Have you ever heard the quote that goes something like, ‘I wish I would have met you sooner so I could have loved you longer?’ I have thought that about my husband, but my deeper wish is that I could have met myself sooner, because when I finally got to know myself I learned to love myself as well!
These may have been my personality default behaviours, but they are still that, behaviours, and behaviours are a choice! If you are feeling like you don't know who you truly are, or feel like you are in an ocean of options and you don't know which direction to even begin, I want to encourage you, to begin with these three actions;
1) find people who inspire you and ask yourself what values they bring out of you
2) ask questions about yourself and if you can't think of the questions, find a personality assessment, and
3) follow that voice inside you that says 'if only'.
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It took me awhile to discover the true me because I was a ‘late bloomer’, according to the lesser known but more accurate definition, ‘someone whose talent or capabilities in a particular field only appears later in life than is normal’. I floundered trying to figure out what I was good at, what I wanted to do with my life, what made me unique. On top of being a late bloomer, I also became co-dependent in my mid-teens and shifted my personality to suit whatever, whomever, whenever needed. There wasn’t much of a 'real' me, usually only the person I was existing as when I was with someone else.
The Me I Wanted to Be
There was one thing though, to my core, I was sure my identity was to be a mother. Yet, when that one thing I was SURE was my purpose, just wasn’t happening, I felt like I was falling into the great abyss of myself, I was getting lost in what felt like an identity of nothingness. I knew deep down, that wasn't all there was to me, there were things I loved about myself, I just hid them because I was waiting for the world to love them first.
Thankfully, that ‘real’ me, buried deep inside, and it was itching to come out, and I was beginning to see that identity was being, not doing. When I became less concerned about the external and focused on the internal, like a gravitational pull my natural tendencies drew me towards the things that would awaken me. All I had to do was follow the pull.
Getting to Heart of It
On the other side of this experience, I reflected on what brought me into a place of awakening to my authentic self, and I noticed three distinct behaviours I consistently kept going back to that led me to identify what made me ‘me’. The best part is that, while they came naturally to me, they don’t have to come naturally to you to benefit from them, they are behaviours that can be cultivated. That’s why I wanted to share these three key behaviours with you, in case you too are looking to find your authentic ‘you’.
1.Connecting – I have always been a person seeking connection with others, and that makes sense as I am an extrovert, but it isn’t just being with people for the sake of being social or have things in common, for me it always was deeper than that. I didn’t recognize this for 75% of my life, but I was actually seeking out connection for influence, I loved learning from other people’s experiences and insights. I love stories, and stories of those I know personally even more so, but more than seeing it as a nice or interesting story, I was gleaning information and getting inspired for ways I could learn from that in my own life. I’ve often gravitated to older people for that ‘wisdom’, but once I made healthier choices for my relationships, I noticed I found wisdom in every age and walk of life, and I found truly positive influences that inspired me, as well as called out the value they saw in me, some of which I could not see in myself at first. Those inspirational connections changed the way I saw the world and saw myself.
2.Inquisitive – For how curious I was as a kid, you would think self-awareness would have come naturally to me, but it didn’t. Understanding people and things is a driving force in my life, and so it was only a matter of time (27 years) before I turned that inquisitive nature inward. It began with a personality profile assessment done through my job and I had such a huge ‘ah-ha’ moment about myself that I was hooked! I poured all my highly-developed research skills to find other assessments that could give me even more information. I am also the type of person who does well with labels, labels give me parameters in which I can explore vs the overwhelming multitude of options! So once I found these classifications I went to work discovering how this impacted my choices, my relationships, my priorities, and even my abilities. Once I saw in writing the talent tendencies of my profiles, I began to finally recognize my abilities with appreciation and value. My true self came alive!
3.Voice – I found my voice at a young age, with a nick-name like motor mouth at the age of 5, there was no doubt of that, but I’m talking about more than that, I’m talking about that thing that makes us not afraid to contribute to conversations, even when others may have differing experiences & opinions.
I think we all have at least one thing, where we are just so passionate about it you cannot get us to stop once we’ve started talking about it. For me, I finally recognized that no matter how purposeless I felt, there were still things I got super passionate about, and so I followed that trail of bread crumbs and asked myself, what was it that I couldn't stop talking about? What made me want to use my voice to bring attention to it, and to share them with others? I kept saying to myself, 'if only I could do this.... to change that...' I saw needs in this world and my heart leaped at the 'if only's' of fulfilling them. It turned out, my passion was not such a far stretch from the purpose I thought I used to have, my definition of it had just been far too narrow! Following my voice gave me a much more extensive perspective of what I truly loved, and I became even more engaged in sharing my new, more confident, voice with the world.
These may have been my personality default behaviours, but they are still that, behaviours, and behaviours are a choice! If you are feeling like you don't know who you truly are, or feel like you are in an ocean of options and you don't know which direction to even begin, I want to encourage you, to begin with these three actions;
1) find people who inspire you and ask yourself what values they bring out of you
2) ask questions about yourself and if you can't think of the questions, find a personality assessment, and
3) follow that voice inside you that says 'if only'.
These are important steps to awareness, and awareness is the first step to awakening your authentic self!
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