Work It!: How to Start Acting as the Person Who You Want to Be!
Who do you want to be?
The question sounds large and intimidating because suddenly, you find yourself thinking of celebrities, role models, and superheroes who you would like to look in the mirror and see staring back at you. But, the question is not if you could be anyone, who would you be? It is, who do you want to be as yourself?
The question has a lot of room for high expectations, unrealistic lifestyles, and maybe even instills guilt if the way we are currently living is different from the life we would ideally have. We may want to be smarter, more attractive, more organized, less depressed, anxious, or lonely, or maybe we wish our mind worked differently. However, the question states, “as yourself,” which means, you already have the resources you need to be your ideal self. So, what stands between who you currently are and who you want that person to grow to be?
We cannot always control factors in our lives, but we can control our actions, and we control our actions based on what is important to us, or our values. Values build the foundation of our ideal self because we decide what we want from life and who we want to be based on what matters to us. Oftentimes, when there is a gap between who we are and who we want to grow into, it is because we are not living out our values.
For example, if you want to be someone with a stable job and a loving family, but currently find yourself dissatisfied with parts of your work or family life, it may be because your value of a healthy-work life balance is not being lived out to its fullest potential.
Additionally, we can have times in our lives where we know what we want and what we value, but we are living out a value in a way that conflicts with our other values, which can equally cause distress. For example, if someone with social anxiety values peace of mind, they may isolate themselves to avoid the anxiety that arises when they are in social settings. While they are trying to honor their value of peace of mind, they may also be conflicting with their value of freedom or social connection.
That is why in identifying who we currently are and who we want to grow to be, we need to determine what behaviors move us closer to our values and what behaviors move us further away from them. We aren’t looking at whether these behaviors are “good,” “bad,” “right,” or “wrong.” We are looking at them in terms of their workability.
Workability is the degree to which a behavior is helpful in moving you closer to living out what matters to you. If an action helps you align with your values in a non-conflicting way, that action is considered workable. If an action hurts your ability to align with your values or there is a conflict with other values, the action is considered less or not workable.
So, I challenge you to think about what matters to you and what you value. It can be helpful to make a list of your values and place them somewhere that you can see regularly. Once you have identified your values and the person you want to grow into, reflect on your day thus far and consider what actions you took. What actions led you closer to living out those identified values or as the person you want to grow into? What actions led you further away? The goal of this question is to have you start thinking more about the actions you take in a day and what they mean to you both short-term and long-term.
For example, if someone who valued success they may have set a goal to achieve wanted A’s one semester. However, every time they thought about doing their homework, they froze because the pressure to get every question answered correctly overtook their ability to start. In the short-term, freezing would not cause too much difficulty because in the moment, it helped them feel less stressed. However, in the long-term, if the student were to keep doing this pattern of setting high expectations and then freezing, they may not do any work and fail the course because they did not turn in any work to have graded.
That is where checking the workability of their expectation would have helped. If they had evaluated their goal and how their short-term actions affected their long-term values, they could have adjusted their goal to reduce the pressure or adjusted their behavior to help lead them closer to their value.
Without realizing it, we are continually acting in a way that aligns or does not align with what matters to us. With awareness of how values guide our actions, intentionality in how we act out our values, and mindfulness of who we grow into, we can make our actions more meaningful, workable, and in alignment with what gives you purpose.
So, ask yourself who you want to grow into and how that growth requires your actions to grow with you. When determining what actions are needed to get there, just remember: are they leading me towards my goal and living out my values or are they leading me further away?
If they are leading you towards your values, keep going. If they are leading you further away, what do you need to change to make your actions more workable?
Once you have determined your steps, work it!
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Written by: Sophie Koch, LGPC
Sophie is a LifeSpring therapist who offers online and in-person counseling services to adolescents and adults (15 and up) to offer help with depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, trauma, and mood disorders.
