How you can tell that you’ve lost touch with who you truly are?
In our work with people, we have noticed that many of them, usually in their mid-30s to mid-50s, tend to lose themselves because they are so involved with their work or personal relationships.
They might be a single parent who is so busy trying to accomplish everything between the job, kids, and household, that somewhere along the way they themselves got lost.
Or they might have a successful career and seem to be achieving a lot, giving a confident and happy impression to others, but deep down inside they are no longer sure of who they are and whether life is taking the turns they want it to take.
Whether or not they are fully aware of how much they have lost themselves, most of them wouldn’t know what to do to find the way back.
One of the most touching and rewarding bits of feedback we get from participants is them saying:
“Finally I have come back to myself!”
We cannot think of anything better than that to contribute to the world.
That’s why today we share with you some ideas on how to recognize when you have lost yourself and we show you some steps you can take to help start the process of coming ‘home’ to yourself – back to who you really are.
How to recognise that you’ve lost yourself?
For many people, the sense of ‘I don’t know who I am anymore’ arises from being so externally driven, overworked or having to juggle too many balls. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
- You try to juggle your work, the child(ren) and the household with hardly time left for yourself (or quality time with your children, spouse or friends)
- You run from one meeting to the next and spend evenings and weekends catching up on paperwork, so you don’t have time to pursue your hobbies or interests.
- You are fed up with the fact that your job, and other people, dictates your schedule to the point where there is no breathing space left for you. However, you don’t know how you can realistically change this situation.
If any of these circumstances apply to you, I am sure you have tried to improve your time management and that you wonder constantly about setting the right priorities to make it all happen in the best way possible.
However, these scenarios are only part of the picture; you might actually have a bit of time for yourself but still feel that it’s not enough. You simply feel depleted on a deeper level because you just don’t feel yourself anymore.
This can play out in various ways; you might recognise yourself in one of these:
- Even if you have some time, you forget to check in with yourself about what you really need in this moment. You might overeat, eat junk food or forget to eat, you might just turn on the TV, spend hours on the internet or the phone – which is all relaxing to some extent, but you sense that you could be doing other things to truly recharge and enjoy life.
- You get stressed out and are ‘losing it’ every once in a while, and you realise: “This is not me anymore, I know I could be acting differently, and I wish I would be more kind, loving, caring etc”. And it actually hurts you to see yourself so ‘off-balance’.
- When you talk about your life and issues with friends, you are torn back and forth between their different opinions about how you should act or which decisions you should make in your job or your relationship. You have lost the sense or access to what your own truth is.
- Even if you had all the time and money to choose freely, you wouldn’t even be sure what to do with yourself, which path to take in your life. You are so busy taking care of others and everything else that you have lost touch with your own desires.
- A lot of what you do is not nourishing you, you are not really enjoying it, you just do it to get the job done, to make the money you need to pay your bills etc. You are yearning for more things that are ‘food for your soul’.
There is a way to come back to yourself
