You can’t find happiness if you aren’t connected to your true self. The number one question I used to get asked when I was a running a personal branding business was “What makes you different than every other business or life coach out there?” Come behind the scenes with me for a minute, and let’s examine some of the inner motivations we all share.
“You must understand, intrinsically, deeply, your WHY.”
The answer to the previous question is incredibly simple.
I am not a coach. I never set out to teach anyone about sales or success or how to fulfill your financial goals.
My goal has always been to help those around me find and present their purpose, intention and authenticity. If you lack the understanding of how to be true to yourself, and show others that quality, all of the coaching and training in the world will not help you achieve success. You must understand, intrinsically, deeply, your WHY and how to communicate it to those you meet, in your professional, personal, emotional, and spiritual lives.
“Most of you have been trying to be “different” than yourself…in order to achieve success”
This shift in mentality has implications far beyond anything you can do in your career or your social life. It is one of the keys to deep-seated happiness and security in yourself. I know a thing or two about this concept as well, since I didn’t exactly have great self-esteem or happiness for the first 30 or so years of my life, and I’ve spent no small amount of time, energy, and money chasing down the answers to how to be “different” in order to find inner peace.
Soak that in for a minute, since I can almost guarantee most of you have been doing something very similar, trying to be “different” than yourself, to become more like a mentor, an expert, a parent, or a friend in order to find your version of success.
When you platform your personal growth of off someone else’s success, personality, or process; you will ultimately fail. You may not fail in achieving something that looks like outer success, but you will always fail at marrying that success with your inner voice and purpose. And this is guaranteed to keep you from being personally as fulfilled and as happy as you should be.
Let Me Break Something To You, Folks…
No amount of training, money, soul-searching, career climbing, dating, or any other distraction technique is ever going to help you find or live your purpose.
How do you know what is right for you? Which clients to work with? Which mentors to trust? Which friend or potential partner is worth pursuing? Learning how to understand and live authentically will help you avoid taking an exit that will cost you an incredible amount of time, wear, and tear on your personal “vehicle”. You need to have a roadmap to the end goal.
Furthermore – trust me on this – the goal of this journey is not to end with a metric, an income level, a significant other, or a particular award.
“If You’re Not Working To Advance Your Position Across Every Plane Of Your Being, You Are Actually Moving Backwards.“
I don’t care whether you are talking about business, about raising children, or about choosing a vacation destination. There are essentially two “lanes” in which each one of us travels.
Frued called them the Ego and the Id. Here is where the analogy gets both tricky and profound. Those lanes can be going in the same direction, with a friendly white line allowing you to move between them seamlessly in a way that gets you to your destination with the fewest possible amount of traffic jams, detours, or other nasty issues. Or they can be divided by a stark double yellow line with parts of your convoy heading both ways, requiring you to split your concentration and your time between both directions.
A roadmap to personal happiness and success is about traveling in the same direction with all aspects of your psyche and physical presence. We all need a direction to focus on as we travel down our lanes.
Seriously, its time to stop working against yourself. Be authentic. Let’s talk about what it takes to stop moving backwards, and aligning your inner and outer personas in a way that makes a positive impact in your life.
To do that, you must do the deep work to understand 3 things:
1Who You Truly Are, authentically and deep down under all of that fake polish you wear that you’ve been taught to present to the world from a young age.
2Who Others Think You Are, since for the majority of us there is a disconnect between how the world views us and who our true selves are.
3How to Close the Gap Between the Two. To do this, you must live authentically, and learn to present yourself authentically to the world. There is nothing that creates more confidence or peace in your life than working on this aspect of personal growth. Most of us need some training, therapy, coaching, or other mentoring to pursue and fulfill your “Why”, but you won’t get there if you are not authentic to yourself in choosing who to follow to help you reach your goals.
And there you have it, folks. This is the “what”. But to be totally honest, I still work on the “how”. Everyday I find myself making a choice: to be open and honest, or to put on a face for the world. How much to give. Its not exactly like being truly authentic is easy, but it sure is a whole lot easier than pretending to be somebody I’m not.
XOXO,
*Photo Credit: 5280 Headshots
**Originally published on nuorikko.com
