Self-Expression

There are 4 posts tagged Self-Expression (this is page 1 of 1).

Risk Being You

If you could erase everything you know about yourself, who would you become?

Imagine for a moment that you could let go of everything that makes up your identity: all your fears and self-doubts, all your past mistakes and experiences, all your family and friends, even the shape of your body and face, and all those weird things you don't like about your name.

Forget about what you look like. Forget about how you normally interact with people. Forget about how people usually respond to you and how you respond and act around other people. Forget what you think. Forget what you feel. Forget all of it.

Now imagine for a moment that you can start from scratch. You can recreate yourself to become anyone you like, a person with whatever personality and whatever traits you desire. 

If you've always wanted to be comfortable around other people, pretend for a moment that you suddenly gain the ability to be extremely relaxed and easygoing. Your confidence goes through the roof and you have no fear of judgement. You make friends easily and you have fun talking to strangers. When someone smiles and says hello, you not only smile and say hello back but you go out of your way to initiate a conversation because you're excited and intrigued about where it may lead and that alone feels worth more than being afraid.

If you've always wished you worried less and spent more time enjoying life and the company of those present, that you enjoyed doing things not because the timing was right but because they felt like the right thing to do, then pretend for a moment that you can suddenly embrace the joy of this moment with no doubt or hesitation, no questioning or analyzing, no reservation or delay.

If you've always wanted to speak your mind and be yourself no matter what others may think, pretend for a moment that in any given situation you will always say what's on your mind. You willingly open doors and you leave room for others to judge you because you're so confident in your own skin that it just doesn't matter. You'd rather let others know you for you — no matter what they may think — rather than let them judge you for who you're not.

If you've always wished that you didn't play it safe all the time, then pretend for a moment that in this newly created life all the characters and props that come with it will be wiped away soon and everything will start anew; it doesn't matter how risky the choice, how crazy the idea, or how absurd the potential outcome: they're all worth a shot because this is your only opportunity anyway.

Now recognize that none of this needs to be pretend.

You can start from scratch. Others who know something about you may hold onto what they know and believe, but you can let it all go.

Initiating conversations and talking to people always leads to more interesting and fun experiences.

Enjoying the company of those present and living day-to-day with a focus on what makes you happy and what opportunities lie ahead is always safer than doubting, over-analyzing, and waiting for the right moment.

Speaking your mind, leaving room for others to judge you, and not fearing the outcome of being yourself is always better than pretending to be someone you're not.

Taking chances on the things that feel right, exploring opportunities that could lead somewhere new, and believing in ideas that speak to you, is always worth any perceived risk; everything you know will turn to dust soon anyway.

Be the person you know you're supposed to be and stop pretending there are justifiable reasons to do otherwise. There is nothing worth avoiding who you are because who you are is worth more than anything you could risk.

Notes: Entrepreneurs: Picking Something vs Being Someone

I've read a lot of stuff over the past few years about building a business online. Most of it talks about the need to identify "our niche" so that we can focus on talking and selling to our "right people". The problem was, settling on a niche meant giving up my multi-faceted self and I wasn't prepared to do that.

So when I came across Abby Kerr, I loved the way that she broke that status quo. She still talks about 'right people' -- which is a concept I agree with, to a point -- but she also takes things a step further and embraces expansiveness in nichification.

Her newsletter comes with a fantastic free e-Course called Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche. All of the emails in the series had something fantastic and her style of writing is one of the few styles that I find really engaging and fun. The highlighted piece below from the email series really hit home:

I don't think wannabe entrepreneurs should just pick something.

I think that wannabe entrepreneurs should be someone.

And the best part about being? Being is an evolutionary process. It's never stagnant. It's continually changing by nature. All beings are born from a process of change and are destined to change, forever.

And really powerful, sentient beings {like you and me} don't just evolve, they create revolutions, and they have revelations. And they help their Right People to have them, too.

I like to look at my entrepreneurial niche, and yours, as an ongoing evolution and revolution {of self, ideas, and ways of doing business}, full of revelations.

This isn't just playful phraseologie.

This is a complete approach to claiming your entrepreneurial niche in this moment, living what you believe to its fullest, being a great friend to those you help and serve and create for, while embracing the reality that because you are not a stagnant being, neither will be your business.

Claiming a niche, the Niche of You, allows you to continue your own growth process. You can explore your niche, be expansive within it, play with it, turn it on its head just for kicks, break it down into its many facets and go deeply into each one.

Remember, even the smallest bits of earthly matter are a universe unto themselves.

And so are you.

And so is your niche.

Breaking Barriers to Self-Expression

It's easy to write about what should be done. It's easy to see a problem, a deficiency, and then describe an action or series of actions to change it.

When change is viewed externally, it seems easy. Our brain has no problem dissecting what's wrong and coming up with possible solutions. What's a bit more challenging is taking those thoughts and actually turning them into actions.

Action takes something special. It takes commitment. Action requires accepting that something is important enough to expend energy doing it.

Much of my writing is a reflection of what's on my mind. The words I'm typing right now are literally recording bits of what's going on in my head. Sometimes what's going on is clear and articulation comes easy. Right now I'm "in the flow", typing these words with only the effort required to maintain grammar and spelling.

I started this Journal entry spontaneously. It started as a thought, "I want to write", and then, being that I had nothing else pressing to do, I began to write. But when I started thinking about what I was doing (as I did towards the end of the previous paragraph), I found myself pausing. I immediately had trouble articulating my thoughts.

It seems that's a problem with most "things we want to get done but don't". They come to our mind as clear as day but then we start thinking about them. We end up destroying our original thought with buckets of analysis and self-doubt.

"Is someone going to think this is stupid? Should I step back and think about this a bit? What if I'm making a huge mistake?"

Instead of following our intuition, we follow our self-ridicule. Instead of allowing the result of action to determine whether we should continue, we suffocate the motivation to act before it's even born.

I do this all the time.

A few days ago I wrote a follow up essay, Say More, to the essay I published the week before, Say Less. I found it interesting that after writing Say Less, I was using that essay as an excuse for not writing more. 

That's when I realized how important it is to say more. I can hide behind being succinct forever, but then I'll be sharing very little. If I feel that I have so much to share (and I do feel that way), then I should make every effort to share more.

It's in my nature to say less. As a child, I was taught the value of listening. I would stay quiet for hours at a time, doing nothing but listening. As I grew older, I continued listening. My dad often repeated a quote that stayed with me: "A wise man thinks first and then speaks. A foolish man speaks first and then thinks."

That quote really resonated with me even at an early age. It made a lot of sense. If you speak first and then think, it's too late to decide not to say anything. But if you think first, then you'll always have the option of choosing whether to speak.

Ando Perez recently shared a quote with me by Jean Jacques Rousseau that reminded me of my dad's quote and inspired me to see it from a different angle: "People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

I certainly wouldn't claim that I "know much", but I do feel that I don't say enough. I hold inside too much of what I feel is important. I need to learn to say more. To speak up. To share what's inside.

When I reflected on why I don't say more, I discovered self-imposed barriers to my expression, barriers that I had created, perhaps long ago, to ensure that I wasn't too wordy or needlessly verbose.

Those barriers served an important purpose and I wasn't ready to rip them down. 

My public writing is usually the result of careful consideration. For the past two years I've maintained a relentless desire to abandon "the way blogging should be done" and replace it with something that felt more true to my heart.

Readers connected with this form of writing and my work felt more real than ever. It felt more like something that I would actually want to read.

But something was beginning to feel stale. More and more things felt trapped inside. I felt caged by my own quality barriers and unable to express and share things that I felt would be really useful to others.

So the idea for this Journal was born. I would create a place to express myself, a Journal in which I could write without barriers (or at least very few barriers) and share what was happening inside.

But, just as it's easy to write about what should be done, it was easy to create this space to write. The actual action of writing here, of taking down those internal barriers and allowing my thoughts to materialize, to become tangible pieces of writing, has been incredibly challenging.

I did not realize just how difficult this process would be until I started writing. It has required an entire rewrite in the way that I think about what I'm sharing. 

Before the Journal, I let everything percolate in my mind. I gave myself as much time as I needed to flesh out an idea to the point where it felt, in my head, polished and easily sharable.

Now, I needed to share that percolation process. I needed to find a way to express my thoughts and ideas before they felt polished.

Perhaps if I had already been keeping a personal Journal, this transition would've been easier. 

There were a few years during my early teens in which I kept a Journal on my computer. I wrote thousands and thousand of pages in a simple text file, sharing my deepest thoughts and observations, and my most private ruminations.

Then someone close to me, someone I trusted, violated that trust and read my Journal without permission. They took things that I wrote out of context and accused me of thinking thoughts that I had not really thought.

It was traumatizing, perhaps more so than I realized.

I deleted the entire journal, several years worth, and promised myself that I would never record such deep thoughts on any medium that a person could access. My mind was the only safe harbor now.

And so my mind became the storehouse for what would've gone in a journal. What I did share verbally and through writing became more refined and more carefully considered.

When I began attempting to write for this Journal, those barriers became apparent. The difficulty of expressing my deepest thoughts without judging myself or holding back felt incredibly difficult and challenging.

This Journal entry is probably the closest I've come in the past 10 years to actually recording my thoughts unedited. I haven't stopped writing since I started the beginning of this Journal and I haven't gone back to edit or reread anything as I normally would.

When I wrote the 'Say More' essay, I was talking to myself. I was telling myself that it's time to stop holding back. 

For more than ten years now I've learned how to hold back. For more than ten years the voice inside has been silenced and moderated by fear. It's time for me to leap past that plateau and move forward.

I'm going to do an experiment for the next 10 days in attempt to cultivate this unedited side of myself.

Every day until January 1st, 2012, I'm going to write at least one paragraph in this Journal. Perhaps some of those paragraphs will turn into longer entries, but no matter what I'm going to commit to writing and sharing at least one paragraph each day. (To minimize the number of emails you receive, I will combine the entries into one email sent out on the 24th, 28th, and 31st.)

Do you hold back? Do you unnecessarily censor yourself? Is there something inside that would benefit others if you shared it? Do you ever feel like you should speak up, but don't?