exist in the world. But the timing was never right, or the tools weren't there, or I was in the middle of something else entirely.
Then one morning it happened. Life Strip went from a thirteen-year-old idea to a live product at its own domain in a matter of hours. The gallery opened. The first Life Strip went in.
The entries at lifestrip.bio/jeannie-sullivan were written in 2013. I left them exactly as they were, because that's the whole point.
A Life Strip isn't a polished personal brand statement. It's the actual path. The real moments. The lessons you learned before you knew they were lessons.
There's something else.
When my partner read my Life Strip for the first time, he chuckled. Not because it was funny. Because he already knew every single story.
Over three years together, I'd told him all of them. My folklore, told and retold. And I realized: he knows me. Really knows me. Not because I summarized myself, but because I'd already been willing to tell him the real ones.
That's what a Life Strip does. It isn't only self-awareness. It's vulnerability, and connection, and being willing to see yourself clearly so that someone else can too.
And the ones who haven't heard your stories yet? This is where they start.
Jeannie Sullivan
Learning experience designer and professional coach
Ready to tell your real story?