There’s a classic scene in Ben Stiller’s movie Zoolander where the main character Derek Zoolander - down on his luck and questioning everything he knows looks at his reflection in a puddle and ask ‘Who am I?’
While this movie is hilarious I am sure that if you allow your mind to drift back through your life you will be able to identify moments where you have questioned who you are and what you are doing with your life. In todays blog we will analyse your identity and how it may be holding you back for being who you really are.
So who are you? I would argue probably not who you think you are!
There are two primary reasons that we get off track and forget who we are. For the first reason I will ask you to cast your mind back over some of the things we have learned on this journey so far....allow yourself to drift back revisiting previous ideas and what distinction you were able to make when first reading and applying them to your life. The concepts that we will focus on are that the map is not the territory, our incessant obsession to generalise and to assume situations are the same as well as the beliefs that we have created about ourselves.
If we look at these things more closely we will realise that we have been using them to create and harvest an image of ourselves since the day that we were born. For example your parents may have told you that you were good children or that we were smart - as a result you started looking for evidence and occasions that supported these ideas and overlooked anything that clashed with the identity that these ideas had created. You may have used these ideas to push you forward and motivate you to study harder or to be well behaved. Alternatively you may have taken a test in your youth and failed - in that moment you may have made it mean that you were a failure or lacked intelligence and decided that it wasn’t worth trying to study because regardless of what you did you were dumb. Another possibility is that your parents split up because they weren’t happy together anymore but you made it mean that it was your fault, that they didn’t love you enough to stay together and throughout you life carried forward the idea that you were unloveable. In each of these examples you then go on to live your life in that particular manner gathering any evidence that you can which would allow you to be consistent with the identity that you gave birth to in that moment.
The second reason is because we are trained by society how to look, act and be a certain way. ‘You can’t say that’ ‘Normal people don’t do that’ ‘People will think you weird’ ‘Act you age’ ‘No one likes a...’ the list goes on and on but you get the idea. These are things that we are programmed to say to one another and it affects who we are causing us to alter the way we behave around others - put simply it restricts us from being who we really are. We don’t say what we really mean because we don’t want to offend or upset others, we don’t undertake actions and activities because it may appear to others that we are strange preventing us from having the experience that we crave deep down. Sound insane? Well it is but that is human nature.
To give you a further example lets dig into my life and shine a light onto the skeletons that lie in my closet. A particular example comes to mind is that when I was 8 or 9 years old I changed schools. I went from a school where I was happy and popular but one that couldn’t provide me with a solid education to one where I had to start over. As I think back to the first day of the transition and I can recall that I didn’t want to go - I didn’t want to lose my existing friends and I decided that the move would be a disaster (a belief or presupposition for how things would go). When I arrived at the school I found that the social hierarchy was already set and that I no longer fitted in at the top - was this the case or was it because I had already laid the foundations with the belief that I carried into the situation? Regardless, in that moment where I was no longer the king pin I made a decision - not a conscious decision but a decision all the same - that I was not interesting, that there was something wrong with me and that I needed to try and be someone else to fit in.
So what was the result? Was I miserable? Has my life been terrible? The answer is no - it’s been quite nice actually. But there have been moments through out my life that haven’t felt right, where I have questioned who I am and how I fit in to the big scheme of things, where I have over thought situations to figure out how I can fit in rather than being in the moment and being authentic. Moments where I have altered my behaviour or what I wanted to say or do to fit in - all of which has caused me not to whole heartedly connect with those that I was interacting with.
Can you relate to this? Perhaps for you its not about social situations, perhaps for you its around intelligence or success or something else. Situations where you need to pretend to be something because you are afraid others will find out and your dirty little secret will be known by the world. What areas of your life have you gathered evidence about the type of person you are? If you think about the evidence is it from a limited number of sources and are there counter examples if you tried to find them? Where in your life have you accepted things the way they are rather than test them? In science a hypothesis needs to be tested to see if it holds true - are you a scientist or a storyteller? You’ll have more fun if you’re a scientist!
So are you going to tell me how to fix this Dan? That’s not the point of this blog - because there is nothing about you that needs to be fixed - that’s how we all got into this dilemma in the first place. The idea of this blog is to allow you to make a distinction about yourself. To have a look at the ‘you’ that you have created and to determine if it is the legitimate you or if you need to take some time to explore who you really are. Let me ask you this - how would it be for you if you knew exactly how you felt in each situation and were able to have the freedom to express yourself without fear of what others would think?
I will leave you with a story I heard at course I recently attended. It was about Michelangelo and his famous sculpture David. It has been reported that when Michelangelo was asked how he created such a masterpiece out of block of stone that he replied ‘I just chipped away everything that wasn’t David’. And thats what you need to do. Don’t look for who you are - it may be too difficult to find given you lost that person so long ago. Take your time to gradually chip away the stone or outer shell that you have created. Slowly chip away the maps, your beliefs and your generalisations. It takes time. Like everything else in life, mastery does not require superior intelligence it requires a normal level of intelligence, desire and dedication - stick with it and you may be surprised at the master piece that lies underneath the surface.
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Until we meet again.
Dan
