“Returning to Yourself.”
I’ll admit it…I am a life-long collector of quotes. From my earliest teenage days, I wrote out countless poems, quotes or songs that spoke to me. I filled out a succession of notebooks, diaries with the little locks (remember those?), lined paper stapled together. Graph paper. Post it notes. These days I seem to capture the quotes with my cell phone camera.
The quotes are an interesting reflection of what I was experiencing at the time…boys, running, break-ups, men (boys)…burgeoning feminism, travel, depression, getting pregnant, babies, exhaustion from no sleep, menopause, anxiety, aging. You get the picture.
Since becoming a personal development coach I am deluged with social media posts, articles, websites full of meaningful quotes…I guess google has figured out the algorithm to get me to waste an entire day down quote rabbit holes.
However, I have become selective now about what I read and post, choosing quotes that will be meaningful for my clients and others who come across my work. I came across this post on Facebook a while ago and reposted it, but I believe it is worth highlighting in a blog post because it captures so clearly how I approach my coaching.
Coaching can be the process that returns us to ourselves, that excavates and unlearns, casting aside learned limiting beliefs. I hold people already naturally, creative resourceful and whole. It’s what is on the surface that often holds us back.
Enjoy this most accurate and poignant quote from the brilliant Emily McDowell and call me if you want to talk about your personal return to yourself.
-Jo
“Finding Yourself” is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. “Finding yourself” is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering of who you were before the world got its hands on you.
-Emily McDowell