Home: The Real You.
Greater Life
As an entrepreneur over 50, your time is just beginning… Live the Greater Life
There, by the babbling brook, as the sunlight dappled through the leaves above, I wept and wept yet felt the power surge.
These are not the lines of some Wordsworthian poem. They describe my lived experience, yesterday at 9.37AM.
The last year has been characterised by the stripping away of the masks and personas I’d worn up until this point. What is left is the reality that I am a man who has minimal reps in any of the following.
In speaking to members of our beautiful community, it is heartening to know I am not alone in experiencing both the brutal pain of this reality, of being in the later stages of my life and still not having the ‘stuff’ sorted, and the profound power of actually living in the truth, of acknowledging my current reality and therefore being able to do something about it.
You may ponder what this has to do with the Pillar of Home.??
The answer is ‘everything’.
Unless you and I can show up as our true selves for ourselves, for those we love and for our customers, we’re simply kicking the can of inevitable pain down the road. Anything built on a lie cannot thrive long-term.
That is not to say you necessarily knew you were lying. Like I said, it has taken a year of some pretty focussed intense work and heavy lifting to even begin to track the way some of my masks have played out, how unconsciously habitual some of the personas were.
So before going further, let’s make sure we’re on the same page. By masks and personas I mean those beliefs and identities you may have adopted to protect yourself from shame or comparison.
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One way this showed up was in the false belief that I knew how to run a business. I’m rapidly learning, but the last year has taught me how little I know about some key elements (and how really fecking good I am in other areas).
Similarly, through navigating my current relationship it became apparent just how much my ‘I’m a really good and helpful man’ was actually a profound lack of personal boundaries and a total absence of being able to ask for what I need and tool kit to meet my own needs independent of another.
So one key question that we can draw from the above examples:
What are the identities that you use to bolster your self-image?
Likely some are authentic and true, but some may be similar to my ‘I’m good at business’ or ‘I’m a good man’ identities.
And it may be painful to realise some of them are houses built on sand…because a total rebuild will be required. But the gift is that you get to build, brick by cherished brick, a version of you who can withstand all the tempests of life, and more, and can develop levels of love, prosperity and joy that would seem laughable to the version of you presently reading these words.
So let go of the masks.
Come home to you.