Asking Who Are You? Part 1

By Arnie Thomas the Everyday Mentor

Many of my clients have come to me because they are undecided about what life's journey they want to take. Most are afraid they will select the wrong one, so they wait for it to knock at their door. But that knock rarely comes and too many jump on a journey that is not them, which they regret years later. They jump on a journey that isn’t them because they haven’t answered the question made famous to my generation by The Who and to a younger generation by the show CSI: “Who are you?”

The “Who are you?” question is very important for each of us to ask and answer. This week, we will focus on asking this question and next week attempt to answer it. In The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell quotes the Thirteenth Century Ques del Saint Graal “of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.” I interpret it to mean that each of us possess uniqueness and must practice “who we are” to reach our purpose. I recently attended two speeches, one toward the University of Georgia graduates and one to the Running Start fellows, and they both stressed the importance of first questioning who we are because if we do not know who we are, how will we choose the path to fulfillment and happiness?

Often we think we know who we aren't before we know who we are. We know if something doesn't feel right or we are intuitively afraid to do something or we know when we are not going to be successful at something. Be careful here because if you haven't done the real work to discover you, your reality may be false and these negative feelings can be more a part of our machine that we have created as a by-product of incorrect childhood perceptions. Often our machine fights our discovery of who we are.

Also be careful not to define yourself as what you do. You are not a Hill staffer or a lawyer or a lobbyist: you are deeper than that. These titles are merely clothing that you wear to practice and experience who we are. I had a client who thought she was a lawyer and then one day she didn't want to be a lawyer anymore and was totally lost. She confused her label with who she was and couldn't be who she really was as an attorney. Every so often I go through my closet and look at my clothes and wonder how could I have bought a garment that no longer is “me?” The same applies with our professional life. We should periodically go through our closets, both physical and metaphorical, and make sure what we are wearing is still “us.”

Also don't confuse your current brand with who you are. Most personal brands are not created with a great deal of honest thought and are often mislabeled misperceptions of you by others that are sometimes encouraged by your own actions. Peter Arnell in Shift said, “To rebrand yourself, to make a major change in your career or your life, start by distilling who you are down to its essence.” Also don't define yourself by your successes or failures. Successes are temporary and a mistake made into failure is only drama.

Next week, we will talk about some suggestions for starting to figure out who are you? Because, I really wanna know!

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