Who have you learned to be?
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You may be successful
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Responsible
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Capable
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Needed
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Admired
You may have spent years becoming the person you believed you needed to be in order to belong, to be loved, to succeed, to feel safe or to matter.
Until eventually you realise you know how to perform your life, but you don’t know if you’re living your own Intrinsic Identity©️
"I help people understand how they became who they became - and develop the capacity to choose who they become next"
You may look like you're doing fine...
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You may be successful
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Capable
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Responsible
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The person everyone relies upon
But privately, you may be asking:
Why doesn't my life feel like mine?
Who am I without my work, my achievements, my relationship or the role everyone expects me to play?
Why do I keep doing things I know aren't serving me?
Why do I need other people's approval?
What do I actually want?
Who would I be if I stopped trying to become who I thought I needed to be?
If you recognise yourself here, it doesn't necessarily mean there is something wrong with you.
It may mean there is something about how you have learned to live that deserves to be understood.
Perhaps you haven’t failed at being yourself
Perhaps you became very good at being someone you learned you needed to be
Human beings adapt
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We learn what creates belonging
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What creates safety
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What earns approval
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What makes us significant
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What keeps relationships intact
Those adaptations can become incredibly successful, They can help us achieve, belong, protect ourselves and navigate the world.
But sometimes they become so familiar that we stop distinguishing between:
what we choose, and
what we feel we have to be
The question then changes from:
“What’s wrong with me?” to:
“What happened to me?” And then:
“What have I learned to be - and what might actually be mine?”
This is where my work begins
WHAT I CHOOSE
and
WHAT I FEEL I HAVE TO BE
What if there is more to you than the identity you learned to live?
Intrinsic Identity©️
I believe each of us enters the world with particular potential - ways of perceiving, relating, learning, responding and contributing that can develop through our experience of life.
I call this Intrinsic Identity©️
It is not a fixed personality
It is not a label
It is not a predetermined destiny
And it is not something I can tell you who you are
It is the evolving expression of what is intrinsically yours as you develop through life, relationship and contribution.
But that development does not happen in isolation
Family, education, culture, relationships, work and wider society continually teach us what is valued, what is acceptable and what we need to become in order to belong
Sometimes those influences help us develop
Sometimes they cause us to adapt away from ourselves
Over time, we can become so skilled at being what works that we lose sight of what is ours
My work is about creating the conditions in which you can begin to distinguish what you have learned to be from what you are capable of becoming
When becoming someone else starts to cost you
The identity we construct to belong can become incredibly successful
You may become:
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the achiever
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the good one
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the strong one
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the rescuer
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the responsible one
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the successful one
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the person everyone needs
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the person who never needs anyone
There may be nothing obviously wrong with these identities. They may even have helped you build a life that looks successful from the outside
But when an identity becomes something you need rather than something you choose, your freedom can begin to narrow.
You may find yourself:
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constantly seeking approval or validation
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unable to say no without guilt
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driven to achieve even when you’re exhausted
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using work, relationships, substances or behaviours to escape yourself
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repeatedly choosing what others need over what you need
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struggling to know what you genuinely want
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feeling successful but strangely disconnected
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experiencing shame when you cannot maintain the identity you’ve built
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asking yourself, “Who am I if I stop being this person?”
The problem isn’t necessarily the identity itself
The question is whether you are choosing it - or whether you have become dependent upon it
This is where adaptation, compulsion and addiction begin to become important distinctions
A different way of becoming yourself
The Intrinsic Identity©️ Method
My work is not about telling you who you are
It is about creating the conditions for you to discover what is genuinely yours, understand what you have learned to become, and develop the capacity to choose how you participate in your life and relationships
Understand the identity you've learned to live
Distinguish what is yours from what you learned
Recover what is genuinely yours
Experiment and discover through experience
Bring who you are into relationship with the world
You don’t have to throw away who you’ve become
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
These qualities may be genuinely yours
The question is not whether these qualities are real
The question is whether you are choosing them - or whether you need them to prove your worth
What becomes possible when you can choose who you are becoming
You don't have to abandon everything you've learned to be
You can begin to distinguish what is genuinely yours, reclaim what has become trapped inside adaptation, and develop new ways of participating in your life, relationships and work
Where would you like to go deeper?
Explore my work, and how we become who we become, with the free download of my short book "The Addiction of Becoming Someone Else"
Explore how we can work together and develop what becomes possible when you choose who you are becoming
