How to Become Something that You’re Not (and Why You Should)
We live in a world of mindboggling cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, we’re constantly told we must conform to the never-ending and ever-evolving list of things we must change about ourselves, lest we be seen as sewer-dwelling mutants who didn’t use their quarantine time to do the teeth whitening challenge.
And yet we also propagandize the idea of authenticity to the extent that you can’t swing a canvas tote bag emblazoned with the words “to thine own self be true” (a quote from Hamlet’s skeevy snooze supreme, Polonius, bee-tee-dubs) without hitting a YouTuber with superfluous letters in their name (like Destinee or Jaxxon or Paisleighe … why?!) doing a guided meditation on “aligning with your genuine self.”
The cog-dis is real, son!
(No, it’s not. Cog-dis isn’t a thing. I just made it up because it felt in alignment with my soul’s tru—Nooooope, cannot say that with a straight face!)
But you’re picking up what I’m putting down, right?
It’s a setup. You can’t win.
So what can we do?
We can disrupt.
We can flip the script and walk tall into the Upside Down! If, you know, the Upside Down was a happy fun place instead of the stuff of actual nightmares.
Here’s the thing. Hazy memories of after-school-special moral lessons may drape their wispy ghost arms around the phrase “becoming something you’re not.” But isn’t that kind of what growth is?
I was that and now I’m this?
We have to be pliable when we’re in pursuit of bold visions. Sometimes that means leaving behind parts of ourselves that seem foundational.
That’s what growth entails.
I hope it’s obvious that I’m not suggesting you toss your moral compass off a cliff and cross the border into Questionable Integrityville. Just to be clear—don’t do that.
Everything I do to serve you as a bold introvert is rooted in helping you lean into your strengths to get where you want to go. But that doesn’t mean it’s always comfortable. Growth necessitates change and as The Rona is illustrating so well—change can be tough.
To work out the mechanics of this kind of growth, we have to inspect the obstacles as closely as we do the houses of our coworkers during Zoom meetings. Why does Sally have so many creepy porcelain dolls and how do I unsee them?! #quarantineblessings
One obstacle that’s roughly the size of my current celebrity crush on Andy Samberg (i.e. all-encompassing) is this weird collective belief we have that in order to become something we must already be a dormant version of that something.
It’s like a wackadoodle form of amnesia where we think one day we’re going to wake up and suddenly remember how to be an amazing writer, podcaster, entrepreneur, manager, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.
Logic tells us that this isn’t true and yet on some level we still believe it.
This belief protects us from failure by convincing us that if we haven’t succeeded yet it’s because we haven’t “woken up” yet. At the same time, it tricks us into believing we don’t need to do the work that’s necessary to succeed because when we do wake up, a unicorn will poop on us and we’ll be blessed with a magical knowing.
Humans are strange little meat bags.
Stranger yet, it often doesn’t feel like we’re sitting around waiting to wake up. We’re busy as hell! And tired, dammit!
But being busy isn’t the same as being busy with the right things.
The dream we do need to wake up from is the one with the radioactive spider just waiting to chomp down on our tasty bits and transform us into the superheroes we were destined to become. Once that happens, look out world!
That’s a reeeeal dangerous narrative, my friend. It may be the stuff of good fiction but it’s the killer of real dreams.
This is a nuanced topic so I decided to break it up and turn it into a series (blog trilogy! woohoo!). Over the next couple weeks we’ll get down and dirty discussing ways to toss some of these garbage beliefs into the dumpster fire that is 2020 and forge a better, bolder path forward.
Stick with me, fam!
Got stories about going toe-to-toe with these challenges? Tickle this email link and let me hear ‘em!