You are NOT Who You Truly Think You Are!
Who you think you are, is not even close to who you truly are. Your perception of yourself is completely false.
There's a quote by Charles Cooley and the quote summarizes all of this perfectly. “I'm not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I am who I think that you think I am.”
Most people think that they are who they are through their own perception of what they think other people think they are. This is a really big problem because we're dealing with a perception of a perception.
So many people have built their entire lives, identity, everything that they know about themselves, the things they love about themselves, things they hate about themselves, based on a perception of what they think that they actually are.
The way that we learn about the world and how to navigate through it is from our parents. We also learn who we are through them.
That's the reason why parents need to be so careful about what they say and do around their kids because the children are going to build themself up based on what they see, what they think, what they hear. Children become who they think their parents think they are.
Some children are verbally abused when they're younger and a lot of people never get over it. Even though they consciously know as adults, that the things that may have been said to them when they were little children are false, their subconscious is still holding it as true.
They take that as their truth and they act like it's their truth for the rest of their lives. The problem with that is that we're living our lives through what we see in other people.
Every single person has a skewed perception based on their childhood.
Looking to somebody else for information on who you are is like looking into a broken mirror to see what you look like.
You'll never see the true picture because everybody who you talk to has different paradigms and different perceptions of the world around them. You're going to be seeing yourself through this broken perception, which isn't true.
If you base your entire life on someone else's perception, you're going to be living something completely false.
If I ask you, who are you, what would you say?
Maybe that you’re a mother, father, brother, sister. Maybe that you’re a CEO, a college graduate, from Florida, or a teacher. You're probably going to start naming off external things, but none of those are actually who you truly are.
You're always looking to the external to figure. You are always looking to other people, your accomplishments, your income, your job, or your name tag to figure out who you are, but at your core level, that's not who you are.
So, who do you want to be?
You can wake up every single day and decide who you want to be. I don't mean being a millionaire, or accomplishing something huge, or having an amazing family, and being an amazing parent.
I'm not talking about any of those things because those are external things. I'm talking about internal things. Who do you want to be before you walk out of your door?
You decide who you want to be. No one else.
I want to be loving. I want to be sweet. I want to be generous. I want to be giving, I want to stop judging people. I want to think the best of people that I possibly can.
It changes how you show up in the world and you realize that other people's perceptions of you have nothing to do with you, but you've been basing your entire life based on your accomplishments and other people's perceptions. And when you morph into who you truly are, other people's perceptions mean nothing to you, outside circumstances mean nothing to you, they don't change you in any sort of way.
You decide who you want to be.
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