Here is a truth that I think we often miss: We are not used to being ourselves.
I’m just going to dive right in.
When we are young, we start to realize that just by being our natural, unfiltered selves, people look at us differently. And because we are hyper-sensitive, we notice it more than others do.
This triggers a primal fear response of Rejection. We risk being outcast from the tribe.
So, naturally, we seek ways to overcome this. We start to observe the social interactions of others in high detail. We model what they do. We merge back into the crowd, and phew—we feel safe again.
But at what cost?
The “Playbook” Trap
In isolation, the ability to model others is actually a great skill. But when we are learning how to be ourselves, relying on copying others becomes problematic.
We start to outsource our decision-making based on what we’ve seen others do. We store it all in a massive, comprehensive mental “Playbook of How to Live.”
Fast forward 10 or 20 years, and our brains and bodies are exhausted. Why?
Because whilst everyone else has simply been being themselves, we have been running all our actions through our conscious mind first.
- It is Slow: We have to calculate the move before we make it.
- It is Highly Inefficient: It drains our battery.
- It is Not Natural: It disconnects us from our flow.
The Crash
When the system eventually tires—and it always does—we forget how to act. We feel like we have no sense of self because, instead of developing our own identity, we’ve been a highly efficient chameleon, taking on the best traits of everyone around us.
This creates quite a pickle (or a deep dilemma). We are successful at blending in, but we are strangers to ourselves.
And this is why when we ask ourselves ‘what do we want?’ we have no idea.
We freeze. We guess. We leave it to the last minute and make a rushed decision. Multiply this over many, many years and our identity really becomes mysterious.
People would often call me an enigma and I played with it, thought it was kind of cool. But in reality, I just didn’t know who I was.
The Way Back
This is why my work isn’t about adding more to your to-do list. It’s about subtraction.
I love guiding individuals back to themselves—back to who you really are beneath the patterns, the “playbook,” and the programming.
When we drop the act, two things happen:
- Efficiency returns: You stop processing every move through the conscious mind and start trusting your “bottom-up” neurology.
- Natural Expression arises: Action becomes genuine, and momentum builds on its own.
Once we’re back to being ourselves, we can put all of our behavioral modeling skills to good use—but this time, within a framework that adds to our identity, instead of obscuring it.
Interested in getting back in touch with your true self?