Month: August 2023

What does it mean to you to be You?

What does it mean to you to be You?

This is the age-old question of ‘identity’ – what does it mean to me to be Me?

It’s simple – I just need to find out who I am, what matters to me, where my place is in the world, what my purpose is, what I do and don’t like, what drives me and what stops me.

Ok, whoa. There’s a lot here. Maybe it’s not so simple.

Hmm, where do I start??

Another tough question. Fortunately, there are many books, tools, resources and modalities to choose from to start exploring who we really are and what really matters to us. I’ve been exploring  a number of these and I am sharing on this website my experiences with them. This is what this WHOLE website is all about!

I think one of the best places to start is to be aware of and understand your values. These are what really matter to you. These guide you through your life whether you realise it or not. When things feel great, you’re around people you feel comfortable with, you are doing things you really like, chances are you are in a situation where your values are aligned with the people and circumstances around you. When things don’t feel so great, chances are there is some misalignment with your values.

Your values guide you through life. To fit in with life, on occasion you may have to be flexible and bend away from them slightly, though you should always come back into alignment with them. They are the centre point/core/backbone of you. If you bend away from them too much, you will ‘break’ and fall out of alignment with yourself and eventually find yourself dissatisfied, unhappy, stuck, yearning for more or something different to what you have. Which is what happened to me.

Now of course, the world isn’t meant to be a place that completely aligns to our own values – it doesn’t work like that. However, when you know who you are and what matters to you, you can make choices and choose people and situations that are a better match for what is really important to you.

For me, my highest value is integrity. Integrity trumps everything in my book, and in my little corner of the world. That’s why you’ll see on this website ‘Live in Integrity’. It’s important to me so I’m making sure it lives here on my website too.

I think finding out and knowing your values is an important first step on the pathway back to you. I think an important second step on that pathway is really coming to understand what beliefs you hold, what you honestly believe to be true – about you, about your life, about your experiences, about your corner of the world.

Once you can gain a real understanding of your values and beliefs and really become aware of them, you will start to see yourself for who you really are. And then, you will know when you are being true and authentic to you – and when you are not.

But how do I find out what I value and believe? Stay with me as I explore tools and resources on this website to help you answer this question and take those first two steps.

We’re nowhere near exploring any of the other questions yet – What is my purpose? What is my place in the world? What drives me and what stops me? We’ll get to those.

And so, I ask you again, what does it mean to you to be You? Do you want to know? Do you dare to find out? Let’s explore that together. One stepping-stone at a time.

Be true and authentic to you

How we get tangled in ourselves

Oh, what a tangled web we weave… when we don’t really know who we are, what we want or what is truly right for us.

How does this tangled web get woven you ask? Good question. It’s a question I have often asked myself in all its various forms.

  • How did I get here?
  • Why does this keep happening?
  • Did I take wrong turn somewhere?

I DON’T UNDERSTAND!!!

It’s so very frustrating and a war I have been battling within myself for some years that had no particular starting point or trigger, but just grew over time as feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration slowly crept up on me.

I started asking myself these questions.

How did I get here?

Well, this was fairly easy to answer. I took the sensible path, a path that is a combination of what I thought was expected of me and what I thought I needed to do to give myself what I believed I needed – security – via a safe, sensible career, a roof over my head and the funds to travel. It was a conscious choice. Objectively it was the right choice as I did achieve those things. However, I knew that just lying beneath the surface I had made a sacrifice. Of what, I wasn’t sure. I just knew it was costing me something, but I was prepared to pay that price. And so I did.

Why does this keep happening?

This was a little trickier to answer. As you go through your life, you may start to see repeating situations occur and if you have a questioning mind like I do, inevitably you ask yourself ‘why’ (one of my favourite questions by the way). That’s all very well, but what happens when you can’t come up with a rational explanation for why you continuously come across so-called friends who do the wrong thing by you or why ‘difficult’ colleagues choose to inflict their ‘difficult’ behaviour on you and all you can come up with is ‘I’m the common denominator here’.

To be clear, this is about observing what is going on in your life, seeing the patterns which are ultimately about ‘lessons’ (we’ll get to that), and the part I played. This is what I had to get crystal clear about.

Did I take wrong turn somewhere?

This was by far the hardest question to answer and something I continue to ask myself regularly as I’m constantly working on coming to truly believe that there are no wrong turns in life. There are choices, always choices, and we make our choices to the best of our knowledge and ability at the time we are making them.

I do believe that we are always in the right place at the right time no matter how challenging or downright wrong it may feel. I do believe everything happens for a reason. I have experienced that even when things don’t feel like they are going to turn out right, they always turn out the way that is best for you, again even though it seems challenging or wrong at the time. Hindsight, in its 20/20 beauty, will eventually show you this.

In my quest to answer this question, it has pushed me to turn to myself, to trust myself and to trust and have faith in the course of ‘life’. This requires an inimitable amount of faith in you and the choices you make.

Take a step back to have a look at the tapestry of your life that you have weaved together. Take in the whole picture – do you like what you see?

The picture is a tapestry of the choices you have made where you had the power and the opportunity to make a choice.

I’m looking at what I’ve weaved together – there are some tightly woven plaits, some loose threads, a few knots here and there among the different coloured threads. I’m taking the time now to unpick a few of the knots and pick up some of the loose threads to see what new tapestry I can weave together. And this time, I am doing this consciously, with intention, carefully choosing what I want my tapestry to look like.

First, I must untangle myself.

Be intentional with your choices