Who told you who you were supposed to be

One of the hardest questions we can answer is: “Who do you want to be?”

Not who others need you to be. Not who you were told you were supposed to be. Not who life’s experiences convinced you that you had to become.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve asked some version of that question to people in incredibly different places in their lives. I’ve asked women coming out of corrections, people rebuilding after addiction or homelessness, staff just beginning their careers, and people who were already decades into them. What always struck me was that, regardless of the circumstances, the question was rarely easy to answer — because many people had spent years becoming who they thought they needed to be, without ever stopping to ask who they truly wanted to become.

I think part of the reason is that we are all moving through transitions, whether we recognize them that way or not. We’re growing, chasing dreams, learning difficult lessons, rebuilding after something we didn’t expect, adjusting to a new reality, or reaching a point where we simply start wondering if there might be something more. Over the years, I began to notice that how people moved through those transitions had a lot to do with how they saw themselves, and that view of themselves was often shaped long before they had ever thought to question it.

I could ask a woman coming out of corrections what she wanted for her life, and she might tell me she didn’t know because she had always assumed she would be a drug dealer, an addict, or a criminal. I could ask someone starting out in their career what they really wanted to do, and they might struggle to answer because they had always been told that the path was to go to school, get a good job and support their family.

The circumstances looked nothing alike, but underneath them I kept hearing the same thing: people were making decisions about their future based on ideas about themselves and their lives that had often been handed to them by someone else.

I understood this in a very real way because I had lived with that contradiction for much of my own life. What other people believed about my story, and how they thought I should feel about it, never quite matched what I felt inside. Yet so much of the world around me told me that it should.

Growing up with abuse, I understood why people saw my story the way they did. They saw something sad. They felt sorry for me. There were messages about what those experiences should have done to me and how someone with my history should feel. But that wasn’t how I experienced myself. There was always a disconnect between the person the world seemed to expect me to be because of what had happened to me and something within me that didn’t fully identify with that version of my story.

That doesn’t mean I was untouched by what happened. I carried beliefs that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. At times, I believed I was evil and that I didn’t belong. But even those beliefs existed alongside something else in me that kept saying, this doesn’t quite make sense.

Romans 12:2 — the renewing of your mind — had been part of my life for as long as I could remember. I didn’t understand then what it would eventually come to mean to me, but the idea that the way we think and the way the world tells us to think aren’t necessarily the same thing was something I understood long before I had language for it.

That tension — between what we’re told our story means and what may actually be true about who we are — became something I recognized again and again in the people I worked with.

When you carry beliefs about yourself long enough, they can stop feeling like beliefs at all. They just feel true.

That’s why one of the most pivotal questions I learned to ask people was also one of the simplest:

Why?

Why do you believe that about yourself? Why do you believe that is the life you are supposed to have? Why does the thing you really want feel possible for someone else, but not for you?

The answers were different, but so often they led back to something that had been said, experienced or absorbed years earlier. This is what my family expected. This is what people told me I would become. This is what happened to me. This is how people have always seen me.

Somewhere along the way, those messages stopped being something people had heard and became something they believed about themselves.

The circumstances I encountered throughout my career were vastly different from one person to the next, and different from my own, but I recognized the question underneath them: How much of what I believe about myself is actually true, and how much have I learned to believe because of what happened to me or what other people have told me?

I also saw what happened when people began to question the answer.

Someone who had always seen herself as an addict began to recognize that she was also resilient, capable and worthy of a different life. Someone who had spent years believing they weren’t leadership material began to recognize strengths in themselves they had never given much weight to. Someone who thought they had to stay on the path that had been chosen for them began to give themselves permission to imagine another one.

Their circumstances didn’t magically change because of one conversation, but something important did change: the way they saw themselves within those circumstances. And when that began to shift, choices that once seemed impossible started to feel possible.

I’ve watched people take chances they never thought they would take, have conversations they had spent years avoiding, pursue opportunities they had already decided weren’t for them, leave behind things that no longer fit, and begin building lives they once couldn’t imagine for themselves.

Not because someone told them who they should become, but because they began to question who they had been told they were.

I know that change personally too. For me, renewal wasn’t about pretending the difficult parts of my story hadn’t happened or convincing myself that they hadn’t affected me. It was about beginning to separate what happened to me from who I was, and questioning whether the way the world had taught me to understand my story was the only way to see it.

Sometimes the hardest part of deciding what you want to do with your life isn’t figuring out what you want. It’s recognizing how much of the answer has already been shaped for you — by other people, expectations, circumstances, painful experiences, or messages you absorbed before you were old enough to decide whether they were true.

After more than 20 years of walking alongside people through very different chapters of life, while also walking through my own, I’ve come to believe that meaningful change often begins there.

Before we can decide what we want to do differently, sometimes we have to become curious about what we believe about ourselves, where those beliefs came from, and whether they were ever ours to carry in the first place.

Because when the way you see yourself begins to change, the way you see your life and what might be possible begins to change too.

When you see yourself differently, you live differently.