Who Am I Now? Who Can I Be?

Where you are is a result of who you were. But where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be.

It took me a long time to understand that my results in life up until this point are a direct result of who I had become in the preceding years and months.

I remember reading words similar to the ones above and not getting it. I just didn’t understand that we ‘become’ someone else as time moves on, created and affected by the things we do, experience and learn.

What Does That Even Mean?

It’s strange, isn’t it, because we quite easily use phrases that actually articulate that we ‘get it’, even though, as with me, we may not. Here are a few of mine:

• I am a wife, mother, daughter, sibling (easy) • I am an accountant (fairly easy) • I am a writer (difficult) • I am a life coach (very difficult)

Even just taking these examples, I can tell you exactly how each has affected my results up until this point…

The Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sibling

I am often tired and time poor, my results are affected by my ability to push through my tiredness and my conflicting priorities. I want to be everything to everyone. This leads me to feelings of guilt and frustration when I fail to reach that impossible goal.

The Accountant

Training for and becoming an accountant taught me to find ways to use my time more effectively, to learn to say ‘no’ even when it was painful.

I also had to live with the feelings of disappointment when I failed some of the professional exams, only to circle back and do them again.

Ironically I also had to accept that I’m pretty good with numbers, because school had taught me that if it took 5 (yes, 5) attempts to pass my Maths GCSE, then anything mathematical clearly wasn’t one of my strengths.

Becoming a qualified accountant taught me that if I put my mind to it, I can do it, regardless of what the ‘system’ once said.

The Writer

I’m still learning to accept that I am a writer.

The upshot of that is that I don’t write as often as I want or should. I judge myself too harshly and feel that if it’s not a perfect piece of work it should be abandoned.

I’ve had to learn to write “DRAFT” across the top of every piece of writing I do to fool my brain into thinking that I’m just playing with writing rather than taking it seriously.

The Life Coach

Coaching people is one of my in-born skills. It’s something I can just do with ease. As a result, people often come to me just to talk and leave with something more than just a shared (halved) problem. They also leave with ideas on how they can move on or make it better, they feel relieved and lighter to have found the next step.

Because that feels so natural to me, I struggle with calling it ‘life coaching’, consequently using the words ‘I am a life coach’ feels unnatural. As a result, I don’t offer this ‘skill’ as a paid service.

What Will The Future Hold?

I will always be a wife, mother, daughter and sibling, they are an integral part of who I was and who I will be for the rest of my life. How those relationships pan out however is entirely up to me.

Whether I a good wife, mother, daughter and sibling is up for negotiation as I move into the future, because where I decide to go with this label will depend on how much effort I choose to put into each of these relationships.

And what about the Accountant in me? How I choose to take this training and experience forward will have an effect on its ability to provide financially for me and my family in the future.

Will I be the best Accountant I can be, or will I choose to become stuck in my current level of expertise?

The same applies for writing. To turn writing from a ‘difficult” label for my mind to accept into something that I accept easily as true about myself will need further inner work and validation.

That can take a number of forms, from external validation if someone commends or just enjoys something I’ve written, or, and far more importantly, my willingness to pursue and hone my craft to a point where I have enough of a body of work to prove to myself that I am indeed a writer.

And what of Life Coach? This one presents the newest and most difficult label to accept as being part of my make-up. But, as the quote states, “where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be”.

If I choose to be a Life Coach, and to fully adopt this persona I need to be doing all the things that a life coach does. But I already do these things, and yet to personally accept the label is sometimes still a challenge, despite my qualifications and experience.

Who Are You?

If you have aspirations for a different or brighter future, but are struggling to make that future appear, what are you choosing to not recognise about your potential future self?

Who is the future version of you and what skills, knowledge and experience are you still needing to address to plug the gap between where you are now and who you will ultimately become?

Because, you are becoming somebody.

Every day that you wake up and go through the motions of your day you are solidifying your current experience which will become your future reality.

Don’t ignore the internal calling to create a better and brighter future. Instead choose to become the person who will be able to handle that set of changed circumstances in the future.

That’s really important, because you’re not suddenly going to wake up one day and find that everything you’ve always wanted is ready and waiting for you, because if it did and you haven’t done the work, you won’t be ready for it. It would be too much too soon.

You must earn your rite of passage.

What Can You Do?

Make a start by cultivating a willingness to accept on some level that you can be the person you are striving to be. As I’ve indicated in my examples, this can be easy or it can be difficult and will be based on your ability to overcome old, embedded beliefs about yourself and who you are or could be.

It’s challenging work, because you and your environment will constantly pull you back to your old habits, your old ways and your cosy comfort zone.

But if you’re going to make the future you want a reality, it’s imperative that you keep going when the odds seem stacked against you, when others are tempting you back to your old self and, most importantly, when you yourself are shrinking back into your old ways.

But if you’re prepared to take the plunge and commit to grow into the person you know you want to be and you’ll be able to meet your future self much sooner than you think.