I had that thought today. “Why Can’t I Be You?”. I don’t know if I had that thought and then I thought of the song by The Cure or it was the other way around but for whatever reason it stuck in my head…and that tape got louder and louder.
This thought has actually occurred to me a lot over the past year. It’s not that I don’t love my life, myself, who I get to be and what I get to do but over the past year, as I have made some really big transitions and have become even more clear about the direction I want my work and career to go, I have become acutely aware of my limitations. Perhaps it is the phenomenon that once we narrow our focus and articulate what we want to move toward, we naturally begin to let go of what no longer serves us and even though that’s a very good thing, there is a loss of sorts.
The truth is for a long time in my business I was creating a structure that went completely against my nature. my personality. I was hoping for outcomes that could only be achieved by doing certain things I didn’t want to do and being a certain way that I most assuredly wasn’t.
As a masters level trained sociologist, counselor and an armchair numerologist this paradox makes sense to me. We are complex beings with multiple sides. From a numerological standpoint we are working many different energies and not all of them get along. Some of them create tension. As do the multiple selves within our brains, if you believe that theory.
My experience tells me that there was a fight for control going on and the side that is most strongly my nature won out. It’s been a little scary and a little bit liberating all at the same time. Scary because when you totally let go of the part of you you have been trying to “keep up” you naturally wonder what the fall out will be. Liberating because knowing your limitations, accepting yourself for who you really are at the very core and creating a structure that is completely aligned with your nature is the best feeling in the world.
I know who I am. I am a thinker and in many ways a quintessential introvert, though most people would be surprised to hear that. On the top of my list of things that make me happy are running alone, practicing yoga alone, getting lost in a great book for hours, researching a problem and writing until my fingers are cramped. I get a tremendous amount of energy from those things.
Then again, my days must also be filled with great people. I love running with a friend out on the trails, hanging out with 5 or 6 good friends or family or hosting an intimate retreat for 10-12 women. I like things small because then I can actually connect with people and not get overwhelmed by too much energy. And of course just about anything I do with my daughter lights me up like nothing else.
So, I’m not a social butterfly, I hate big parties, superficial and surface conversations, and networking and I have a very strong BS meter so I have little patience for inflated egos and schmoozing. It doesn’t feel real and genuine to me. I would rather have a handful of really strong and real relationships than multiple ones that exist mostly on the surface. Not liking these things definitely hurt my business because my old model depended on them, which explains why I didn’t experience much success in the beginning.
My new model not only involves only writing about and speaking about the topics I love but it doesn’t depend on me doing any of the things that are against my nature in order to find happiness and success. This feels great too.
I often work with clients who struggle with matching their business model to their personality or their energy. Maybe they learned a model or a way of doing business from someone whose personality was totally different than their own. When they tried to recreate the model, it felt hard and they got frustrated by the results.
For some people the gap between who they naturally are and who they need to be to see the results they want in a certain field or line of work is very small. For other people, like me, the gap was way to big to bridge. The lesson is in knowing that there is a way, no matter your second nature, to do what you love and get paid for it and the sooner you get clear on who you are and what you want to do the sooner you can let go of the things and behaviors that drain your life energy and limit your possibility for success.
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