Beyond the Mask: Your Authentic Self Wants to Make a Difference

Welcome to another episode of the Brighten your Way podcast with Christina Renzelli. I'm creating this podcast as a way to share some of the things that I've learned from coaching, both from my clients and the impact that coaching has had on me personally and my own personal growth. So today I wanted to talk about the two fundamental core ideas that come up frequently with almost every person who I work with, and these are two things that almost everybody wants. I never want to generalize, but I feel like these are two areas that I think, if we look at the root of most of our life's challenges, we can find these two fundamental truths. So the first one is I think everyone wants to be fully who they really are and to be seen as who they truly are. So every person is alive and complete inside and as we live and are a person in the world.

Parts of our true selves tend to get minimized or pushed down. And think about who you were as a child. You were probably bolder or less worried about what other people thought of you, and we don't start toning down our true selves until about adolescence, when we start to become hyper aware of what everyone else is doing and we start worrying about being accepted by society. So earlier on in childhood, we tend to be freer and more aware of who we really are. We love ourselves until we learn messages that tell us not to. And that's just how a lot of that's just how it is a lot of the time. So I used to be a third grade teacher and I taught for 12 years before becoming a coach, and kids are super magnetic and the one thing they all want is to be seen for who they truly are. We all want this and as adults, we want to be able to be our truest selves and our most true selves. At the core, we know who we are, but maybe we've just suppressed parts of who we are in order, to quote, fit in. But what we all really want is to be fully alive and fully who we are. In order to do this, we have to learn or I should say relearn how to trust our intuition. So we all have this really strong intuition, but unfortunately, we're taught to disregard it, and this is why we end up doubting ourselves and pushing parts of our true self away.

So we all want to be fully who we are. We want to connect with others as we fully are and we want to be seen and loved for who we truly are. That's the number one thing I think we as humans want. It's fundamental. And the second thing that I think everybody wants from my experience as a coach and as a human, I think everyone wants to make a difference and they want to feel like they make a difference in the world. So we all want to try to make a difference in the world and this gets lost sometimes because we're in the rat race trying to hit the goalposts that we're told we should hit. We go to school and get degrees or get jobs and make money to pay bills and do all the things that we're, you know, supposed to do to become productive members of society.

But I think that deep down, we all want to feel that our lives are making a difference in the world and to other people. It probably goes hand in hand with number one the need to be fully who we are. But part of being fully who we are is the ability to make a difference or the feeling that what we do and who we are makes a difference to other people, to someone else. So if you've been struggling or feeling challenged, ask yourself these two questions Do you feel like you are really able to be fully your true self? Are there parts of you that you're minimizing or hiding or holding back just to make yourself fit in better, and what parts of yourself are you holding back?

And then the number two question is in what ways do you feel like you're making a difference? Would you like to make a difference in ways that you're not able to at the moment, in your current circumstances? So those are just two things to think about. And what would it take to be fully yourself and make a difference in the world? If this sounds like something you'd like help with, send me a message and we can talk more about it. Email me at christina@christinarenzellicom. Thank you for listening to Brighten your Way with Christina Renzelli.