I've found this metaphor useful in values work and as a defusion exercise. Janet Wingrove's feedback (thank you Janet!) helped me to improve the wording.
Picture your life as a movie. The first episodes are already shot. (Here I usually summarize what I know of the – usually difficult – salient moments of the clients life). Now the movie is going on. Imagine you are the director and you can direct an actor that plays your part. But you're a special kind of director with a limited power. You can't go to the screenplay writer and ask him to change the life events happening to you or direct the other characters to act like you'd want them to do. The only actor you can have an influence on is the one playing your part. You can have him/her play exactly like the person you dream to be. Figure out how you would want him/her to act, in that precise situation you are experiencing now. How would you instruct the actor to act if you want the continuation of the movie to resemble what you would like your life to be, or to show the father / spouse / colleague / etc. you would like to be?
This metaphor has multiple sources.
(1) Doing values work with clients, I tried the tombstone exercise and the funeral exercise and had the feeling they didn't really ring a bell. It seemed to me that people understood them as one more appeal to pliance, to being a «good boy» or «good girl».
(2) I found an idea of Dan Millman interesting : «When I refer to practicing "everyday enlightenment," I'm speaking about actually consciously asking, "How would an enlightened being act in this moment?"—and then acting that way.»
(3) Alexandre Jollien is affected by a severe form of cerebral palsy due to birth damage and had to face the trauma of being separated from his parents at the age of 3 and raised in a faciltiy for disabled children. He finally made it to a degree in philosophy and published two books the title of which can be translated as «In praise of weakness» and «The trade of becoming a human being». He's now married and father of a young child. He explains in his crippled voice how the ancient greek philosophers have taught him that one could sculpt one's life in order to do a work of art out of it.
(4) This connected with Viktor Frankl's suggestion to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. And with the bus driver metaphor, each question of life being a new crossroad, a new opportunitiy to drive the bus in a valued direction. The reels of the past episodes come with us. I remember Frankl said that, in a novel or in a movie, it is sometimes what happens at the very end that gives a new meaning to the whole story.
The recalling of this metaphor in some difficult situations sometimes helped me to defuse of some tricky contents and to steer the course dear to me. I had the feeling it was less felt as pliance inducing by clients as the funeral and tombstone exercises. They sometimes answered to it with statements like «I would want him (her) to stay cool, to think positively etc.» which set the occasion for one more round of creative hopelessness work.
What I'm mainly afraid of is that the metaphor could be fueling self-accusations in all the cases where the passengers succeed in having the bus driven in the direction they want life to proceed.
I'm still interested in and grateful for any feedback