“She’s a Lamborghini trying to be like the flood of sedans that surround her, completely unaware of her encoded magnificence.”
That’s my client, Jane, and most likely, you’re just like her. You’ve sacrificed your potential to chase everyday achievement, and you don’t even know it.
Actually part of you knows – the part of you that is restless, thinking ‘this can’t be all there is’.
You have a ‘persona’ doing all the things while the real you is wilting in the background. Or maybe the real you is waiting until you’ve ‘made it’ and can finally do what it wants?
There’s a term that’s become popular: code-switching exhaustion. It’s the exhaustion caused by constantly suppressing your authentic identity.
We each come in with a unique encoding, a blueprint that is specific to us. And from the moment we’re born, we are weighed, measured and compared to some standard.
It seems innocuous and yet in that moment the foundation for being someone else’s version of us is laid.
Why It Matters
Have you ever studied an acorn? It seems impossibly small to become the enormous stately oak tree. Yet it does. It never becomes a pine tree, a sunflower or an eggplant.
What about a tomato seed? With over 10,000 varieties of tomatoes, how does the tiny seed know which tomato to become? Why doesn’t it get confused and become a pepper?
Because of its encodings.
In both instances, the potential final, glorious result is directly encoded into the small inconspicuous, seemingly unimpressive seed.
Humans have those encodings, too. Each one of us has a unique, amazing blueprint that is pure potential living within. Waiting to be tapped. Why is it waiting?
Because humans have free will. And our blueprint ends up bumping up against society’s ideas for us, the conditioning, the standardization, and more.
Becoming our potential doesn’t just happen, we have to choose it. That’s harder than it sounds since more often than not, our voice gets buried under the cacophony and we can’t distinguish our song from the rest.
Potential vs Achievement
This conversation came up yesterday with my client, who I’ll call Jane. She’s had solid success in her niche and yet she feels torn. “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking with big existential questions and when the alarm goes off at five, the world needs me to be me and make the magic happen.”
She’s in a three-way tug-of-war: continually feeling like she has to do more (ramp up the business), feeling like she just needs to stop and be done (sell or close the business), and being pulled to even bigger questions (is this all there is?). She’s constantly pushing even though she’s exhausted and frustrated.
Who is the voice in her head? Is that her, what people have told her, or some greater influence? And how can she tell the difference?
She understands that she has a unique why built into her and right now it feels like that’s just one more thing to do. One more thing added to her already full plate.
This is the achiever brain doing what it does best – pushing. We’re so conditioned to achieve that we sacrifice ourselves in the process. We know the physical costs – breakdowns, depression, addictions, illness and more. We keep going anyway.
Ironically, there’s another level of cost – our own potential.
Jane is so conditioned to do what needs to get done that she has no space to get to know herself, the potential she came to be. She’s a Lamborghini trying to be like the flood of sedans that surround her, completely unaware of her encoded magnificence. That’s what standardization does – even in achievement.
Follow the path, or rebel against it. Neither option teaches how to look inside and be yourself.
Jane has sacrificed her potential for everyday achievement.
That may sound like she has to choose between potential and achievement. Nope. Both success and achievement come more easily from an aligned place.
The Painter Who Had No Talent
Vincent van Gogh had no idea what he wanted to do. He bounced from one profession to the next swinging from art dealer to teacher to pastor, and more. Each time he threw himself in completely, only to abandon it and move on feeling more dejected with every attempt. He kept changing styles, mediums and goals.
He eschewed painting and drawing as he’d been told that he had no talent for them. Instead, he drifted trying to become someone his family could be proud of, someone useful to, and approved of, by society.
Van Gogh’s search was genuinely anguished as evidenced by a letter to his brother where he refers to himself as an “idler despite himself” –
“the idler truly despite himself, who is gnawed inwardly by a great desire for action, who does nothing because he finds it impossible to do anything since he’s imprisoned in something”
~Letter 155, To Theo van Gogh. Cuesmes, c. 22-24 June 1880
How society must see him – lazy and aimless – is a heart-wrenching contrast to his internal reality: consumed by a desire to act, unable to find the right outlet. He can feel there is something he’s meant for, he just doesn’t know what it is.
His sense of purpose made him restless. He chose to listen to that voice and keep exploring instead of squashing it and settling, yet that was a continual source of angst for him.
“I took the way of active melancholy… the melancholy that hopes and aspires and searches, to the one that despairs, mournful and stagnant.”
~Letter 155, To Theo van Gogh. Cuesmes, c. 22-24 June 1880
Honoring his need to explore in the face of the outer world pushing him to pick something took him on a deep inward journey. He kept questioning the voice in his head and testing his path. Rather than settling for achievement, he pushed for alignment. He refused to settle in an arena that wasn’t right – a feature in his life, not a failure.
This is what made space for his lightning to strike.
A few months after that particular letter to his brother, van Gogh committed himself to becoming an artist. That did not bring overnight success, it did bring him to himself, which led to his breakthrough.
Van Gogh had always used paint generously and, inspired by the still lifes of Adolphe Monticelli, in June of 1886, he deliberately began to explore the effect of applying thick paint. That eventually became the bold, thick-brushstroke style that is his legacy.
The work for which he’s remembered happened late in Vincent’s life. Many would say that he frittered away his early life, quitting job after job. What if his late start and willingness to quit weren’t problems, what if they were the very process he needed to get to his alignment.
If he’d followed ‘best practices’, he might have stuck it out as a teacher and we might not have The Starry Night in our world today.
He might have found himself in the situation Jane is in – feeling stuck in a life knowing that it was not the life he came to live – regardless of how amazing that life is.
Jane created a phenomenal life, and she feels stuck. The gap between where she is and who she is makes her tremble.
Society celebrates her wins while telling her to ignore her pain – the pain of being an oak living the life of a pine tree.
Finding You
Living someone else’s version of your life, no matter how successful and amazing it looks from the outside, always ends up being a prison.
There’s a point in time when something you’re ‘tolerating’ becomes so annoying that it flips a switch inside. Getting to that point is actually the good news.
It means that you’re ready to step up to the next level.
So you can either take the step into the unknown, or ignore it and stay put, “safe” in your success. There’s a cost to both, which is what Jane is learning.
Stepping into the unknown means diving inside, getting vulnerable and questioning everything.
Staying put means continuing to sacrifice yourself. Remember the physical costs? Breakdowns, depression, addictions, illness and more. There’s also the cost of closing the door on your soul, the part of you that’s been calling you for decades, your very encodings – a cost that may not show up on your P&L, and is the one that matters the most.
There is a path to get you there – it’s just less traveled.
Are you courageous enough to set out on that path?
If so, as I told Jane earlier today, “congratulations, I’m honored to be walking with you!”
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If you’d like support in your journey, this is what we do. We work with entrepreneurs, artists and athletes who are ready to know themselves and live fully in alignment.
Check out our upcoming free Gap Workshop to get to know us.
If living someone else’s version of your life feels familiar, you might like these two episodes:
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