What You Do is Not Who You Are

When you ponder the question "Who am I?" what comes up for you? I suspect first off will be a list of things that you DO. Or titles that you hold. 

But is that really the essence of who you are at your deepest core? 

In this episode I'll be talking about that. That what you DO is not who you ARE, and why it's important to remember that. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

When you ask yourself the question, who am I? Does your mind immediately go to all the things that you do? Let's talk about why that might be a problem. Welcome to the Joy Felicity Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Wakefield. So this week I made kind of a massive decision in my personal life. I have moved down here recently to Florida and was in the process of getting license to sell real estate down here. I've taken all the classes. I was just on the cusp of taking the exam. And I decided that I'm not going to pursue my licensing down here after all. Now that's a big deal for me because that's what I've done pretty much all of my professional career. And it's kind of what I know how to do best. And it's it's a profession that I've enjoyed in many ways. But really, it's it's become a huge part of my identity. So to decide not to pursue that licensing down here is a bigger deal than it may sound at first glance. And I decided it for many reasons. Kind of the tipping point for me came with some different lawsuits that are pending in the courts right now that look to possibly change the structure of the way that we do real estate in the next years coming up. Not necessarily so much that that's going to be a horrible thing for the industry. I just think there's going to be a lot of turmoil and a lot of change in the industry coming up. So if I was still in Tennessee, where I've held my license for the last 11 or 12 years, I probably wouldn't be making no changes. But when I'm sitting on the cusp of starting over in a new market and all of the new expenses and the time and effort and energy that that will require, I really had planned to be retired from this business within the next three to five years anyway. So I just made the decision that this isn't a good time for me on a personal level to do that in a brand new area. I'm not making any commentary about, you know, the industry in general. Just for me as a person, I made the decision that that wasn't probably the best idea for me. It's been something that's been pending for a while in the back of my mind. I actually almost retired from the industry a few years back and then jumped back in. And there's a myriad of reasons for that. I love my clients. I love the business itself. I've acquired an immense amount of knowledge over the years in it, and it's a bit of an addictive thing, actually, once you get into it, because it's an exciting business where no two days are the same, and there's a lot to be said for the business. But for me as a single mom, it's actually been very difficult as well. It's a schedule that on the one hand does offer some flexibility, but you also work a lot of weekends and a lot of evenings and a lot of holidays and a lot of vacations. And so the scheduling can be rather unpredictable, which has made it difficult for me as the only parent in my home to be able to be as present for my children as I would like to be. I miss a lot of events. I miss a lot of time with them, fully present while I'm on my phone, putting out fires. And so it's been pending in the back of my mind for quite a while to make a change. So I guess I just finally decided that now is the time. It's going along with a lot of personal changes in my life. So this career change is part of a more grand change in my life, generally speaking, I guess you could say. The reason I want to talk about this today, though, isn't really to talk about my career change. That will probably come in a later episode, because I do have some ideas about what comes next for me. It's more to talk about why it took me so long and so much hand-wringing to come to this decision. And it goes back to what I said earlier that this had become quite a big part of my identity, both online and even just within my own self. And so every time I thought about quitting, all of those fears would pop up in me. Well, what else do I do? I this is what I know how to do best. It's what I've always done. It's who I am. How do I not be a realtor? How do I not have my real estate license? It's just what I do. And so every time I would begin to step forward toward the things that my heart was calling me toward, I would sort of run back to the safety of familiarity in that because the question was always in my mind. Well, what do I say now if somebody asks me, what do you do? In casual conversation on dating apps, everywhere, this question comes up all the time in society. What do you do? And we have a knee-jerk reaction to that. Well, I'm a realtor, or I'm a banker, or I'm this or that, or whatever it is that we do, or I'm a stay-at-home mom, or whatever labels that we have easily at hand in our mind is what we spit out when someone asks that question. And what do you do when the answer to that becomes not quite so simple, or perhaps not quite so societally acceptable, or not as clearly defined? It can throw us into a bit of an identity crisis. First of all, in terms of what we think other people are going to think, but also just in terms of our own heart and soul, who am I without that identity marker? And we do this on a lot of things. Our careers are one of the more notable places that we attach these markers or these labels or these symbols to ourselves. But we do it in a lot of things. Who are you? If someone asks you that question, or you ask yourself, who am I? What comes up immediately for you? It's probably a lot of labels. Well, I'm a wife, or I'm a girlfriend, or I'm a parent, or I'm a realtor, or I'm a Republican or Democrat, or I'm a Christian or a Muslim, or I'm whatever other things. You know, it it can be about our belief systems, it can be about our careers, it can be about our relationship status. But the important thing that I want to get at is that we have these labels. And the labels almost always are attached to the things that we do, not to the things that we are. And that's a very important distinction to begin to make, and a very important understanding to come to that I'm just now beginning to fully integrate into my heart that the things that we do are not who we are. I'm gonna say that again. What we do is not who we are. Now it can be an important reflection of who we are, and it can be things that uh we choose to do because of who we are, but the things themselves are not who we are. And why is that an important thing to understand? Because all throughout our lives we're going to be faced with these moments of identity crisis. For instance, here's a good example from my life as my children are beginning to grow up and move away. Part of my identity has always been I'm a mother. I have nine children, so that's obviously been a massive part of my identity. But it's very easy to attach the doings of motherhood to that. So, for instance, when somebody becomes an empty nester at the end of that, that can throw them into often a huge identity crisis. Well, what do I do now that my kids are grown up? Who am I now? Because all of my life, when I thought of being a mother, it was all wrapped around perhaps the things that I did. Well, I was a dead mother and I was a room mother and I worked in their schools. And these are the things that I did as a mother. As they get older, they don't need me to do those things anymore. But I'm still a mother. And coming to the understanding that I am a mother who loves her children. That is the core of that particular portion of my identity. So when you come to that understanding, it's not about what I'm doing as a young mother. I also ran into a bit of an identity crisis when I suddenly was divorced and needed to become a working mother when I had been an at-home mother for 20 years. The ways that I did parenting had to change. I wasn't able to be in the classroom all the time. There was things that I used to do that I couldn't do anymore. And so I constantly felt like I was failing as a mother because I wasn't doing it the way that I used to be able to do it. And it's important to always understand, I'm still a mother who loves her children. It just looks a little bit different at different times and places along that journey. But the core of that remains the same. Whether your children are at home, whether you work, whether you're a stay-at-home parent, whether you've got little children or adult children moving into grandparenthood, you're still a mother who loves her children. Just the outward appearance of what that looks like day to day will change, but your basic identity does not. So when we stop wrapping our views of identity around those doings, we'll far less often get caught up in that sense of failing and be able to pivot and swerve into new activities that still match the basic value system and the basic core of who we are. And the more we understand this, I think the faster that pivot can happen with far less angst. We may miss those days when they were little finger painting, but our personal value and worth won't be at stake inside of our own minds. And we need to stop judging other people based on these things too, based on the way that we choose to do uh different activities to judge how somebody else feels or who somebody else is, because perhaps it looks different for them. The core of it is what matters most, and that can be sometimes very hard to integrate. It can be very difficult. For most of my adult life, I was very active in a church. And there was a lot of activities in this particular church, and we had responsibilities that we called callings, and that became a big part of your identity. You know, well, what's your calling right now? What do you do right now? And people would get very angsty about whether or not they had one that was a good calling or bad calling or all of these different things. And there were activities we were supposed to be at and meetings we were meant to attend, and much of our life was dictated by the doings of the church. And I'm not even commenting on whether or not that is good or bad. That's a personal choice for people, whether or not they choose to be affiliated with a church or a group of any kind and to abide by the activity structure of that organization. That was not the problem. The problem was that a lot of my identity became wrapped up around those doings. And so when I began to question the doctrine of that church years later and left the church, I was once again thrown into a massive identity crisis because who was I without this label? Who was I without being able to say that I am this? I do this. And I floundered for quite a long time, feeling like I no longer had a foundation before I finally landed and realized that my identity was wrapped up in my personal relationship with God, universe. Most of you that listen to this podcast know that I think it's all the same, whatever name you give it. But that that was my identity was a person that valued spirituality and a closeness to God. My identity never was or should have been membership in a particular organization. The organization could be a reflection of the things that I believe, and my membership there could demonstrate that, but my true identity comes from that personal connection with spirit. And that remained unchanged, no matter what church I affiliated with, or could remain unchanged if I allowed myself to understand that. And that's when I finally felt at peace spiritually again, was when I came to that understanding deep within my own soul that my identity had not changed at all. Simply the outward doings of what that looked like had changed. We do it with political affiliations, we do it with relationships. That can become a huge part of your identity. I'm a wife. But what happens, like in my case, when you suddenly get divorced? And too much of your personal identity is wrapped up around that relationship because you only have control over part of that relationship. There's another person involved that also can make choices and can change that for you. And circumstances outside of the relationship can also be influential. And then what do you do when that ends when your identity was wrapped up around it? That becomes a big problem for a lot of people and they can find themselves in a very difficult situation. Same with career changes, either because of job loss or even retirement. It's well known that a lot of people struggle as they move into retirement because they base their whole identity around their job. And when they're no longer getting up every day and going into that job, a lot of people have a sense of worthlessness, lack of value that hits them more powerfully than they ever imagined upon retirement. At first, they're really excited that they've retired, and then they find themselves like a ship without a rudder, having no idea what to do every day without that structure. But it's deeper than that. It goes back to what I said before. It's more about how do I define myself to other people now? Oh, I just don't do anything. I'm retired. That feels weird when you're used to getting up every day and having maybe a high-powered career that is well respected in the community. If your identity is wrapped around that career, that can be a very unsettling experience that can take people a long time, sometimes forever, to fully settle into. And they'd start to attach a whole lot of meaning to the fact that they're no longer that thing. So therefore they're nothing. And that's not true. Your identity is deeper than what you were doing. Your identity comes down to the work ethic that helped you become successful in that. I'm a hardworking person who values service, who values knowledge, who values intelligence, those kinds of things. Your true identity comes down to your deepest uh values. The essence of why you do what you do. Not what you do, but why you do it. And that identity can carry you through almost any kind of life change because you can take those same values and you can swerve them to something new. So the fact that I'm leaving real estate after all of this time, does that mean that all those years in real estate are no longer valuable to me? Of course not. I learned a ton of skills, people skills, sales skills. I built a network of people that I'm connected to. All of that comes with me. That's my identity, not my title. My value system is my identity. In truth, very often the things that we're doing don't reflect our true identities at all. And that's where a lot of the source of anxiety is coming from in a lot of our lives, where the things that we're doing don't match our identity. And we're doing them for a lot of different reasons that I've talked about a lot on this podcast before and will again, that are external, and we're kind of trying to stuff our lives into those things and make ourselves into this outward identity that doesn't really match the person that's underneath at all. And that's a big problem. If you're trying to live a life full of joy, peace needs to be at the heart of that, and kind of at the heart of peace is matching your doings to your belief system, whatever that may be. And it's not gonna look the same for everybody. So, like I've talked about before, for some people, they will thrive in a high-powered sales position where they're constantly on the go and the hustle energy is is like fuel to them and they love it. Other people that will literally feel like their soul is being sucked out of their body. For some people, they enjoy it, but perhaps it's keeping them from other things that are more important to them. It's all personal, it's all individual. But the main point I wanted to make on today's podcast is that no matter what I'm doing for my job, no matter what life stage I'm at, or relationship status, or political affiliation, or any of those things, no matter what church I attend or don't attend, no matter where I was born, all of those kinds of things, those are not the essence of who I am. And when you start to strip those things away, there's a kind of an uncomfortable moment in time because that's how we're used to defining ourselves. And when you take all of those out, you can sit there a little bit confused. Who am I then? If though if none of those things, if all of those things are just the things that I do and they're not who I am, how do I even figure out who I am? And that's the beginning of a beautiful, amazing, transformative journey. When you strip it all down to that raw question and don't have all of the answers readily available like you thought you did, but that right there, that moment of confusion, and it's it can be a very uncomfortable place actually to be sitting, or it can be very exciting, depending on how you interpret those feelings. That's the beginning. That's when your new life of joy really begins. And we're going to talk about that more coming later. But let's be human beings rather than human doings. Of course we do stuff. Once we figure out who we are, it is going to result in us choosing to do things a certain way. So I'm not trying to say that the doings don't matter. They matter a lot, and they can change our lives for positive or negative, depending on the choices that we make, and they definitely can reflect who we've decided that we are, or who we're allowing other people to decide we are. So the doings matter. They're just not at the heart of it. So take that time today, take all of those outward labels off, and ask yourself that question: who am I? What is my true identity? And see what comes up for you because you're only at the beginning at that point, but it's an exciting journey ahead. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you for joining me today on the Joy Felicity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share, and come follow me on all major social media sites at JoyFelicity or on my website, joyfelicity.com. You can follow the link in the description for this episode to all of the places that we can connect. Have a great day, everybody. And remember dare to dream, plan to play, live to learn.