Who Are You?

Discovering Who You Are: Beyond Labels and Towards Authenticity

Alice in Wonderland 1951

It started in 1951 when I first saw Disney’s Alice In Wonderland and the caterpillar asked, Who R U?

It’s taking a lifetime to answer that question and it’s worth every minute of figuring it out.

Let’s get past labels and talk about what you know about yourself.

Being told how smart you were all of the time may have caused the opposite to happen. If you were tied to your identity as “the smart one,” you may have missed the opportunity to find out who you are—what is “the natural state of you” and what can you count on. When faced with new challenges and the possibility of failure and loss of identity, your confidence suffers and your motivation can hit rock bottom.

Sound familiar? If you think the price to pay for lack of perfection is loss of love, loss of income, or loss of anything you hold dear, then the only way forward—to living fully, is to re-frame the stories you’ve been told or you’ve been telling yourself about how the world works.

The good news is you can start now. The downside is your old habit of beating up on yourself might show up when you realize you would have been better off finding out who you are by the time you reach 30, rather than continuing the march to your death through unnecessary suffering. What are some of the stories you might uncover when you do the work to find out who you are?

Here’s a short list of stories others have found that never were set in stone:

Only gifted people deserve success.

Entrepreneurship is risky.

You can’t make money as an artist or writer.

All news is true.

Being different is bad.

I am not creative enough to change professions.

Why is it so important to know oneself beyond societal labels and conventional success metrics?

In the post-pandemic era of war, polarization, and economic and environmental challenges, is it any wonder that we’re questioning a lot of things we thought we knew? Are you ready to reevaluate what’s important and rethink how you are living your life?

The world of work is changing rapidly.

Today we work in a knowledge-based world. Your collective knowledge about yourself and your industry is the key to your future.

As time passes, it becomes even more apparent that knowledge begets knowledge, and new competencies drive careers forward.

You may not realize it, but your skills, knowledge, and competency (past, and present) are either helping you advance your career or hindering your progress in life.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. — Alvin Toffler

Confronting and Embracing Inner Truths

Truly understanding one's gifts and nature is key to fulfillment and authenticity.

You became a professional and do you know why you took that path? What is it about you that said go beyond the crafts or creator levels and embrace the academics, mentorships, and continuous education credits necessary to renew professional standing every three years or so?

You became proficient in communication, including writing, speaking, presenting, and the connection arts found in human behavior fields. Are you using those listening skills and learned experiences in asking better questions to find your truths and the story that makes you trustworthy and credible?

On top of that, you found out or may now be at the start of looking into the reality that you are an adult born with a brain, wired in the womb, as gifted. How gifted are you? Study the work of Deborah Ruf, Ph.D. to learn the five levels of giftedness. Still not sure about this? Study the work of Paula Prober, Your Rainforest Mind, and start here Why Do I Need to Convince You That You Are Gifted? Why Do You Need to Know?

How can you live so long and not know who you are?

When you are ready to get real and do the exploration of your life, for the benefit of the rest of your life, there are some wise people ready to help who worked for 10 or more years on what you are about to experience.

Every day in my email I get Sovereign Business Daily Journal by Jason Leister. Since 2011 and every day, all of those years, he has provided a free newsletter about the journey to where you are moving yourself and your business, whatever that next level or desire may be.

Most recently he wrote this: “Virtually no business book talks about what I've found is the most important variable in all of business. That is...WHO YOU ARE. They talk a TON about the business itself. About the market or the products and services or the unique selling proposition or lead generation or selling systems. And they talk about who you should be, who you could be, who you NEED to be, or the traits of "successful" people you can model. But no one talks about YOU. About the fact that you're uniquely wired to move through this plane in certain ways and NOT in other ways. That you are endowed with certain gifts that were not offered to others. About the fact that if you chase success running contrary to your nature, you're either going to fail or possibly succeed and be completely miserable. WHO YOU ARE comes first.”

Don’t rush to look him up on LinkedIn or any social media. He’s been successful by knowing who he is and why while living far away from New York or Los Angeles. For a long time, he lived and ran his online business from a small town in Montana. Recently he moved his family to Hawaii where he may stay for a year or more. Jason is a recovering “Straight-A Sheep” who spent the first 30 years of his life thinking, doing, and saying what he was told. One day, he realized that virtually everything he thought to be true was a lie. Since then he has been on a journey searching for the truth about everything. He is the father of 10 children, is psychologically unemployable, and publishes the Sovereign Business Daily e-newsletter, where he writes about sovereignty, freedom, family, business, and living well outside of the Matrix.

In November 2020 Jason changed his brand from Incomparable Expert to Sovereign Business and launched a new website. You can still see the depth of his writing and wisdom in the archives of daily articles from 2011 to 2020.

Following Your Personal Legend

Following the sovereign trail, you’ll find more recent and deeper wisdom from Emma Seppälä, a bestselling author, psychologist, and Yale University research scientist and lecturer. She wrote Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos (2024)

She writes: “Sovereignty is internal freedom and a relationship with yourself so profoundly life-supporting and energizing that you access your fullest potential.”

“Sovereignty allows us to reclaim the treasure trove of possibility that exists within all of us if we allow it.”

This book is a manual, a road map, a manifesto by which you can systematically become aware of all the areas in your life where you have abandoned your sovereignty and what to do to reclaim it.

Practical Steps Toward Self-Discovery

Today is the best day to start on this if you haven’t done it or, worse if you thought that you did it and found out you barely peeled off the top layer.

Resist the old habit of thinking it’s too late or you have lost your mojo. I jumped into this when I hit Medicare age and realized there was still a lot of gas left in my tank and I was done with competing with anyone.

My steps into self-discovery started with Bernadette Jiwa in 2018 when she published Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are. She wrote: “Every one of us has been conditioned to compete to win. Ironically, the people who create fulfilling lives and careers—the ones we respect, admire, and try to emulate—choose an alternative path to success. They don’t worry about differentiating themselves from the competition or obsess about telling the right story. They tell the real story instead. They don’t feel the need to compete, because they know who they are and they’re not afraid to show us.”

Fast forward to 2024 and I’m working on the discovery and real story with Mary Henderson. She’s been through this, she’s got the wisdom to guide me. For Mary, 2021 was a year of self-discovery. The global pandemic pushed her boundaries and paradigms on every level. She said, “It has taken me 9 years to figure out what that meant and I am only just scratching the surface.” Her search for Who Are You got intense and past the point of no turning back in 2012.

In 2023, I experienced a lifequake transformation when my husband and business partner died. Mary reinvented her business in 2023 when artificial intelligence shifted everything in her systems design frameworks to work with specialists—one-of-a-kind professionals, to systemize their genius.

Say no more. That landed on the trifecta of professional, communicator, and everyday genius, plus my paradigm shift at the same time Mary made her paradigm shift. Together, Mary and I have more than 60 years of genius to systemize and deliver to the world.

I choose life. I choose to work with gifted professionals and communicators. All of them are brilliant and able to find out who they are if only they will commit to the deep dive and the everyday new habits of paying attention to that “real you” or the “natural state of you” once they find it and commit to keeping it alive.

There’s a lot of “how to” in moving forward and the one caution in all of this is to stay awake and not allow your story and your truth to get buried again under the years and years of barely vital narratives where you found it, during your truth-seeking quest.

We’re on a mission to feature stories about professionals who are initiating meaningful conversations with other gifted minds and storytellers—and who they serve.

If you’re curious about how sensitive, creative, intense, multi-potential, professional, ethical, expressive, and clear you are about your intentions, wants, and needs, check your GPC score.

Learn more about Gifted Professionals and Communicators via:

👉 Our Community
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👉 Our blog (GPC Journal)

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