Who are you, really?

This is important because if we don’t know ourselves, how are we meant to instil trust in others that we’re capable and trustworthy?

What I’m seeing in conversations with clients is similar to what I’ve faced myself; that they don’t really feel at ease with who they believe (or fear) they are, and consequently they don’t believe they’re enough. They believe they need to be more. More fluent, more confident, more influential, more charismatic, more likeable, more social, just more…

Repeating ‘I am enough’ while looking at yourself in the mirror several times a day doesn’t make it true. (I know because I’ve tried it.) The truth is that if you feel like you’re not enough, you’re right… you aren’t.

You can’t be, none of us can, because being enough means something different for every person and situation we come across. Every person and every situation requires something different from us; no one thing being better or worse than the other, just different.

Even being enough for ourselves is hard, for most people. The majority of us set high expectations. We have a natural desire to do more, learn more, experience more… if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have evolved as far as we have.

I know what it feels like to not feel like you’re enough because I lived with this feeling for decades. What surprises me is that so many of my clients suffer from the same feeling. I’m talking about professionals with 10, 20, 30 years experience in their industry holding senior positions not feeling like they’re enough. So, it seems to me that not feeling like you’re enough is a human experience, not a personal failing.

So, do we just stop trying?

Yes… and No.

We need to stop twisting ourselves out of shape to please others and start with getting to know who we really are… the full ‘good, bad and ugly’ of who we really are when no one’s watching. When we do this, we can start to understand our unique features as well as our unique failings. We need to understand who we are at our core and be okay with that before we choose what we’d like to improve and change about ourselves.

So how do you go about answering the age-old question of ‘Who am I?’

By starting with what you do know to be true. To do that I created a questionnaire to get more insight into who I am when I’m not trying to impress or ‘be enough’ for people and it’s been incredibly revealing and supportive in my journey. The questionnaire has grown as I’ve added questions, exercises and techniques to help connect with who I really am on the inside.  What started out as a questionnaire has now become a workbook with exercises and techniques to help you reconnect with who you really are.

Knowing ourselves is an important step because it’s very difficult to develop more confidence or more presence when you’re out of touch with who you really are and what confidence really feels like to you.

The fact is that often it’s not that we’re missing confidence, it’s more that there’s something blocking access to our confidence. That’s why confidence hacks don’t always work, they can’t always break through the block. Increasing confidence or any emotion is a process, first you have to understand what’s blocking it, then remove or lower the block, before you can tune into confidence and increase it.

My workbook is called ‘Enough - A Practical Guide for Achieving Authentic Confidence’ and will be published in the spring. If you’re interested in having a copy dm me and I’ll message you as soon as it’s published.