As a child you know who you are. It’s natural and you don’t even think about it. You follow your inspiration. If you want to sing, you sing, if you want to cry, you cry. You don’t worry about what other people think, at least not before you get socialized and programmed to operate in certain ways. Even though you were very small, you knew the key to making life work.

But as you grow up and you’re told what you can and cannot do, how to behave properly and how to operate in society, you may start to lose some of the true essence of who you really are. As you strive to fit in you may take on roles to help you navigate life.

But you are not these roles and often these roles take you further and further away from your truth and who you really are; your authentic self.

These roles may show up in many ways:

The rebel

The victim

The good girl

The perfect one

The trouble maker

The peacemaker

The black sheep

The responsible one

The drama queen/king

The list could go on…

Which roles did you take on?

You are not the roles you play. Often, these roles come from a place of dysfunction in your family. You take on certain roles in order to receive love or attention from those around you. Maybe the only way you can get attention is by screwing things up, or being the good girl who finally is noticed and applauded for her accomplishments. No accomplishments, means no love, so you keep doing what brought you this love as a child even though now you’re an adult.

But these roles are NOT who you really are. However, they likely create strict rules for you to operate by, rules not based on your own truth but based on a role you took on in order to get attention from your parents. They may have served you then, yet at this point it may be exactly what’s blocking you from living the life you want.

These roles and the rules they operate by often keep you locked in limited ways because you think you cannot be someone who doesn’t live that role, even though you want to, deep inside.

Eventually as you grow older, it gets harder and harder to recognize what is the real you and what is a role you took on.

The farther you stray from the real you, the more challenges you are likely to face in your life. You were never meant to be someone you are not. You are not the roles you play.  You are perfect and whole just as you are and you have an inner guidance system to steer you in the right direction. Call it your intuition, or God/The Universe speaking through you and guiding you.

You have gifts that are unique to you and a special purpose only you can accomplish – by being YOU.

Your desires are your guide posts designed to keep you going in the right direction for you.  Everybody has this inner compass, but often it gets distorted by society; by other people telling you who you are and what you’re supposed to do.

You are told you cannot have, be or do what you want, that you need to be realistic, to dim your light, to stop talking so loud, singing so loud, taking up so much space, dressing so strange, for being different and unique and for standing out in a society where we are taught to be the same to fit in.

The big problems start to happen when you believe more in who other people tell you you are than in yourself. That’s when you lose your direction and purpose in life and get lost in living the life of someone you are not. You may get sick, have relationship or money problems. Life is not working and the reason it’s not working is because you are living a role instead of being the real authentic you.

Once you step into being the real you, honoring who you really are: your desires, wants and needs; things will fall into place for you.

I believe everyone has a purpose and reason for being here. We all contribute to the whole of the planet by being who we really are. If we were meant to be different, we would be different. Embrace who you are. Your uniqueness, your quirkiness, the side of you that makes you different or weird. That part of you is also what makes you unique.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are a cell in your own body, receiving energetic signals from your brain about what to do. You follow your purpose as a cell and listen to the messages you receive from “God”, your mind.

You do your job the way you were meant to. You listen to and obey to the messages you receive and the body functions as it’s meant to.  But then what happens if you start deciding to go against your purpose? To do another job because one of the other cells convinces you to work with them instead, despite the fact that you know this isn’t what kind of cell you are. Now you may be making the body sick because even though you are a cell that is supposed to help with one purpose, you are not doing the job you came here to do. You become a cancer cell spreading disease in the body.

The same happens in your life when you’re not being who you really are. You will feel like you’re swimming against the current, exhausting yourself without getting to where you want to be. Life feels hard.

I believe the Universe will do what it can to nudge you in the right direction. First gently by giving you ideas and inspiration, or by showing you that something isn’t working, so you can find a better way; then more forcefully if you’re not getting the message or resist following your inner guidance system.

I believe that all of us come here to learn certain lessons and that we are perfectly set up to learn these lessons by the challenges we face. For many, finding the way back to who they really are – the real authentic you, can be a long road of shedding the layers of all the roles you have been playing and all the programming and messages you have received about who you are supposed to be.

There are many layers.

I recently had an aha moment at a retreat I was at in Mexico over New Years. I was at a yoga retreat and one of our teachers introduced us to chanting. One of the last days of the retreat, I had an emotional moment when I realized how happy it made me to sing. When I was a child I remember sitting on the swing in my daycare singing all day long.

But then I stopped and didn’t sing again.

As I grew up I was told I had a bad voice and to stop singing. It started with my family as I grew up and even my own boys have told me this, 40 something years later.

In this moment, as I was sitting in a circle in a beautiful outdoor yoga studio in the jungle overlooking the ocean, I realized how my inner child so badly wanted to sing and as I sang my tears were flowing down my face as I realized how happy it made me to sing. I felt like I finally found a long lost piece of myself.

I had forgotten what it felt like to be singing because society told me to stop and I had stopped, even though singing is a part of who I really am.

If you have lost your voice, your singing child or anything that represents that piece for you, I want you to honor it. What does your inner child crave to be, do or have? What did you love doing as a child that you no longer do?  I encourage you to take your inner child seriously and give it the love, attention and care you never got.

Do the things you really wanted to do but were told you couldn’t.

Be the person you wanted to be so badly but were discouraged from being.

Speak the truth you never dared to say.

Express yourself in ways you were never allowed to.

Honor your divine, beautiful being for what it is.

Take some time to reflect on what you did as a child, and it will point you in the direction of the real you. What did you do naturally when nobody else told you what to do? That is your joy. That is the real you before society started telling you who to be. Don’t forget to listen to the wisdom of your inner child as that little boy or girl knows who you really are.

Embrace the real you, not the person society has made you to out to be. The biggest gift you can give yourself, is to be yourself.

Want some help shedding the layers and step into living the life you came here to be, fully and unapologetically? Let me help you create the life and business that allows you to have, be and do anything your heart desires and to live the lifestyle your soul craves. Click here to apply for a complementary session with me. We’ll get clear on what’s standing in your way and how you can step into the reality you want.