Yes, you read that correctly. I, your life coach, am telling you to stop trying to “find” yourself, which is a term people tend to use when they feel cut-off and separate from life and want to reconnect to it. 

‍

When people come to me and say they need to find themselves, my flippant response is usually something like “what do you mean—you’re right here!” 

‍

Jokes aside, the feeling behind that statement is very real. And it is absolutely something to work through. But probably not in the way that you think.  

‍

I say this lovingly, because there is a massive industry around “finding yourself” out there that is really eager to take your money. From bougie yoga retreats, to plant-based medicine ceremonies, and yes, even some not-so-ethical life coaches, there are a lot of people willing to charge you through the nose to get back to the literal one person you actually can never stop being, no matter how hard you try. 

‍

So before you spend a small fortune on an epic journey of self-discovery, let me try to explain what’s going on in this extremely free, kinda short article. 

‍

Central to this whole topic of “finding yourself” is a losing game our brains constantly play with us called identification. Aka, the belief that there’s actually even “someone” to find. 

‍

Identification is a silly, useless game 

‍

If I asked you to describe yourself, you’d probably present me with a list of adjectives that describe your best and worst qualities and present them as if they were absolute truth. 

‍

I would then (lovingly) rip that list up in front of you, and ask you to try again. 

‍

You would look at me incredibly confused, and come up with a new list. I’d rip it up again. 

‍

We’d go on like this until you rage quit our coaching session. 

‍

Well, (mostly) just kidding. The only absolute truth about your identity is a paradox. 

‍

You are nothing. And because you are nothing, you are also everything. 

‍

There is no set of words in any language that can fully describe or encapsulate your being. 

‍

If you say “I’m creative,” I can find evidence to prove you wrong. I’m sure you ripped off someone else’s work or idea at some point in your life. 

‍

If you tell me you’re “adventurous,” again, I am sure there are times in your life when you said “no” to adventure and “yes” to a Netflix binge. 

‍

You are a field of pure, limitless potential. You can quite literally be one thing in one moment, and its exact opposite the next. And if you want to get really cerebral about this, these dualities that we use to define ourselves like, good/bad, creative/uncreative, adventurous/boring, smart/dumb, etc, don’t even actually exist on their own. 

‍

How can you define “hot”? The only way you can do it is in relation to its opposite— “cold”. Something is hot when it is NOT cold, and something is cold when it is NOT hot. If we remove either end of the scale—hot or cold—the whole thing falls apart. We can’t explain or define temperature anymore. It  just becomes an experience that we can have, but not explain.  

‍

Duality is a convenient illusion we keep alive for the sake of language. It’s just a lot easier to say “the water is hot” instead of “there is a tingling sensation rising up my arm that causes my skin to turn red and my blood to feel excited.” The word “hot” can never really fully explain the experience of being hot, the same way no word can ever explain the experience of being you.   

‍

And at this point you’re probably asking why any of this even matters. It matters because our minds spend a lot of unnecessary time trying to construct our identities with these words. When you do something right, your brain is quick to say things like “I am the best, I am awesome, I am incredible, I am powerful” and when you do something bad, the inner identification goes entirely the other direction, “I am terrible, I suck, I am the worst, I am weak.” 

‍

And no matter what story your brain tells, it’s always technically wrong! The only true part of those statements are the words, “I am.” 

‍

This entire process of creating an identity based on the stories we tell ourselves about our lives is a gigantic, unnecessary illusion. Remember— you are actually all things at all times, never just one side of duality’s coin. 

‍

Your brain wants you to identify because it makes predicting the future easier 

‍

Your brain wants you to spend time telling yourself that you suck and you’re the worst because, frankly, that makes its main job—accurately predicting what happens next—a lot easier. It doesn’t really care that that’s not the whole story. It’s an organ, and organs optimize for energy efficiency. Telling the full truth burns too many calories! 

‍

If you believe fully in your own suckage, your brain will make sure that in the next moment, you see that suckage! Even if the best thing in the world happened to you, because you believe you suck, your brain will filter out the competing evidence that perhaps you don’t suck, and will focus solely on the sucky bits. Your brain is actually really bad at predicting the future and even worse at being an impartial judge, so it looks for evidence in reality to confirm your existing beliefs about yourself so it can continue to be “right.” 

‍

Now, if you’ve ever gone through psychotherapy, this is probably not new to you. A lot of therapies spend a lot of time trying to help people shift these sneaky, underlying beliefs into something more positive or helpful so that their brains stop being assholes to them and distorting their realities. 

‍

And here is where I break with traditional therapeutic advice—I actually think that the work of trying to turn beliefs into something “more positive or helpful” is also a load of horseshit that doesn’t do justice to reality.  

‍

A positive belief is still an illusion of perception 

‍

Remember what we talked about earlier? If I ask you to change your belief of “I suck” into “I’m actually really awesome,” I wouldn’t be telling you to see reality as it is. I’d be asking you to swap one lie with a lie that just feels a lot better. And if you’ve been in therapy before, you might recognize how futile this work feels sometimes. It’s like your brain has an inner bullshit detector that can look at these “positive beliefs” and sense how flimsy and untrue they are. 

‍

As a coach, I don’t want you to adopt a new belief. I want you to step into your power by moving beyond belief entirely and focusing on the things that matter—your values and the actions that support them. 

‍

I want you to see that your mind can never really tell a true story about you, because you can’t be encapsulated in words. You, my dear, are simply too large for that. You have within you the potential to be a saint and a sinner, an angel and a demon, and because you will be both of those things at one point in your life, you will also be neither of them. 

‍

I want you to end the game of constant identification so that you can see that, actually, reality is a lot cooler and richer when you’re not trying to fit both it and yourself into tiny, contained boxes for your anxious brain. 

‍

What I hear when someone tells me they need to “find themselves” 

‍

I translate that statement into two hypotheses, and I then ask some probing questions to try to ascertain if either hypothesis is likely. 

‍

My first hypothesis is “this person is not living a life that’s aligned with their values.” I investigate this by trying to determine if the person even has documented values in the first place. And then, if they do, I try to ascertain if they are taking daily actions (not just ideas or theories—literal actions)  that connect them to their values. When this part of the equation is missing, a person tends to feel stuck or confused, which may cause them to report needing to “find themselves.” 

‍

The other hypothesis I tend to have is, “this person is hypnotized by their brain’s tendency to constantly identify.” When I ask someone to define themselves, very few people tell me they’re undefinable, or that today they’re x but tomorrow they’re more y. I get a lot of very firm adjective lists, and it is the presence of that list itself that is often the problem. 

‍

Because the person who identifies as “creative” has a high mantle to uphold. If creativity is a part of their identity, and they haven’t made anything lately, of course they’re going to report feeling lost, confused, or stuck!  They’ve unknowingly given themselves an impossible standard to uphold each day. 

‍

Their brains are looking at this false identity belief, not seeing it represented in reality, and then going “huh there must be something wrong or off about us! This creativity thing should be here, but it’s not! We gotta figure this out asap! Or otherwise we might actually be, gasp, UNCREATIVE!” 

‍

What actually needs to happen is a perspective shift from a focus on identity (ever flowing and changing) to a focus on values (focused and clear). Another way to say that is: a focus away from belief (mind) and onto action (reality).  

‍

What does living without belief look like in practice? 

‍

It starts with you accepting the only truth about your identity there is—you’re the potential to be all things. You’re not a list of words that you have to try to maintain and “prove” each moment of your life. You’re whole and worthy just because you exist. You can’t be lost, because you’ve always been here! 

‍

Once that’s out of the way, we work on presence. Presence is about moving your attention away from the unstoppable narrative of thoughts and stories that your brain produces on its own and towards what’s actually unfolding here and now in your life. Meditation, particularly a non-dual, open-awareness style of practice, will help you develop this muscle. 

‍

When you work with a coach, you will hopefully have a list of values and valued-actions that constitute them. Your way of life then becomes bringing your full attention and focus to the completion of those valued actions day-in and day-out. 

‍

You are not doing these actions to “be” someone, to get validation, to belong, or any of that crap. You’re doing these actions because they feel good and matter to you. And when you do things that feel good and matter to you, you will naturally attract people who want to share them with you and create community. The focus is always the action and never the associated mental story. 

‍

As you do all this, your mind will still interrupt you. It will wrap you up in identification and labels and stories all on its own. You cannot ever fully stop this, so please do not try. This isn’t about being perfectly present all the time. 

‍

It is about recognizing when you get caught up in the old identification game again. When you’ve chosen a label to slap onto yourself, you’ll notice those same feelings of stuckness and constriction return—like your world just got a whole lot smaller suddenly. 

‍

And that’s when you go “ahh, there I go, identifying again,” and you let the label go and come back to the actions you set for yourself. 

‍

Photo credit: Thiebaud Faix, via Unsplash

‍