Who Do You Want to Be?

Who do you want to be?

One of the great clarifying tools of my life came to me in my late 20s in the form of the question Who do you want to be?  I wish I had a fabulously delightful story to recount about how that showed up but I don’t actually remember where it came from or if it just arrived in my consciousness one fine day.  Either way, it became a transformative internal meditation for me. 

There are so many moments when the smallest shifts in awareness create the most transformation or become the motivating tool that simply works, the habit that sticks.  This, for me, is one of the those.  Suggesting it to others always sounds a bit trite, yet I see it work in clients’ lives time and again.  Here’s my theory on why that is.  All humans create narratives to make sense of their lives and their experiences.  And of the narratives that are on repeat, we often find ourselves in deep grooves of self talk that try to create change from a place of criticism or challenge.  The first moment we don’t measure up to our new internal standard, we repeat something from the past to chastise and punish our self or to simply prove how this will never actually work, so we might as well quit. Sound familiar? 

Asking oneself this simple question, who do I want to be? and following it with my favorite variant answer-- I want to be the kind of person who <fill in the blank with your truth> -- moves our choice point location from the past into the future self.  The life we want to fully inhabit.  The person that is truly who we want to be and become.

Let me throw in a philosophical aside here, as one does, that the future is a construct.  One never reaches it.  There is only ever now.  Really.  It’s a fun fact our brains need reminding of over and over.  Are you in the future now?  No, you are in the present.  Let’s assume you are 40 now, did your 25 year old self think of this 40 year old self as the future?  Yes.  But once you reached 40, it was not the future, it was now.  So is it the future? Well, kind of.  Somehow we are always in our own future and in our own past.  Yet it is always simply now.  So your future is constructed by a series of choices in your present ‘now’ which will become your future ‘now’… yet always be your present now, obviously!

It is an understanding that is actually quite freeing.  There is great peace available in this truth.  Be here now, as Ram Dass would say, and only here.  The rest is a mind game.

Okay, back to who do you want to be?  I want to be a woman who prioritizes her health or I want to be a woman who is present in her body or I want to be a woman who does yoga…whatever language fits, but who you want to be simply says yes, I’m going to yoga class today.  And this shows up in lots of ways.  I want to be the kind of man who fathers his children lovingly or I want to be a man who shows emotions vulnerably.  Other variations to try on for size are – what would a woman who loves herself do right now?  A man who trusts himself?  And on and on.  Only you can feel which one is your fit.  Try it, let me know how it goes!  Or better yet, let’s come up with these kinds of tools together for you in a session.  We’ll start with a complimentary call to get to know one another.

 Angelene Price works with people ready to tune into their inner wisdom through coaching and yoga. Click here to learn more about coaching services.