You’ve already begun the process of retrieving your authentic self by beginning to understand your family of origin, the role you took on within your family, your fears, and your core limiting beliefs. Now, you have to become the interpreter of your own life. You’re going to be asking questions such as: What are my needs and aspirations? What do I like and dislike? What are my passions? And, ultimately, what is my life purpose?
Here’s some guidance on how to move forward with this process:
• Take a holistic approach. Don’t rely solely on the results of your MBTI assessment or what you learn from the exercises that appear at the end of this chapter. Use all the exercises to gain valuable information about yourself, but then dig deeper. We’re all more complex than tests can reveal. By using a variety of different approaches, you’ll start to see patterns and the pieces of your puzzle will begin to come together. You should have an understanding of some of your life conditioning from the preceding chapters. Let those insights help guide you through the process.
• Look for clues in your responses to situations and people. Operate from a place of awareness and check your reactions against the new information you have about your family of origin, core beliefs, family role, and fears. When you have a reaction to a situation, ask yourself: Is this coming from the conditioned self or my authentic self? If you experience fear or anxiety, you’ll want to check it out. But—and this is important—don’t assume that every emotional or behavioral reaction you have is based on your conditioned self. You have to do the investigative work and examine yourself and situations as they occur. For example, if you walk into a crowded room full of strangers and you experience fear or anxiety, you’ll want to check that out. You want to ask yourself: Where is this anxiety coming from? Is it a fear of being judged or rejected? Or is it an innate discomfort from being in an environment that’s very loud, where there’s too much going on, and that feels overwhelming? Does that kind of environment conflict with my innate nature? Do I generally prefer quiet environments and small groups of people? When you reach a conclusion, double-check it with your intuition. See how it compares with what you’ve already learned about your fears and innate nature.
• Use your journal as your workbook. Your journal is a valuable tool to help you track your feelings and reactions and how they compare to your core beliefs. Don’t censor your feelings and reactions. This is the place where you ask yourself: What’s truly mine and what have I adopted from someone else?
• Be discerning in your friendships. As you begin to live more deliberately and become more aware of your life conditioning, you’ll start to see patterns in your relationships. Explore the characteristics of those relationships. Ask yourself questions such as: Am I habitually drawn to people who are critical? Am I replicating the dynamics I had with my parents in my relationships with others? Am I always comparing myself to others and feeling bad about Check the dynamics of your relationships against your core beliefs and habitual myself? behaviors. Perhaps you notice a pattern with others in which you always feel like you’re giving and never receiving, based on the core belief that others’ needs are more important than my own. To consciously change this old pattern, you’ll have to start communicating your needs to others. And, by starting to communicate your needs to others, you’ll gain valuable information about those relationships by how the other person responds. Then, you’re in a good position to ask yourself: Is this someone who respects who I am—my needs, dreams, and boundaries?Is this a relationship based on the beliefs and habitual behaviors of my conditioned self? Or is this someone who is compatible with my innate nature?
• Use your intuition. I believe our souls communicate to us—about ourselves, about others, and about our lives—through intuition. That makes your intuition a good barometer for checking in with your authentic self as you go through the process of assessing whether something is right for you. Recognize that emotions are often unreliable; they fluctuate easily, changing from one day to the next based on immediate circumstances. Consider this example: I had a friend in high school who had begged her parents to let her withdraw from her Catholic school and attend public school, where she thought she’d feel more comfortable. She had a dozen reasons to make the move, and she made a strong case for it over a two-month period. Her parents finally agreed, and she planned to switch schools mid-year. Two days before the switch was to occur, the football captain at the Catholic school asked her out on a date. She was elated and abandoned her plans to change schools. She let her emotions drive a decision that was based on months of soul-searching—and within days, she regretted it. You don’t want to make decisions driven by the changeability of your emotions. Give it time to see how something sits with you. As you work to retrieve the authentic self, your intuition is a valuable ally.
• Practice effective communication. A big part of living from your authentic self is being able to communicate your feelings, opinions, needs, and boundaries to other people. If you’re afraid to share who you really are and express your true feelings—because of how other people will react or what they will think—you’re living from your conditioned self. I’ve devoted a big piece of this chapter to effective communication. It’s an important tool to help you honor your authentic self as you go through your everyday life.
Potholes along the Way
For people with certain habitual patterns and behaviors, the process of retrieving the authentic self can be particularly challenging. High achievers often have a difficult time. Let’s say, you’re a classic Type A—success-oriented and driven—and you’re approaching midlife. You’ve probably been on track all your life, successfully negotiating all the earlier phases of human development: building a foundation for your personal and professional life, perhaps settling down, having kids, climbing the corporate ladder, or establishing yourself in your field. That’s the American paradigm. Then the kids leave and you feel like you’ve accomplished your life goals, but you don’t have a roadmap for the rest of your life. Often, the person who as a child took on the family role of the Hero experiences the greatest angst in midlife. If you’re a Hero, you’re all about success and recognition. But to successfully negotiate a midlife transition often involves surrendering the ego. The ego is often attached to outward symbols of success such as titles, status, money, and prestige. If you discover that you need to make a major life change in order to be happy and fulfilled, and it involves letting go of your title and prestige, you may find that your ego presents an obstacle. I had a friend who came from a family characterized by poverty and physical and emotional abuse. He had five siblings, and both his mother and stepfather had difficulty holding down jobs. He rebelled against his family patterns and made a decision early in life that he wasn’t going to be like them. He took on the role of the Hero. His core belief was: To survive, I have to be educated, successful, and independent. Not only was he the only member of his family to go to college, he was the only one who ever graduated from high school.
My friend became a successful corporate executive with a six-figure income. But he hit the skids when he approached midlife, feeling the conflict between his authentic self—which craved a more contemplative existence—and the high-powered, relentlessly driven conditioned self. After a lot of soul-searching, he left his job and announced an elaborate plan to travel, read, meditate, and spend more time in nature. He was trying to recover his authentic self, and he and I shared many conversations on the subject. But for him, retrieving the authentic self promised to be a lengthy and complex process, because those lost parts of him hadn’t been expressed for many years. Ultimately, he got scared and his ego-driven, conditioned self kicked back in. Out of the blue, he was offered a position with a big company that gave him a higher salary, a more impressive title, and even more prestige than he’d had before. He accepted the offer, and I lost touch with him for several years. The last time I saw him, he’d retreated back into the corporate world—his comfort zone—but he was still conflicted and unc
ertain about his decision.
I don’t mean to imply that everyone who’s motivated to succeed is operating from the conditioned self—indeed, that drive is often the authentic self seeking expression. But if your drive for success is based on old childhood wounds or an attempt to compensate for feelings of unworthiness—as was the case with my friend—if left to its own devices, that drive will often pose problems.
People who are habitual people-pleasers also tend to have a hard time retrieving their authentic selves because so many of their habitual patterns are built around meeting the needs of others. If you’ve spent your life focusing on other people’s needs instead of your own, you really haven’t had the chance to know yourself well. It may be hard to determine what you like, what you don’t like, what’s okay for you, and what’s not okay. I had an example recently in my practice—a client who grew up outside the United States where the cultural conditioning was very strong. It was all about getting a good education and a good job, and about the children, ultimately, being able to provide for their parents. This woman recognized early in life that she was interested in art. She loved to draw, but she never let her family know, because it was so against their beliefs and expectations. When she graduated from high school, she came to the United States to attend Harvard and then went into the field of finance. She was tremendously successful professionally and made a great deal of money. But when she came to me in her early 30s, she was an isolated, sad, and very insecure person. She felt like she was living a life that wasn’t her own. She’d spent her entire life trying to meet her parents’ high expectations of professional success. Her authentic self was so deeply buried and her life experience had been so limited that she had no idea how she wanted to live. She didn’t have enough information about who she was, and about her own values, needs, and life preferences, to start living from her authentic self. So we devised an action plan: she was going to use some of her savings to learn about herself and what she wanted in her life. She went to South America and taught English, spent a month in India, and traveled to Thailand to scuba dive. She unleashed the sense of adventure that was part of her innate nature.
She was seeking information about who she really was. Of course, not everyone can afford the luxury of going around the world to find their authentic selves. The key is this: if you don’t know what you like, what’s important to you, or what you feel passionate about, you have to make a conscious effort to experience new things. In my coaching work, I use an assessment tool that identifies habitual behaviors. People-pleasers tend to score high on approval-seeking behavior, on dependency, and on the conforming, risk-adverse behavioral styles that relate to being cautious and staying safe. As a result, it’s often harder for people with those patterns of behavior to explore the unknown than it would be for someone like me, whose habitual behavioral style was to rebel against the prescribed norms of my family. People-pleasers tend to be people who have had heavy expectations laid on them by others when they were growing up. That’s a challenging pattern to break. Like my client who went scuba diving in Thailand, when people-pleasers try to uncover information about who they really are, they often can’t gain access to it. If you can’t answer certain fundamental questions—What do I like? What’s important to me? What do I dislike? What are my values? What do I want in my life?—then it may be time to start jumping into life and testing the waters. Test lots of waters. And then, each step of the way, check in with your intuition. Over time, as you begin to move out of your comfort zone, take new risks, experience new people, and try new things—continually using your intuition as a barometer for how all this sits with you—your authentic self will begin to reveal itself to you.
Communicating Effectively
Effective communication is a powerful and crucial tool for living from the authentic self. If you follow the basic approach outlined here, it will help you identify your feelings, improve and enhance your relationships, and develop your emotional intelligence. It will also help you move out of trance states and into the here and now. How? By incorporating reality checks into your communications. Often, when conflicts arise in relationships, it’s because people are assuming they know what the other person is thinking, and they’re basing what they say on those assumptions. Effective communication involves dropping your assumptions about what other people are thinking or feeling, and checking in with reality to find out what’s really going on. Effective communication involves checking in with your feelings and intuition before you respond. As such, it isn’t just a new pattern of behavior; it’s a way to stay connected to and in alignment with your authentic self.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. I have a client in her mid-50s who has been divorced for more than a decade and lives alone. Janet has a history of conflicts in her relationships. She grew up in a family in which, to survive emotionally, she had to keep her head down and avoid challenging authority. In addition, her parents were highly critical, so Janet had a pattern of either reacting defensively or avoiding conflict altogether by not saying anything. She would let her feelings build up over time and then let them rip—either overflowing in a defensive rage or cutting herself off from the other person. Because she rarely addressed conflict with her friends and family when it arose, she didn’t give other people the option of responding to her concerns or feelings. She also had an aggressive communication style, one that tended to evoke a defensive reaction in others. Often, her feelings of anger and resentment were based on imagined slights. As a result of her poor communication skills, she alienated people and missed out on a lot of opportunities for relationships.
Here’s an example of how Janet’s communication style plays out. She has a friend, Margaret, who tends to be very critical and insensitive, and Janet has been unable to address the issue directly with her. One day, Margaret made a comment about a mutual acquaintance who was considering a divorce: “Doesn’t she know that if she leaves her husband at this stage in her life, she’s going to end up spending the rest of her life alone?” Janet felt angry and hurt by what she perceived as an insult. She said nothing, but after they parted, she vowed never to speak to Margaret again. Then, after fuming for a few hours, she called Margaret, angry and edgy, said, “I can’t believe you said that to me.” Margaret didn’t even know what she was talking about. “You said that that woman was going to end up spending the rest of her life alone, as if that’s the worst thing that could happen. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m alone. That was a horrible thing to say. You insulted me.” Margaret immediately got her back up: “You know, you say things like that to me all the time, but you don’t see me blowing up.” The conversation went downhill from there.
Effective communication is all about the intention and energy behind your words. It’s not just what you say. It’s also how you say it. Janet was engaging in a very emotionally charged communication. Communicating effectively involves learning to communicate in a way that will defuse conflict—not escalate it by invoking defensive behaviors in the listener.
When I reviewed this conversation with Janet, I first encouraged her to consider what she might have done to create, promote, or allow Margaret’s response. Upon reflection, she realized that her message and tone of voice were hostile and critical. She also assumed that Margaret meant to insult her, when that may not have been Margaret’s intention at all. She recognized, too, that she’d failed to address Margaret’s hurtful comment the moment it came up. Instead, she’d fumed and fed her anger for two hours, then called Margaret on the phone, furious and upset.
Ideally, when a person says something that hurts your feelings or makes you feel angry, the best time to respond is immediately, and the best way to address it is in person, because you can communicate through tone of voice, eye contact, and body language. You also have to know yourself and express your feelings honestly and straightforwardly. A better way to handle Margaret’s comment would have been to say something like: “I’m noticing that I’m having a really strong reaction
to what you just said. I’m feeling hurt. It may not have been your intention to be hurtful, but those are the feelings I’m experiencing.” That opens the door for Margaret to respond more compassionately, without feeling unjustly accused or feeling the need to defend herself. She might say, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even think of it that way. I’m really sorry.” Addressing the implicit criticism of her single lifestyle, my client could have said: “I’d like it if you could please be more sensitive to the fact that I’m single; I’m alone by choice. I’m actually happy. I’d really like you to be supportive of my choice and my single lifestyle. If you feel critical about it, I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from sharing those feelings going forward. I’d rather you didn’t say anything about it.” That’s what I call communicating from the adult, emotionally intelligent ego state. The key to communicating from the adult ego state is to focus on your feelings, your reactions, and your concerns. You can’t assume you know what another person is thinking or feeling, or even that your reactions reflect what’s really going on.
This approach to communication is based on the transactional analysis model, which emanates from the work of psychiatrist Eric Berne, who first postulated the ego states of “parent,” “child,” and “adult” as the key individual systems of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from which we interact with others. The basic premise of this line of thinking is that, at any given time, we’re communicating from one of those three ego states. I’ve expanded this model to include what I view as the six most common communication styles, in addition to the “adult state,” which is the most effective way to communicate in most instances. As you read through the following descriptions of these communication styles, notice which ego state feels the most familiar to you.
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