To be ... Mindful of Identity

Hi ———,

Hope you are enjoying a good summer. Thank you for your email setting up an appointment for next Monday. I read your note regarding your goals and reasons for wanting to be coached. Thank you for sharing the challenges and aspirations that you and your company are working with to make wise choices.There is a very visible uncertainty these days which is heightening our perception and scrutiny of our own lives, assumptions, roles and our own identity. There is a lot of disruption going on but on the other hand, there are extraordinary opportunities too.

Subtle assumptions precede the forming of any recognizable self identity, triggering minuscule intentional and unintentional thoughts and emotions owning or repulsing an identity. A stream of thoughts or an alignment of ideas gain momentum towards the culmination of a sense of I and purpose, spilling onto the conscious canvas of thoughts, emotions and actions — an expression of an individual life.

A sense of being something — an identity, takes center stage in our experience of living and our perception of life. Everything we come across manifests in either being worth ‘me’ — my time and effort, worth doing, worth pursuing or worth letting go or not worth ‘me’.

Actions originate from a cluster of loose identities adding towards a certain new entity, seamlessly blending into a concept or labelled identity — a constellation of identities that promise a much wanted momentary certainty in securing a sense of ease or disruption of dis-ease — a self identity of profitable relevance to make the best use of possibilities.

Self identity becomes a source of an action and in turn, an experience — which more often than not is based on a value, an emotion, a thought or a very physical reality. The mere emergence of a new possibility may make us feel reluctant to merely leave it for time to take care of or for unforeseen events to mutate and present us with a better hand at life.

Sometimes, our identity feels like a non-identifiable insignificant significance when reality changes beyond our scope of an educated and linear vision. Often, our perceived identity does not relate in anyway or form to the entity that is most valued — in all tangents, to and from the thinker, the self and its presumed identity. Ourselves. Our perceived identity becomes merely a tribute to the past or a set of positive words, designed to desensitize and induce a healthy amnesia to protect ourselves from our own insecurities and deepest fears. Words to facilitate an ideated self identity, self insured, in our pursuit to feel and be successful.

An identified self identity is perhaps the closest thing that we relate to as the conscious self - a self that is quintessentially a set of traits, functions and habits — physical and abstract mannerisms with unique and custom made resonances to a GPS device set to reach the coordinates of ‘success and happiness’. Set to our own landscape of values — inherited, invented and tested at various periods in our evolution and invention of secure and sacred spaces.

We have combatted uncertainty and insecurity many times, in the physical and ideated reality of our own devices. And yes, we have fortunately slipped, fallen, gotten up and carried on. Otherwise our awareness to notice only what we want to notice will never change. We will never notice reality.We often build habitual trenches and bridges to identify ourselves with the value we bring to ourselves and society with a constructed identity. An identity preempting a necessity for a designed mental preframe of requiring a methodology to live in abundance, dominated by fervent signs and symbols of encouragement to exercise our free will and satiate our unsustainable senses. To solve our humanly problems in proportion to shareholder value and reap the rewards of labor with complete disregard to the wisdom of how much is enough. We envision and collude a way of life, inventing ourselves from a beltway of a cookie cutter education system, customizing ourselves into a pre-determined industrial Bonzai Liberalism that pervades our life — pendulating to the promise of freedom — freedom from want and satisfaction of purpose.

Out of free will, we labor at forming identities with a customer friendly magnetism to certain spheres of contact, fueled by a want of expansion or a fear of being devalued or rejected - individually, as families, as groups and as nations — inadvertently inventing an external rating system for our personal and collective self esteem, believing in fixed dominant identities. Our self expressions are willingly educated, aligned, transformed or muted to be in tune with the terminology of a sphere of identities that network and build transactional relationships — the ‘x’ factor being the ‘why’.

Our past and our future may not have anything in common except our present. Our present — even though fleeting, is always at the core of our composite and vibrant identity. It is this entity that relates to and sustains both our future and our past. Revisiting experiences, recycling thoughts and validating and strengthening emotions. Our memories of joy, pain, success and failure often reincarnate and heavily influence our instruments in navigating, qualifying and quantifying the future, in scaling performance, risk management and rewards (external and internal). The things we want to do, to have and to avoid are based on perceptions, expectations and judgements, born at a very specific time of a confluence of invented and inherited sensory and abstract resources, constantly evolving collection of identities often mistaken to be static. Our identity is what we want it to be. There is no fixed identity. There are no fixed identities. We are constantly evolving — reality is constantly evolving. Our identity is our invention. We constantly reinvent ourselves with exposure to an osmotic exchange of internal and external factors — equal parts building and dismantling. We must validate our accomplishments with gratitude and joy. Own our mistakes and forgive ourselves for not being realistic and internally profitable to ourselves. Recognize our joyful voluntary discipline, our disgust for distractions and our ability to delay gratification.

After we chip away at our perception of identities and separate the art from the artist, what is the identity of success? Just think about it. Looking forward to work with you.

Best regards,

Tenzin