Sep 11
10
Who Are You?
Did it ever occur to you that most of our life’s challenges are based on one simple question – Who am i? Yet, despite the simplicity of the question, each time one of my clients is faced with it, they go through a very profound physiological reaction – almost immediately their face goes white, as if all the blood was drained from it, there is a sense of panic in their eyes, and all they can think of is: ‘RUN’!
But that is not all, it gets even worse, as almost immediately after the question “Who Am I?”, the mind wanders to “What do I want?”.
“Who am I and what do I want?” is just too much to handle for anybody at any given time!
Most of us in order to answer the question look back over our shoulder and based on our past achievements or rather the lack of them, we try to come up with the answer as to who we are right now. As we have a greater tendency to see more failures than successes, the process is usually not a very encouraging one. The more we try to answer the question, the more stuck we feel. We do not even get close to considering question nr 2 (“What do I want?”) until we have figured out who we are.
What if there was a way out of this? What is there was a solution, an answer that would for ever free us? Even more, it would empower us!
Most of us know the saying that the quality of the questions we ask ourselves determines the quality of our lives. Watch what happens when you simply re-phrase the question and ask instead … “Who would I like to be?”
I do not know if you have ever tried looking at the same thing from a different perspective, but it is quite amazing how much you can see when you change your point of reference!
Asking “Who would I like to be?” does a number of things:
1). It immediately brings us out of the past and orients us onto the present-future direction
2). It gives us a chance to create artfully and passionately a description based on desire, rather than past performance
3). It allows us to look around us for role-models, those people whom we admire the most and hand pick those of their qualities that would serve us the most. What would it be like to have the motivation of Richard Branson, Oprah’s ability to impact millions of lives and Dalai Lama’s wisdom? Not your selection? Guess what, you get to design your own sketch of your “would-like-to-be-me” qualities based on the people you would like to model.
And trust me, it pays off to have a great imagination. The days of being punished for it at school are well over and nowadays huge imagination is a very sought after commodity!
Once you have a fairly good understanding of the qualities of the person you would like to be, this is where the fun starts – you then actually get to be them! I mean that literary – in every situation, at any place, all you need to do is have a quick chat with yourself before you respond to anything in your external /internal world. You know very well how the “old you” would have behaved, you have rehearsed those responses too well, so well in fact that they became habituated. It is now time to ask yourself how the “new me” would respond. By creating a “new you” you have unknowingly raised your standards and expectations. Your new standards will call for higher expectations and you will find it very hard to settle for little. Once you develop a hunger for more, it becomes quite contagious. Since you feel better, you look better, your environment notices that and responds to that accordingly. Since you have raised your expectations, suddenly you start to get MORE!
Once you decide on who you would like to be, answering “What do I want?” is so much easier! By then your imagination is well used to being bold and dreaming BIG. From there to feeling whole and complete is only a short distance away.
And the best thing is – if tomorrow you do not like the person you were today, you get to design it all over again! We are constantly meant to re-invent ourselves.
After all, “Only fools don’t change” … !
Complimentary 30min Business/Personal Coaching Session