It Just Isn’t You

What do you tie your identity to?

Do you choose your actions based on how they make you feel about yourself, or based on how they advance your mission?

Are you so busy preserving and protecting your old, inherited, childhood ideas of who you are from your past that you’ve stopped asking yourself what you must do and who you must become to create your future?

You want to bring on a partner to move your business forward. But as you go through the paper work, the lawyer appointments, and the due diligence, you feel overwhelmed and pull the plug because you’ve decided the whole partnership thing “just isn’t me.”

You want to share your art with the world. But then you realize that means you’ll have to market your work, self-promote, and suffer the criticism of strangers, and so you shake your head sadly and conclude it “just isn’t me.”

And you’re right.

Doing these things isn’t you. Not yet.

But they could be.

“You” is not some fixed entity. “You” is ever-moving, ever-evolving.

“You” is up for grabs.

So the next time you feel the words “this isn’t me” rise to your lips, remember your two options:

Option 1: Allow your smaller self to not only give in to cowardice, but to add to that the lie that you did it out of loyalty to “true self” instead of fear;

OR

Option 2: Break that precious sense of self and make your MISSION be the arbiter of your actions.

As much as we’d like to think we can have the life we want without changing who we are, you can’t. You have to become someone else.

It doesn’t mean you become some corrupted, “sell out” version of yourself.

It’s not a cop-out.

You can’t fall to the top of the mountain.

It’s you becoming someone messier, bolder, bloodier, harder, softer, wilder.

Because that’s what it takes.

And I’m guessing at the end of your days, when you look back on your life, that’s the “you” you’ll hope you had the courage to be.

…

Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper