Knowing What Is Truest About You

I have a picture in my office that I keep in plain sight. It is a picture of me as a 7-year old when I was the ring bearer at a wedding. As you can see from the picture below I was pretty proud of myself.

I once told a colleague about this picture who replied by saying he thought the idea was to keep a picture on your desk to remind you of your goals.

He said, "I expected you would have a picture of a Ferrari, a lake house, or a boat; something that motivates you!"

I told him that's not at all what motivates me and this picture is not there as a motivator, but a vivid reminder.

This picture reminds me of something far more valuable than cars, houses, money, business growth and boats.

What is most valuable to me is being the truest form of myself and living each day just how I was created to be.

That kid in that picture reminds me that I was created to be a friend, to laugh, to love large, to be sensitive, to give people the benefit of the doubt, and to help others.

This is who I was created to be!

This picture is a daily and gentle reminder that no matter what the voice of shame tells me, I am all those things.

Everyone has a little kid still inside of them, including you.

However, for most, somewhere along the way, your inner kid got knocked around.

It happened when you were told you were not good enough, smart, capable, or unloveable. It was when you were rejected, were cut from the team, told you were not good-looking or pretty and had friends whom you found out were anything but friends.

And when that happened, the work began to protect your little kid, to tell him/her to toughen up. You looked to defend all those lies, but some of them got through and landed and in the process, your kid got buried and your true identity got lost.

In order for you to really begin living, you have to get back to who you were created to be. It will be hard work and you may need help to get there, but oh my is it so, so worth it!

So the question remains . . .

Who were you created to be?

Maybe in order to answer that question, you need to find a picture of yourself when you were a kid and begin to reject the lies you have come to believe about yourself, and embrace what you know to be truest about you.

This is the first step you need to take in order to design a life that you love.

On the journey with you,

Carlos

This edition was first published in The Life Design Newsletter on LinkedIn.