Welcome my friends! How are you all? I hope your day is amazing so far. So I this morning when I was taking my dogs out to do their potty thing, my dog Leila, started barking. She was looking at the house and I was trying to figure out why on earth she was barking. There was no one there. Then I realized she was barking at my reflection. Apparently she couldn’t recognize me in the window and that I was a stranger. Silly dog. But it got me wondering, how many of us have had the experience where we look at ourselves in the mirror and don’t recognize who we’ve become. Or we look and just feel like we either lost a piece of ourselves or completely lost who we are inside.
I had a time like that in my life. Actually, probably a few times like that, but I can remember one in particular where I was feeling completely lost. I didn’t know who I was anymore, what motivated me, what would give me in the moment ultimate happiness. It was a time when our family was in, what I call survival mode, where I was trying to just get through the day without having some kind of major crisis. Can I keep it together just enough so no one would notice we were really struggling as a family.
I had all these ideals of how I wanted my family to look, how I needed them to look so I could feel like I was a good mom, like I was a good wife. I was trying to force everyone to fit in this mold and when that wasn’t working, I would change myself to see if that would make a difference. Not to say that I was completely out of control, but I was always in a mode of desperation and scarcity because what would people think?
I didn’t even realize I was doing this until I started training to be a life coach. That I was putting all my power into a basket and handing it over to everyone else, hoping they would take care of it and do what I needed them to do to so I could feel better. And because that rarely works, I’d change myself and hand the basket back again and hope then they would make me feel better. I became a self-imposed martyr sacrificing myself and changing myself until I completely forgot who I was. What my original dreams were and what passions did I have that excited me to keep living, keep evolving into a better version of me.
So I think it’s good to every now and then to step back and do an internal life audit by asking yourself, “who do I want to be?”
Who do you want to be? Remember when we were little kids and people would ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up? And when I was growing up the typical answers were I want to be a teacher or a doctor, a ballerina or a police man. Times have changed a bit, hasn’t it? But that’s what we want to be. I think that’s different from who you want to be.
Do you want to be a person who shows up for yourself? Do you want to be a person who shows up for others? Do you want to be a person who is compassionate or fun or wise? Do you want to be a person who travels or who likes to stay in the comfort of their own home? Do you want to be the person who stays committed to your goals?
And it’s not about how successful you are or what you own or how many followers you have. It’s about who you are to yourself. No matter what you do, you still get to show up as you, you get to act like you and be you. So you can decide the person you want to be and that will create the experience that you want to have. You are the creator of your life experience. If you decide that you are a successful person then whatever you do, you will be successful no matter what it is you do. The place doesn’t matter, the people don’t matter, what matters is who you are to you, and how you want to show up regardless of the circumstances around you.
Who are you right now? How well does the person you are right now match up to the person you want to be? The first thing you’ve got to do is decide who you want to be and for some us this will take some time. I’m all grown up, but I’m still learning about who I want to be on so many different levels. However, if you already know and it’s not aligning with who you are today then why not?
Did you know that the person who you are today is based on who you thought you were in your past? So if I’m a person who currently finds ways to beat myself up every day then my past self was thinking all the ways I’m not measuring up and how I should be doing better. So whatever you’re thinking about yourself today will determine who you become in your future.
If I want to be a confident woman what am I doing today to get me there in my future? In what ways do I already exemplify confidence and in what ways would I like to increase that ability? If I want to have better self-confidence then the first thing I need to do is start thinking better about myself. Self-confidence is deciding that you’re going to have your own back no matter what. It’s deciding that regardless of what happens today I’m still going to believe in me. I’m still going to remember that I have 100% worth and nothing will ever change that. True self-confidence says I love all of me. The messy side and the amazing side. If who you are today is not aligning with the person you see for your future, pick one way on how you want to change that to progress towards becoming the person you want to show up as.
What you do is what will give you your results in life, however what you think will determine who you want to be. And you may be thinking, wait a minute, I thought our thoughts determined our results. But you can be successful and still get there by not showing up aligned with who you want to be. You could be successful and not recognize who you’ve become. You could have a loving relationship and get there without being who you want to be. So you’d be in a relationship, but is it authentic? It’s not, if you don’t know who you are and are just acting to please others in the name of pleasing others.
You could say I would like my relationship to be this way and I want to get this job or you could say this is who I want to be in my relationship, this is who I want to be at my job, this is who I want to be as a mother. There’s nothing wrong with knowing the kind of job you want or what type of relationship you’d like to have, however trying to control circumstances outside of your control can be extremely difficult and exhausting. Anytime you’re involved with any other person, then they have their thoughts and their feelings and their actions and that doesn’t always align exactly with what you want. So if you keep trying to reach this ideal of how you want it to be your relationship or your job, then are you showing up as who you want to be or are you changing yourself to try and fit it into your ideal?
Versus if you just knew who you wanted to be and you showed up that way and allowed everyone and everything else to show up in their way. For a long time I was trying to change myself when my relationships weren’t fitting how I thought they should look. I’ll tell you right now, that is a great way to lose yourself! You’re always changing who you are to meet some sort of idea or expectation you have. You end up chasing the idea instead of just doing the work to figure out who you want to be and then work to show up that way and allow the relationship to evolve from there, in true authenticity.
So the difference between going out into the world and seeing how things go and deciding for yourself how they’re going to go is huge. It’s you taking back your basket of power and creating instead of being a piece in someone else’s creation. A lot of times we look to others for their opinions to determine who we are as people and if we’ll be OK with ourselves. We look to others to validate for us if we are successful, if we’re lovable, if we’re beautiful. We look to our friends and our family, our colleagues and our bosses to get the validation to prove that to ourselves. How different would it be if you just decided right now: I am successful, I am beautiful, I am lovable, I am a good mom. And so you’re taking control of your own life and your own life experience by determining who you are before hand and then your actions are fueled from positive feelings, getting you far greater results because you are acting from an evolved future-self state.
I mean notice the change in energy from I want to be versus I am
I want to be committed, I am committed
I want to be a good mom, I am a good mom
I want to be brave, I am brave
I want to be successful, I am successful
I want to be fun, I am fun
It changes your energy from a needing, a hoping feeling of something possibly out of reach to an empowered statement of who you are. I am happy, I am compassionate, I am a good mom, I am a good wife, I am great at staying committed to myself and my goals, I am fun.
I remember with my kids growing up there were certain things that they didn’t want to do because they didn’t think it would be fun. Either going to a camp or going to school or working a certain job or even going to a party. They’d complain about how it’s not going to be fun or it’ll be boring. Don’t show up to where you’re going expecting someone to make it fun for you. Show up expecting that you will make it fun for you and that keeps you completely in control and in power of your life experience, regardless of what is going on around you.
You have the power inside you to just decide right now, who you want to be and start telling yourself that’s who you are. Because that’s all it is, a decision. If that’s out of reach, ask yourself why? What’s holding you back from believing that and how do you want to go about changing your beliefs about yourself so you can get there. It could be as easy as changing the I am statement to “I am learning to believe that I am (fill in the blank)” Or “I am learning to be (fill in the blank)” I am learning to be brave, I am learning to be a good mom, I am learning to believe that I am successful. It gives you a little more wiggle room to be where you’re at and to keep moving forward.
Remember, this is about who you are to yourself. And figuring this out is important because you are the only one with you 24/7. In order for you to like who you are, you’ve got to know who you are and who you want to be. You got to have some kind of understanding of that. Otherwise, you have nothing to measure against it to see if you’re becoming who you want to be or if you need to pivot a little to get you in the right direction again.
At the end of your life when you’re the wisest you’ll ever be, will you be able to look back on your life and recognize who you’ve become? Have you evolved into the future self you’re seeing for yourself right now? Take your power, decide that no matter what, you will be that person or become that person and it happens one day at a time, one empowering belief at a time. Remember, you are the creator of your experience. So, what do you want to create today?
Until next time, have a great week! Bye!
