Who am I?

Have you ever pondered this question? This comes up in my coaching sessions and the initial response usually revolves around roles and qualities. For example, if I were to answer this question, my first level response would be, “I am a daughter, sister, aunt, niece, mom, wife, friend, life coach, yogi”; I would add my physical characteristics, and my personality traits, perhaps my education and some of my life experience.

These answers are my perception of how I am in relation to the outside world.

Is that really who I am?

I had the most interesting coaching session yesterday, with a client I have been seeing for years. One could assume we might not have much work to do after a few hundred of hours together but this is when the deeper internal work happens. When there is no immediate crisis to attend to, things on the outside are quieted down and we can relate on a deeper level.

The question of Who am I? was our deep dive this week. We came up with so many answers from so many perspectives. Spirituality, Religion, Physics, History, our humanness, it all came together.

We exist as a perception of others, we exist as a perception of ourselves. What is true and what is not?

Some of the answers we came up with included:

I am energy

I am my dna, my ancestors

I am one with all humans

I am one very small part of the universe

I am light

I am love

I am my body,

I am my soul,

I am my spirit,

I am my mind.

There were more, but these were the foundation of our conversation which led into materialism, stress, overthinking, perfectionism, etc. All the things we carry on about that keep us from who we really are.

My takeaway?

It came to me that all this talk about who I am and the perception of others being how we define that is in direct relation to something I say often: “What other people think of you is none of your business. It is more about them than about you.”

If Who you believe you are is defined by others, and their perceptions of you, I encourage you to do this exercise.

If you are a current client and would like to take a deeper dive into this conversation, I am here for it.

If you aren’t a current client and you would like to dive into this conversation or any others, I am here for it, too.

With Love and Joy,

Sheila

PS: To take advantage of my 1:1 Coaching program, learn more here