Who Am I, Really? Part 2 – Looking Back At Lessons And Victories

So who the heck are you??

In Part 1 of the series, we concluded that you are not your past struggles; the hurt, the pain, the mistakes, the disappointments, the failures.

None of those things define who you are. A lot of those things might point to how you wound up being the person you are today; where your values came from, where your mental and behavioral patterns and habits came from.

But we are not asking how, we are asking who?

WHO am I, really?

We also talked about how instead of defining yourself as those difficulties, you could take from those experiences, since there’s a whole lot that becomes available out of them. The humility, the growth, the sensitivity, the lessons, the relatedness, the strength that came from all those experiences.

But is that who you are?

Not quite. Those are lessons learned and attributes and characteristics you developed. While you might like describing yourself as those attributes and characteristics, you were still you before you ever acquired them.

It’s fair to say you are a more learned and developed You.

But who are you, really?

So you must be the victories!

Right? All your proud accomplishments, awards won, milestones reached, recognition earned, acknowledgement received.

If you are not your failures, then you must be the person who persevered through them and came out victorious on the other side!

Right?

Well no. It would be very biased to say that you are not your past failures, but you are your past victories. That’s still the past.

All those accolades definitely do belong in your résumé. They are experiences and accomplishments worth sharing with others. All of them contributed to your strengths, attributes, and characteristics. But again, you were still you before any of those took place also.

How about a 1-year-old baby? Is he still a person? He doesn’t have any accolades or accomplishments to put in a résumé. But I think we can agree that a 1-year-old is a human being just as much as you are.

So therefore, we can conclude that, while you might be very proud of your accomplishments and victories, they are not who you are.

It might be little deflating to think that you are not your accomplishments, your values, your strengths, your characteristics, your attributes, your accomplishments, or your victories since you worked so hard for them.

But consider this. Just as defining yourself as your past failures is limiting in your belief in yourself, who you are, and what you are capable of, defining yourself as your victories and accomplishments is also a limitation. The lid may be placed in a higher place, but it’s still a lid.

However large your past accomplishments may be, you can accomplish a hundred times more! But you won’t see that by viewing yourself as a fixed set of attributes, strengths and characteristics with a linear progression based on what you have already accomplished.

Whatever you have accomplished, whatever self-development you’ve undergone, whatever strengths, attributes, and characteristics you’ve nourished up until now, it’s all great! And I commend you for it.

Now take the lid off.

That’s not who you are. That’s only what you have demonstrated to yourself that you are capable of.

Discovering this might be a relief for some people who feel that because of what they have accomplished in the past and where they are now, they are now tied to expectations that they themselves or others might have of them. Don’t fall for that. You don’t owe anybody anything.

Perhaps you only owe it to yourself to live the life you’ve always dreamed of.

If today was Day 1 of your life, no expectations from the past, blank canvas!.. what would you choose to do, be, create, or experience?

Allow yourself the freedom to experience that you are not your accomplishments, and you are not your past.

As far as our inquiry goes, we will leave it open for now.

Who are you, really?

Who am I?

Who are we?


Thank you for reading. Make sure to subscribe and catch Part 3.