Does anyone else feel like they’ve had their identity stolen? Or hacked?
I’ve been sitting thinking about how many of our souls are grieving. We are grieving the loss of ourselves. And what feels so dangerous is that many of us know it, but we don’t know what to do about it because the world demands that we are online, visible, constantly showing up. As a business owner, I feel like I’m losing myself because I’m trying to win in a world that demands I disconnect from who I am. I know the work I do is valuable, and I know people feel the power of it.
But sometimes it feels like the only way to bring people into my world is by following the rules of this new world. Posting constantly and talking about yourself, positioning, funnels, strategies, and optimisation. And every time I create something, I ask myself: Does this sound like me? Is this me? Because I’m constantly checking to make sure I haven’t lost myself in the process.
This morning, I spoke to my sister, who is 20 years older than me and has known me since I was a baby, and I asked her what one thing she would say describes me as a child. She said, “You were determined. You’ve always been determined.” And it made me emotional because I realised I had never fully acknowledged that this determination has always been part of me, that it isn’t something I learnt, it is something I came into the world with. My identity as a child was determined, and over the years that determination has not always been accepted, understood or even recognised as something I should apologise for, but my determination means I keep going. One of the people who helped wake me up was Nazar Bartosik, a nuclear physicist who is very far away from the world I’m in. He would say things like: “Yeah, but why are you saying it like that?” “But why are you doing it like that?” And this was the third mirror in play. The mirror is where someone holds it up and shows you what they can see. And he said to me: “What I see is that you’re brilliant at what you do, but you are trying to play by the rules.” And because he’s a scientist, he speaks in objective truths. If he says something to me, it’s not off the cuff. It’s something he has observed long enough to tell me now what he sees.
And I remember saying to him: “My soul’s crying because I don’t actually know what to do. I don’t know how to let people know I can help them unless I follow the rules.” When we were building The Speaker Room, I had written this huge ClickFunnels-style landing page with endless copy, scrolling, and persuasion. And 🙈Join here buttons after every paragraph. And he said: “I’m not going to make a landing page like that.” He said: “Let’s just make the kind of landing page that people would actually want to use. Don’t just follow what everyone else is doing. Just do something user-friendly.” And I remember thinking: Oh. I never even thought of that. Are we being conditioned to disconnect from ourselves to succeed? I got caught, too. And now I think one of the most powerful things I can do is help people remember who they were before the world convinced them to forget. Because your story becomes your reminder.
I think of it as your declaration, a bit like your (SOP’s) standing operating principles.
A reminder of: This is who I am, how I operate and what I stand for.
Does anyone else feel like this?
