Who You Are Is What You Want
What is your Work in the world?
Knowing deeply who you are is not just integral to planning your life and the first step in understanding what you want; it is fundamental for understanding and enacting your Work in the world.
Your Work in the world might be connected to your work, but it is so much broader than solely what you do to put food on the table. Your Work is an expression of who you are. When you understand who you are, your unique contributions to the world will naturally present themselves.
“The question is how our own meanings are related to those of the universe as a whole. We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to be us.”
― David Bohm
If you start thinking about wants, dreams, and goals without profoundly understanding who you are, you will pursue the wrong things and limit your ability to achieve them—there are a few reasons for this.
Going Against Your Authentic Self
Before you can let your true self be seen, you must understand who that true self is. Like the limiting mindsets around want and desire, there are limiting mindsets around who you are allowed to be in the world. Sometimes we’re so busy being what we think everyone else wants us to be that we don’t really know who we are. Before you can choose to be yourself, you have to take some time to remember who your true self is.
Understanding your true self is all-encompassing—you’ll need to be honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly.
In general, I prefer to focus on natural strengths and talents when designing my life instead of trying to mitigate faults constantly. This is a luxury of being a hustler—when you get to design your work to fit yourself, you get to choose to focus on your strengths instead of constantly trying to “fix” your weaknesses. You can build upon your talents more effectively when you’re clear about what they are.
“When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the "You-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" maxim might be more accurate: You cannot be anything you want to be—but you can be a lot more of who you already are.”
― Tom Rath
But a strength-based approach is too simple to get to the fundamental truth of who you are. As humans, we like to categorize things into neat boxes of preferences, skills, strengths, and weaknesses. (I’m not gonna lie, these are tools I use all the time in my work with clients.) While those tools are valuable and necessary (and a fine place to start), you have to look beyond those categories to understand who you genuinely are.
"Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories."
― Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Humans need categories and boundaries to organize their thinking, we just have to recognize that those categories are a tool to understand who we are, not a static, all-encompassing definition of ourselves.
As I said last week, strengths can also be blind spots if you get too used to relying on them, so taking a more holistic approach to who you are will give you a better foundation for understanding what you want…what your Work is in the world.
Focusing on External vs Internal Goals
Who you truly are is the same as what you want.
The problem is, most of us don’t really understand who we are, so we’re constantly chasing things we think we want but won’t really give us what we need.
This is why typical “goal setting” frameworks often miss the mark on authentic, living processes for achieving what you want—they start with external goals instead of internal ones, ends instead of means, the fragments instead of the whole. You focus on some external representation of happiness instead of diving deep into what happiness means to you and opening up possibilities for finding it.
This is also a product of operating within a typical capitalist system of employment; your work is about external representations of happiness (e.g., money and status), instead of Work, which is internal fulfillment based on your authentic self.
“No one, no matter how wealthy, secure, or comfortable, can ever feel fulfilled in a life where [their] gifts remain latent. Even the best-paid job, if it does not engage our gifts, soon feels deadening, and we think, “I was not put here on earth to do this.”
Even when a job does engage our gifts, if the purpose is something we don’t believe in, the same deadening feeling of futility arises again, the feeling we are not living our own lives, but the lives we were paid to live.”
― Charles Eisenstein
This is how I became a hustler - I knew that I was not put on earth to do what I was doing. My work checked a lot of the boxes, the external things I thought I wanted, but it didn’t feel integral to who I was.
Hustlers have the luxury of designing their lives to honor their authentic selves and build business models around them instead of changing who they are to fit into corporate molds of what “good employees” should be. We get to choose to BE our authentic selves as much as possible every day.
“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”
― Brene Brown
That doesn’t mean that we’re taking the easy route. Society wants us to want what it wants, wants us to fit into the structure like a cog in a wheel, which means choosing to hustle is going against the norm. As Brown says, we have to choose every day to be our authentic self; creating Work that allows us to do that for ourselves is much more complicated than fitting into work that was already made for us by someone else.
A self-reflective practice should be the starting place for all goals to ensure they are relevant to who you are and where you are now. While keeping in mind that relevancy is iterative—who you are today is not who you’ll be tomorrow—understanding who you are is a lifelong journey that will never end; it is a series of choices that you will make every day, not a one-time epiphany.
Not yet a hustler?
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© Sarah Duran 2022
Find out more about me and my company, Fruition Initiatives, here.
Image by Sophia Floerchinger from iStock
The Obvious Disclaimers…
This information is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional advice. What you decide to do with this information is up to you and all repercussions are on you.