Welcome friends to Episode #144 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. There’s a myth about being your own person that I want to bust. We often think that to be ourselves means to rebel and to fight against others. It means that we think we won’t be the partners and team players that contribute to making the world a better place. It’s not true and today’s podcast on being your own person is going to be the seismic shift that will change the course of your life.

Let’s be real. Being your own person sounds great but is hard to put into practice. As soon as we start to resent people, we want to be our own person. As soon as you are your own person, you want to be with others to share all the goodness. Why is it so difficult to find that balance of being yourself without others’ influence and being someone who is connected and willingly influenced by others in the most positive of ways?

We might have had these moments in our lives where we felt so stuck with others, maybe in your childhood or even as you raise a family. All you wanted was your own space to do what you wanted the way you wanted to do it. Such a sense of freedom can come from this practice of having space for yourself.

Yet, we often do this in a way that feels antagonistic. We yell and get angry when we don’t get that space. We think we should have had it by now and wonder why everyone else doesn’t get it. Can’t they see that you need some time alone to be by yourself to figure something out? Can’t they see that it’s hard enough to live this life, let alone perform at the level that you are asking yourself to perform at – and that you need some space?

We all know the answer. No, they don’t. If they did – they would have given it to you. So the illusion of having what we want is that we think it just comes because people should just know.

Being your own person isn’t about making your own decisions about everything that happens. It’s about learning that when life feels overwhelming and uncertain, that you know you will figure it out and that you have the resources to handle even this. Being your own person becomes more about building resiliency not just space.

The reason this is important is because building resilience in terms of our energetic capacity to handle life’s demand is what will give you the strength, courage and confidence to say what needs to be said. We don’t become our own person by buying a plot of land where people can’t bother us – although I’m sure you’ve all wondered if that was the answer.

We become our own person by being in life, with others and still finding strength to work through the challenges and feel that we accept and are intelligently working through the process in the best way you know how. I get the feeling of wanting to just have an independent life and mind, especially when you feel that other people are the reason you have low-energy or feel stuck.

I remember being in a role where I felt people were overly demanding and now, I can see that if I were my own person, I wouldn’t have changed them but I would have been more accepting of them. By doing that I wouldn’t have made it all so personal. Being my own person means that I see them as them and me as me. Not everything was just about me and what I wasn’t doing. This person had a lot of their own things going on and that’s how it came out in these higher stress situations. Without knowing myself, however, I made it mean that I needed to fix it and just do whatever needed to be done to make them happy.

I literally remember thinking that it was a great goal to just make my boss happy. This wasn’t my boss by the way, in case you are wondering. It was someone else I worked with, but I remember thinking that making my boss happy was such an altruistic thing. What could go wrong? So many things. My goal isn’t to make people happy and I would encourage you to see that for yourself as well. 

My goal could have been to do the best work I could and deliver results. That makes the most sense. That isn’t about me fixating on another person. That kind of goal is a goal that someone who was their own person would have. Why? Because it is about an outcome and reality that is less about others and more about yourself and how you can contribute in a constantly changing world.

When you’re your own person, it almost doesn’t matter who is with you. You do you. Of course you adjust your style to help influence others and communicate to them in a way that they can understand best, but that isn’t changing your message or the outcome that is for the highest good for all. You are just altering the way you do what you do.

All of us can be our own person without being mean, rude or rebelling against everything that you know. You can instead be thoughtful, curious and open. You are determined to succeed using what you have at your disposal. Whether it is the time you have because you’re working another job or the money you have or the place you live or the socioeconomic and racial structures that you were born into, you can be your own person. 

Take one thing that you have uncertainty about and work to resolve it in the best way possible. Deliver results in the best way you can do with what you have. I had a client who didn’t know how to be her own person so much so that she was so successful in her career because of her ability to seamlessly understand what needed to be done and solve for it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t her own person though. She felt that she was not living to her potential because she was so caring about others. Yet her superpower is unique and we just made one tweak to it that let her feel so much more engaged with who she was becoming as she witnessed who she actually was all along – and how that giving and loving nature of hers wasn’t wrong, even if she got bored eventually from what she was doing.

This work isn’t always comfortable or easy because you tend to do a lot of comparing when you think about how to be authentic and unique. It’s like a paradox because by looking at others to figure out how to be different, you’re essentially becoming a version of yourself that is a response to other people. A simpler way to think about it is to just do what you think makes the most sense and check for your own biases along the way.

When you do what makes the most sense you are taking all the wisdom and experience you have gained and learned – and do life in a way that makes sense to you. You do have to at some point engage with other people, but if you’re questioning your own biases and your own patterns, you’ll be much more likely to overcome objections by others. 

This is why being your own person and having authenticity starts so much more with self-awareness. It is becoming more you while improving on the places where you know that you could make some tweaks to help life feel so much more authentic. There will be many places in your life where you don’t even realize that you are uncertain and because of that, you default to old patterns, automatic behaviors or delegate your decisions to others who seem to know more than you.

Even as a coach, I will ask you to work on your own decision-making process. Of course there are simple things you can do that I will tell you because of my experience and what I’ve learned, but you will also learn so much more about yourself in the process of being coached as you learn how you operate. You learn what it’s like to be you. Maybe it’s taken decades for you to learn that but I think that’s some of the most beautiful and rich experiences about growing older. 

I admire those people who seem so comfortable with their own skin and the way they show up and often it comes with more extremes in ages. I encourage you to notice all the inspiration of people around you who are already showing up in their uniqueness, not even trying to be unique. Love them because what you love in them will be reflected in you.

I also invite you to join us if you’d like to cultivate more certainty about yourself and how you can be your own person, even if you have others around you in life. It is where your own confidence will grow and you become even more empowered to show up authentically with more ease. It is where you will notice yourself changing in all the ways you know to be even more true to yourself, doing the work you most want to do, leading the way you believe is sustainable and living a healthy and wealthy life that you’ve designed for yourself.

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Take the first step to actually get the energy you want in all areas of your life and live into your potential as a unique individual. Sign up for Spiritual Achiever™ Coaching. Schedule a consultation here at www.mayempson.com/contact and we’ll get you started so that you see results, now. I just taught the energy audit and systems work that is so fundamental to embodying the way YOU do life so that you can live more authentically and sustainably. Making your own decisions and trusting yourself. 

Do not miss this opportunity to get your tank filled up so you have the capacity to do the work you were meant to do and not get burned out along the way.

If you’re ready to Own Your Best Life, I want to invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies. You can access the training at https://may-empson.mykajabi.com/stand-out-and-lead.

You can then apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call HERE. We’ll see you inside.

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.