Whose Life Are You Living?

Watch a video version on my Youtube Channel.

What kind of life are you living? Whose life are you living?

I spent the better part of thirty years not living my own. From the outside it looked normal, even good. Grow up, go to school, get a degree, get a job, buy a house, start a family, move into a nice neighborhood. I did the things that felt expected of me, without ever asking who was doing the expecting.

That's the part that took me the longest to see. I wasn't just living an average life. I was living by rules I never chose, rules so woven into everything that they didn't feel like rules at all. Culturally appropriate. Societally appropriate. Recommended. The American Dream, more or less.

None of that makes the traditional path wrong. It's just not for everyone. And it turned out it wasn't for me.

So here's the question I want to put to you: are you living your life, or are you living the life that was set out for you by people who meant well? People who love you, but who maybe didn't understand what would actually be in your best interest. What would actually make you feel alive.

I know there's a version of "follow your passion" that gets dismissed as naive, disconnected from how the real world works. I don't think that's the whole story. There's a way to stay grounded in this world, to survive in it, while still making decisions from your authentic self instead of from inherited expectations. That's possible. Maybe more possible now than it's ever been.

It's also not clean. It sometimes asks you to give things up. I'm in that right now. We're selling our house. We don't know exactly what's next.

So as you think about your own life, and about what I've just shared, ask yourself: is there an area where you're not living from who you really are?

That question is the whole of what I do. I help people close the gap between who they are and how they're actually living.

It's easy to convince yourself you're already doing that. Then one day you look at your life, look at how you're showing up in it, and realize this isn't you. This isn't who you are. That's the moment something has to change.