My friend Scott said I’ve always been “true to myself” in pursuit of my passions. I had to look up what that meant. An internet definition stated: ‘Making your own decisions for yourself; to become convicted of something.‘ I would add that being true to yourself means following a passion and failing at it as the way to our true calling.
Beyond conviction and decision-making, being true to ourselves is about our search for purpose and meaning and believing that pursuit and achievement of a passion will bring our lives fulfillment.
Being True to Yourself Is About:
- The conviction you have about something that matters to you.
- Listening to passion’s “siren-call” to respond. A call pregnant with the possibility that we answer with a wholehearted “Yes!”.
- Deciding to answer “Yes!”
- Trusting the current that what the call-to-act releases will guide us towards birthing our passion.
- Responding to the situations, opportunities and challenges on the journey towards our passion.
- Believing that our passion will give our lives meaning, purpose and fulfillment.
- Transforming your beliefs about what it means to be true to yourself after your passions fail and faced with defeat.
- Accepting that there is still purpose, meaning and fulfillment for us.
- Learning to love ourselves and our journey just as it is.
- Accepting our human-ness and the unpredictable-ness of life. That we don’t always understand ourselves or why life works out the way it does.
Some of us believed being true to ourselves would bring fulfillment but instead brought defeat. We felt betrayed and deceived and that we could no longer trust ourselves. Afterall, you had been painstakingly true to yourself and arrived at your passion and it either failed or didn’t deliver on its promise. You found yourself wondering, “How could I have gotten this so wrong?”
But we also learned more things than we could’ve imagined or expected.
We learned that our beliefs about what being true to ourselves would bring (fulfillment in vocation, relationship and financial success) needed to be adjusted.
I learned that failed passions, defeats, and setbacks are part of what it means to be true to myself. I also discovered that having passions fail, was not a reflection on the pureness of the conviction of my pursuit or the trueness of my heart and soul’s intentions.
Being true to yourself and starting to pursue a passion is really the first step on the journey towards deeper self-understanding.
You honored yourself by following your convictions and you’ve now come to understand that there is something deeper at work that life wants to teach you.
You understand that being true to yourself is more important than reaching or attaining the passion you pursued. The journey in pursuit of your passion, a “golden fleece” as Joseph Campbell called it, is one in which we were never really supposed to attain. The purpose of passion was to start us on our journey. A journey where life draws us more deeply into it, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with our passion.
