Puppet on a string

Have you ever felt like you were torn into pieces from many different sides and helpless to step out of it and realize that it’s just your mind playing tricks on you? – Well, that’s how I felt really intensely for most of the day yesterday.

Like I mentioned in my last post about purely being me, I’m really good at anticipating what others want and expect of me. But I didn’t realize until the last few days, of how it seeped into many different parts of my path to be self-employed and build up my business. I didn’t know at all how to handle that completely new process of being on my own, deciding for myself, what to do almost every single minute. No idea, how to really focus and build up a project like that from scratch.

The Search…

So, of course, I was looking for answers in a lot of different places outside of myself. Seeing patterns, following questions, mimicking other’s paths and figuring out how I would fit in those paths. I only realize now, how stressful that was that whole time. Always being on the lookout of what I missed in my observations, always afraid that it’s not a complete replica. So I guess that is a big part of why it never felt right to go online with it. It never really felt like my own expression.

I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, to collect some new experiences of making myself visible to a broader audience, but it only got me so far. Like a child that can’t swim very well yet and is pushed into deep water, your first instinct is to just struggle real hard to somehow get back to the shore or some area where you can hold on to something or get out of the water. That’s all that I could do. It was frustrating, but at the same time, it also helped me to see the parts I still needed to learn and figure out, before I could just swim on my own.

Who am I?

I was wondering, if I’m a Coach, or a Trainer, or a Blogger, or a Writer, or a Consultant. Trainer for groups to go out into nature to connect with nature, or just facilitator and organizer for those events? Consultant for IT, for Online Marketing, for organizational development? I really tensed myself to figure out who I was. Even if I came up with more than one definition, I would have been fine. But I felt like I NEEDED to find an answer to the question of what I do. During my training to become self-employed and all the other programs (marketing, business,…) I stumbled upon after that, a lot of focus was to get your elevator pitch up and ready.

All of those actions were very much focused on what’s outside of me. Even though I meditated on my vision and my dreams and what I really want to do and why, the motivation was still somewhat extrinsic. It was focused on what I need to be on the outside so that I fit into some pattern where people know what to make of me.

stuff that just happens…

All the while, I didn’t even realize, that I was already following my path. It was especially fascinating to me, that all the steps to follow my heart had happened incidentally, even though I was putting all that energy in those really stressful exercises to find out what that big faceless blob of “society” needed me to be. It felt like running around in circles with your feet tied together.

So while I’m ripping away the strings, my next posts will finally reveal, what I came up with for the question of “Who am I and what is my message?”