You are who you have chosen to be.
You are perfectly aligned with the choices you have made and are making. Every choice you’ve ever made pours into the mix, and here you are.
If you want to be something else, make different choices. At any time, you can choose to be the same as you are now, to be more of who you are, or to be someone else entirely. If your motivation is strong enough, you can transcend both your nature and your nurture.
However, being true to who you are is best. It’s much easier to overcome obstacles and heal limitations when you’re true to yourself than if you’ve chosen to be something else. In either case, once you align with what you want, you can manifest that choice. The process roughly follows this pattern: Want ® choose ® believe ® align ® receive.
Consider the following attributes that contribute to who you are. Accepting these attributes will empower both your choices and your results.
Your Gifts
You arrived in this life with everything you need to manifest yourself, to fulfill your purpose and to serve others. What you have cannot be simply categorized as talents or character traits or advantages, although you possess all of these. You possess your own form of intelligence, your own unique outlook, your own problem-solving skills, and your own insights. None of these aspects of you can be reliably measured against anyone else’s gifts because there are so many external variables, including: situation, environment, opportunity, urgency, and other people’s values systems.
Each aspect of you can, however, be explored by you, acknowledged by you, evaluated by you, accessed by you, and exploited by you. The more you detach from the opinions and judgments of others as you execute this self-awareness, the more complete and true you assessments will be.
Look for your strong points in terms of potency. What surges most strongly within you? Perhaps you already know you are talented, smart, strong or fast. Or perhaps you are slow, ponderous or shy . Acknowledge whatever is strongest within you as a strong point. Not “good” or “bad,” just strong.
Once you’ve identified the qualities of you, look at them objectively. Anything that is strong within you has power, and that power can be used constructively or destructively. Perhaps you already know (or have been taught to believe) the negative aspects of your strong points. Take the time to discover for yourself the positive aspects of each one. What can you do that someone without this quality cannot do? In what ways might you use this power to your benefit or to the benefit of others?
An amazing example of this is Temple Grandin, who is autistic, yet is also an author, a speaker, and a professor of animal science. She changed the way livestock is handled in this country, and now she’s changing the way people see autism.
You can choose to see any strong point as a gift; and as a gift, you can use it any way you like. If you do not like what some strong point offers, you can choose to transcend it. You have what you have. What you do with what you’ve got is a choice.
Your Deficiencies
Also inherent in who you are is what you do not have. There are abilities you lack, perhaps skill in some area such as math or athletics or music. There are personality traits you do not have (perhaps considered by others as virtues), such as patience or assertiveness or flexibility. You may not have the problem-solving skills necessary to some situations. For instance, you may lack the tact for diplomacy, the moderation for economics, the aggression for war, or the inclusiveness for community-building. You possess only your own kinds of intelligence: you may be emotionally intelligent and mathematically challenged; you may be musically intelligent yet have no affinity for nature.
Once you identify your deficiencies and acknowledge them, you have choices. You can:
- Bow down before them. If you allow your deficiencies to dub you insufficient, they become the arbiters of your choices. If all your choices fall under their jurisdiction, you grant them the power to rule your life.
- Sidestep them. When you treat your deficiencies with as much regard as a lamppost, you can maneuver around them and carry on with your life quite nicely.
- Struggle with them. When you despise your deficiencies and make them your enemy, you stay constantly engaged with them. Your attention empowers them, and your energy feeds them. They win by drawing you away from more profitable possibilities.
- Partner with them. There are no single-sided swords in the game of life; there’s a strength embedded in every weakness. Every deficiency will benefit you in some way – if you are open enough and observant enough to discover that benefit.
- Transcend them. You can bring anything you lack into your life from another source. When you see yourself as whole and sufficient, you can welcome the full measure of partnerships available to you.
Your Opportunities
Opportunities come in two basic packages: Obvious and not-obvious. The obvious ones are so obvious you know them when you see them. There’s the opportunity to work, to play, to travel, to rest, to serve, to love, to heal, to buy, to sell, etc. When you see an obvious opportunity, you have two choices – take advantage of it or not. You probably choose without giving it much thought.
Not-obvious opportunities take two basic forms: those you create for yourself from raw materials, and those you transform into opportunity from something else.
To create opportunities, recognize the ample raw materials you already have in hand. In addition to your abilities, you have the power of your thoughts, your emotions and your actions. You have creativity, intuition, freedom, choice, and an infinite partner. From these, you can create anything you desire.
Transforming opportunities from something else is perhaps the least obvious and the most neglected of all. Every event and every situation in your life holds an opportunity, if you are willing to look for it, notice it, and invest energy in it.
- Every disaster holds opportunity. The opportunity might be to explore beliefs, reconcile the past, develop new strategies, serve others, transcend difficulty, lay fears to rest, own your own part, etc.
- Every relationship holds opportunity. The major relationships hold the most possibilities – between spouses, between parents and children, between partners, etc. – but even temporary relationships can provide a new idea, a new challenge, or a new perspective.
- Every adventure holds opportunity. Adventure often takes you into new territory, whether that territory is new geography, new experiences, new thought, or new emotions. In many cases, the first opportunity is to see a new experience as an adventure.
There’s a point in every situation where you either slide behind the wheel or remain a passenger. Most often, that point is at the very beginning, when you decide how you will react. The first surge of emotion can carry you in one direction or another, but you always have a choice. Then, from every decision point along the way, you can choose to see opportunity – or not.
Your Wishes
There’s a high correlation between who you are and what you wish for. In this sense, we’re talking more about deep longings and desires than intentional choices. You can tell what these deep longings are if you look at what you’ve got. They have been the creative power in your life. From your desires, you have become who you are. Who you are reinforces certain wishes and discards others.
Such deep longings are subconscious, and therefore tend to be invisible. You can recognize them, however, from a neutral examination of your results. Your thoughts, emotions and actions combine to create your current reality – what is, what you have, and who you are. Here are just a few of the many possibilities of who you might have become as a result of your wishes:
- A producer. If you tend to be active – busy, in charge, in control, industrious, creative, etc. – you have evident wishes for action and progress.
- A victim. If you tend to relinquish your power, to suffer, to be taken care of, to not act, or any version of these, you have evident wishes to not own your own life.
- A traveler. If you tend to experiment, to ride the wave, to take risks, to deviate from accepted rules, etc., you have evident wishes for adventure and experience, and you probably accept tumbles, wipeouts or failures as part of the deal.
- A learner. If you tend to explore, challenge, study, question, rebel, practice, etc., you have evident wishes for growth and mastery, and you may disregard daily practicalities in your quest for more.
- A grower. If you tend to plant, invest, take root, save, weigh risks, counter-balance, etc., you have evident wishes for stability and permanence.
These examples are not the full range of possibilities. The patterns of your behavior and your results will reveal your wishes, your beliefs and your past choices. Become aware of them and the results they bring about, acknowledge your alignment with them, and you will find it surprisingly easy to choose something else. You can choose different wishes at any time. You can decide the kind of person you want to be, determine the beliefs and behaviors that align with that kind of person, adopt the new beliefs and behaviors, and reformulate your wishes. As soon as a new alignment clicks into place, new results occur.
Your Preferences
Your likes and dislikes seem inborn. You have preferences for some foods, some kinds of books, some music, some school subjects, some colors, some diversions, etc. Because your preferences differ from those of your parents or your siblings or your friends, you may have assumed they’re innate to your personality; nature rather than nurture. Except you can develop a taste for things you at first disliked, such as wine, rock music, carnival rides, or dogs. And you can develop a distaste for things you have always liked – such as wine, rock music, carnival rides, or dogs.
Cultural mores always play a strong role in preferences, whether we’re referring to your home-town culture, or the culture of a country on the other side of the world. If everyone in your life always takes off their shoes when they enter a home, you will have a natural distaste for (perhaps repugnance of) shoes worn inside. If you’ve never seen a crawdad, let alone eaten one, you might prefer to not try them.
Your preferences, whether innate or acculturated, shape who you are. Likewise, who you are shapes your preferences. So, it comes down to this: do your preferences serve you, and do you like who you are as a result?
If you decide you want to be urbane and sophisticated, you can learn about art, literature, classical music, world politics, and the manners of the socially elite, and you can cultivate preferences for them. If you decide you want to be hip, you can read Rolling Stone, watch “Saturday Night Life,” surf cool web sites, and cultivate a taste for savvy humor. Whatever or whoever, you want to be, you can cultivate preferences that will support your choice.
But what about being true to yourself? Being the truest person you can be? Don’t your preferences help you understand who that person is? Yes. And no. Your innate preferences will. Your acculturated preferences might not. To discover the difference, try this strategy:
1. Become preferentially neutral. Become mindful of what you like and don’t like, then let go of the preference. Surrender any agenda or beliefs you might have. Imagine you could go either way.
2. Layer in any motivations that might influence a preference, starting with your values. For instance, if you value diversity, that could weigh heavily in favor of a preference for social integration.
3. Add your vision of your life. If you see yourself living in harmony with nature, that will tip you toward a preference for a vegetarian diet.
4. Factor in your goals. If you want to write a crime novel, that favors a preference for books (both fiction and non) that involve mystery and/or criminal psychology.
During this process, you will discover some preferences that resist neutrality. You can trust these to be innate, soul-deep. Such preferences will always be values-driven, i.e. for peace, for love, for progress, for growth, for adventure, for kindness. The truest choice you can make where these preferences are concerned is to simply choose them. Align with them. Let them help you become the person you choose to be.
So let’s review the process: Want ® choose ® believe ® align ® receive.
- Decide who you want to be.
- Make who you want to be a conscious choice.
- Believe in yourself as that person.
- Align your thoughts, emotions and actions.
- As you become the person you want to be, receive both the blessings and the challenges.
