This Is The Year To Be Who You Know You Are

Photo by Miss_Katrina_Beers courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

If you’re anything like me, you have trouble sometimes identifying what your Next Great Move should be.

You might have a strong feeling of what you want in your entrepreneurial life, but you struggle with which act will be your highest leverage one {and yes — you even think in buzzphrases like “highest leverage”}.

You know that feelings generate action and action leads to feelings, but you’re not sure which one should take the lead. {It’s the old chicken-or-the-egg debate.}

Maybe, like me, you worry about losing interest in your anticipated project before it’s even off the ground.

And the thought of losing interest in the thing you really want, the thing you feel you were born to do {mm-hmm, that thing}, is so sad you can hardly stand to dwell on it.

Because you know you want this thing, but even that doesn’t guarantee you’ll do what you have to do to get it. You know yourself: there might be something even more dazzly — even more well-authorized and vouched for and propagated and recommended — that pops up in your peripheral vision before you’ve taken the second step into your first vision, and you might decide you’d rather pursue the new thing.

Like you, my entrepreneurial passion regularly wanes in the shadow of all of these concerns. There are days — weeks — when I covet the easier, more structured lifestyle of my friends who are not self-employed, receive regular paychecks, benefits, and vacation days. My friends who, yes, have to make decisions at work, but the great majority of those decisions don’t directly and immediately impact when is the next time they’ll get paid. Their minds don’t necessarily spin at night with ideas for how they can next use their creative talents in the world.

I’ve just had to face it: I’m not naturally a Point A leads to Point B person. My routes to fulfillment have always been circuitous, intuitively fueled, and perhaps to onlookers, a bit devil-may-care. My crescendos of success certainly haven’t always come through steady plotting, but rather, through what I think of as “intuitive lunging.”

And, you know, ask any trainer: lunges hurt like hell when you’re doing them right.

I count myself lucky to be someone who’s able to identify very readily and easily what I want and how I want to feel.

It’s all the other stuff that gets in the way: the systems, the order of things, the ranking of leverage-ness.

This past week, I had my first coaching session with Sinclair of Self Activator. {She was coaching me, just so we’re clear.} During just our first session, she led me through a visualization process that helped me integrate my vision of what I want with the tools to apprehend how I’m going to get there.

And what I saw, felt, and knew at the end of that session was so beautifully, clearly obvious to me. The vision was whole and complete, colorful and tangible. It was me — who I know myself to be, even though the world hasn’t seen it yet.

The most important thing I took away from our hour together was this:

I’ll get where I want to go when I start living the life of the person I know myself to be…immediately, with the very next action I take.

Today, what I’d like to tell you is this:

You know who you are. You know who you see yourself to be in the future. You know.

You don’t need peer or mentor validation, social proof, a highly trafficked blog, a big commission, a completed manuscript in your desk drawer, or five figures in your bank account to tell you who you are. Or who you are becoming.

It doesn’t matter who else observes it, touts it, or approves of who you are and who you are becoming.

You know. And that’s the only thing that matters in helping you bring Future You a little closer into the Now.

I shared this thought in a Tweet yesterday,

Sooooooo, what does that mean? It means that there is no magic from outside of you, no Deus ex machina.

But there is magic from inside of you. There’s intuition. Hunches. Stuff you love. Stuff you’re wildly good at. Stuff you hate. Stuff that drains you. Places you revel in being. Places you can’t stand being. Dreams. Fantasies. Vision. God.

There’s evidence of Future You — the you you know yourself to be — right there within you. In fact, your brain is steeping in it.

This is the year to be who you know you are. Don’t wait. See it, trust it, and take the very first action. This very hour.

In the comments, I’d love for you to feel free to share who you know yourself to be, and who you’re going to let yourself be this year.