316 Holly Worton ~ Know Yourself: How to Answer the Question of “Where Am I?”

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! This is the second in a mini-series of episodes on what I call The Three Questions. I started last week with episode 315, where I helped you to answer the question “Who am I”? That’s a massive question to answer, and I believe it’s a life-long journey to self-knowledge. But we have to start somewhere, and I think it’s probably best done in stages.

This week, we’re looking at “Where am I?”, which explores where we are in life…right now. This is all the stuff that’s temporary, that expresses what’s going on for us at a particular stage of our lives. These are the things that we can change, if we don’t like them. We’ll be looking at our mindset stuff, which makes up a part of the answer to this question: our fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs.

This is important stuff to dig up and look at so that we can answer the third question “Where am I going?” which will follow next week. Each questions builds on the previous one. I hope you find this useful!

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

How to distinguish between who you are and where you are
Why it’s so important to know yourself + where you are in your life
The risks that come from avoiding taking a good look at this stuff
Why it’s so important – and why it can be challenging – for us to look at this stuff
How to get clear on where you are in your life right now
Why this is an important part of planning the life that you want for yourself

Things I Discussed

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 316. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today is the second part in the mini-series I am doing about the three questions. I started last week with episode 315 where I helped you to answer the question: who am I? Now, that is a massive question to answer and I believe it is a life-long journey to self-knowledge. I mean I know I have been working on this for years, but I think we also need to start somewhere, and I think it is probably best done in stages. This is something that you are probably going to be wanting to revisit over and over and over again and I do think that the steps and the actions and the suggestions and activities that I shared last week are something that you can come back to over and over again.

So this week we are looking at where am I?, which is the second question and that explores where we are in life right now. This is in all the stuff that is temporary, so whereas who am I is who you are and that is something that doesn’t really change. Your ability to see yourself at the core will change over the years, but who you are at the soul level, the deep level, doesn’t change, you can just get a better viewpoint of that. But this stuff: where am I right now?, that is temporary stuff, it is based on where you are right now at this particular stage of your life. These are the things that we can change if we don’t like them and it is also a place to look at the things that we do like, so we can keep doing them. So we are also going to be looking at mindset stuff, which makes up part of the answer to this question, so where am I? includes what are all the fears, blocks and limiting beliefs that I have right now, obviously not all of them because that’s a lot, but this is really important stuff to dig up and look at so that we can answer the third question which is coming next week, where am I going? Each question builds on the previous one. And I really hope that you find this stuff useful.

As always, I welcome your feedback and this is probably the topic of my next book, or the following book, so I really, really, value your feedback on this. Is this interesting? Is this useful? Have you tried the stuff that I mentioned in the episodes? And what do you think?

So what are you going to learn this week? I am going to talk about why it is so important to know yourself and where you are in life. I am going to talk about the risks that come from avoiding looking at this stuff. I discuss why it is so important and why it can be challenging for us to look at this stuff. How to distinguish between who you are and where you are, which I talked about last week, but I wanted to refresh it, and why this is an important part of planning the life that you want for yourself. So, let’s get started.

So, as I said last week, who you are is basically unchanging because we are looking at who you are at the very deep core level, the soul level, who you are. Now, like I said earlier, your perception of who you are may change because as you peel off the layers and the masks and the crap that isn’t really you, you will be seeing different things as you work towards getting to the core of yourself. So it might seem like you are changing and maybe some things are changing, but really who you are at the core is who you are, it is just hard to get there, so it takes some time to peel off the crap. Where you are? – which is the question you are answering today – changes, so where you are right now today, this week, next week, this month, next month, next year, you are always at a different point in your life. And if you are really into the personal development stuff, as am I, this stuff can change quite a bit, so I think this is super, super, useful to look at.

So, why is it so important to know yourself and to know where you are in your life? I think it is really important because it helps you take stock of where you are, what you have got, what you like, what you don’t like, what you want to keep, what you want to change, and then helps you take a plan to change those things that you want to change. I think the reason why so many people struggle with knowing what they want in life, or knowing what they want to change, is because they are not taking a really good look at where they are. And when we talked about who you are, last week, I talked about why it is so important to really be open to looking at who you are, without filters, I mean that’s hard, but really be willing to see the stuff that you like and the stuff that you don’t like. And seeing the stuff that you don’t like can be really hard, especially if you are in a place where you are really unhappy, and life feels like crap, and you feel like crap, and it just feels like so much. Obviously, if you need help, and support, and if you need mental health care get that, because it can be challenging to dig all this stuff up and then not have support so get the support that you need. But it is important to look at the stuff that we don’t like, otherwise we can’t change them and sometimes when you feel like you are just drowning in a soup of crap it helps to pick out all the ingredients in the soup so that you can change them, undo them, clean things up, clear things out. And then start moving towards the thing that you want, the things that you want to have, the things that you want to experience, and how you want to feel.

So, the risks that come from avoiding taking a really good look at this are that you stay where you are, you stay stuck, you stay stuck in a life full of crap that you don’t want to be living, experiencing, feeling, and I mean really I think a lot of times we are afraid to look at this stuff but the worst that can happen is that you stay stuck where you are. Really taking a good look at the stuff that you have that you don’t like, or the stuff that you are experiencing that you don’t like, only serves to help you take action towards making different decisions. Yes, it can seem overwhelming, but I honestly feel like for me in my experience it has been more overwhelming to not put a name to these things, to not make a list of these things, to just feel like I am drowning in that, it’s not a soup, but that’s how it came out…the soup of crap that can be in our minds sometimes if we are in a bad place, if we haven’t been making the decisions for ourselves. For me it is worse to not put a name to these things than it is to sit down and pull back the carpet, sweep all the dust and crap that we swept under there into the open and look at it and name it and make a list of it so that we can change these things. Again, if you need support, if you need extra therapy, mental health care help, get that as you look at this, because it can trigger our stuff.

So how can you get clear on where you are in your life right now?

I am going to reference my old blog posts from 2011/2012, which will help you work through this but I am going to go through them now on the Podcast. And, as always, the transcripts for the podcast usually go live about two weeks after the episode airs, so if you feel like this is something that you want to revisit check the website in a week or two, and the transcript should be up there.

So for starters, I like doing, and this is a really old school coaching thing, if you are a coach you might laugh at me for saying this, if you are not a coach this will probably be new to you, the wheel of life. So the wheel of life is this thing, like a pie chart, where you section your life into different categories and that can be: spirituality, health and wellness, work, business, financial, all those kinds of different areas of your life and I have a wheel of life which I will link to in the show notes, but you can change the categories and make it whatever feels right for you. But basically you rank on scale of 1-10, how happy you are in each area of my life. Now I am a very visual person, so it really helps me to see which areas of my life come out well, by my own criteria, and which areas of my life are not so good. So, even if you have done this before, I think this is worth doing now, so that you can get a snapshot of what your life is like now, which areas are you happy with, which areas are you not happy with, so you can see what it looks like for you.

So usually what I do, when I have looked at that, I then identify the top three areas that I want to improve, so maybe you do your wheel of life and you think: everything is pretty much crap, fine, but you need to start somewhere. And if you try to improve everything at once that can be totally overwhelming, so just pick your top three areas to improve and get started there. Or, if things are going well, maybe pick one area to improve; or if the whole thing feels really overwhelming pick one area to improve; and don’t feel like giving priority to this one area it means that everything else gets pushed to the side, because that’s not how it is, it just mean that you are going to start with one thing, so that you are not getting overwhelmed, and I really find that as I take action in any area of my life, it makes it easier to take action in other areas and it means that things start flowing in other areas. It is like when you step outside of your comfort zone in one area, it suddenly becomes easier to do that in other parts of your life. So pick three areas to improve, or one area to improve, or whatever feels right for you, just so you know that’s what important to you.

And then leading on from that is priorities: what are your priorities in life? Is it your family? Is it your career? This is kind of similar to what we have just done in terms of picking the top area to improve, but this might help you dig up some more things. What is important to you? What are the most important things in your life? What things are non-negotiable for you? Years ago, not years ago, I just left the group last year, but when I was in my spiritual group that I was in for 12 years, we had these personal exercises that we had to do every day and for me they were non-negotiable, they took about a half-an-hour every day to do all of the things and that was non-negotiable, it did ever not happen. So every day, for 12 years, I did these exercises. I did not miss the exercises, if I was sick and I was in bed, I found a way to do them in bed. It never didn’t happen. So that was non-negotiable, look at what is non-negotiable for you? What things do you absolutely have to do every day? It might be something important like your spirituality, it might be a meditation practice, it might be yoga, or it might be basic needs like eating every day, or maybe not, because maybe you do fasting, and you do a different thing and maybe you eat every other day. But figure out what things are non-negotiable for you, what things are absolute priorities in your life.

Next, look at your habits, what habits do you currently have? What habits would you like to have? What habits would you like to get rid of? I did a podcast episode on habits not too long ago; it was episode 306, and it is called: how to create new habits that last. So in looking where you are in life, it is not just about wanting to create new habits but looking at where you are with your habits. What are your good habits? What are your bad habits? What habits are you happy with? What habits do you want to change? This is not a value judgement thing — I just used the words good and bad and I am aware of that — but it is what feels good and bad to you? What habits do you want to keep? What habits do you want to let go of?

And then look at things that you want to do, things that you feel like you should do, things that others tell you that you should do. Look at your weekly schedule and classify the stuff. If you use Google calendar, like I do, if you use a printed planner or whatever, look at the stuff that you do every week, look at how you are spending your time, look at it and classify it is (a) something that you want to do, (b) is it something that you feel like you should do and that is why you are doing it? (c) is it something that you do for others or others tell you that you should do? This, I think is really useful to see why you do the things that you do every week. And then look at your time wasters, the things that you do to procrastinate, what you do when you procrastinate, look at how you procrastinate and what those things give you? Do you spend a lot of time browsing certain websites whether it is social media or something else? Do you spend a lot of time playing games on your phone? And what do those things give you? Do they give you a break? Do they give you a rest? Do you feel like it rests your brain? Do you like it is like a palette cleanser for your brain in between tasks? Or are you really just wasting time? And that is fine, again, not a value judgement, don’t judge yourself on this stuff, you need to look at how these things are serving you, because they are serving you in some way otherwise you wouldn’t be doing them.

So I recently got an Oura ring, and I will link to that in the show notes, but It is a tracker thing, it tracks them differently and it is really geared towards helping you get better sleep. So it tracks your temperature throughout the day and night and your heart rate and your heart rate variance and gives you a lot of data. I really like body data, so I really like having both a Fitbit and this ring. The point of telling you is not to advertise the ring but to say that in the app it has these things called moments, so it has these little guided meditations where you take a moment and you listen to this thing, you can either do a guided meditation or do a breathing exercise or listen to nature sounds or relaxing music for a few minutes. And while you do that the ring tracks your heart rate, your stuff, to show you how that compares to, for example, your sleeping time and I am really loving it. I have had the ring for about a month or maybe less, I hadn’t tried the moments until the other day and I really, really, loved it and I think this is going to come a part of my regular day, it is a good way to let my mind rest and take a break and it is like a meditation kind of thing and I don’t meditate very often. I haven’t been doing my morning routine very much lately because I have had other things going on so I really think that taking ten minute throughout my day will be a really useful break, rather than playing a game on my phone which I might have done before. Now, I think there is a time and place for everything, but this is an example of how you can look at your distractions or time wasters and find something else to do if you think that it might be useful. I still think there is a time and a place for playing games as long as they don’t disrupt you from doing the things that you really want to be doing.

Then look at what is your ceiling, what is your self-imposed ceiling, if you look at all the things, maybe on your bucket list, or the stuff that you want to do in your life, your goals that you would like to set, that maybe haven’t formally set, what is your ceiling? What are all the things that you think: oh, I am capable of this, oh I am not capable of that? What are the things that you would like to do in your life but think maybe you can’t achieve, maybe you think you are not good enough to achieve or you are too old, or you are too young, or there is enough time or you don’t he enough time, or you are just not the kind of person that can achieve that. I was online the other day and I was reading this question, it was on Reddit and I think it was on the ask women sub-reddit, it was something like: how do you come to terms with the fact that you are not going to achieve all the things that you wanted to achieve or some of the things that you wanted to achieve in life? And I was really pleased to see that a lot of the comments from people were: I am not dead yet, so I haven’t come to terms with that, because I still have time to do the things that I want to do. I think that question is coming from a place of, this woman was looking at their ceiling thinking, there are all these things that I want to do but I need to come to terms with the fact that I can’t, for whatever reason. So, what are the things that you think that you can’t do? I think that is really, really worth taking a look at, because a lot of times that is really subjective and a lot of times if you make some of those things a priority of course you can do them.

So, next question, the voices in my head say (whispering): I am not good enough, I am not worthy, I can’t do that. Was that creepy that I just whispered at you? {laughing} I just kind of naturally went into whisper mode! So, what do your voices in your head say to you, what is your negative self-talk, what is your positive self-talk, what is your self-talk? Again, I just used the words negative and positive, but is your self-talk limiting? Is it enhancing? How does it make you feel? What is the stuff that your head says to you? What do your mind gremlins say to you? This is super-important to really look at and you might find you get more of the unsupportive stuff, rather than the supportive stuff, that is fine, dig this stuff up, put it out there. And I should have said this earlier, take notes on this, if anything I say triggers a thought for you, write it down, go through this again, listen to it again and make notes and pause after each thing. Again I hope to be writing a book about this, I hope to turn this into an online program, but today is today, here were are, and you can get started on this stuff, now, with what you have got which is this Podcast episode.

So, next, what do you get from other people. So I talked a little bit about this in last week’s episode but what is the crap that you have taken on from other people? Because this is temporary, this is stuff that you can get rid of. Did a teacher ever tell you that you are not smart enough? You are not good enough? You are not good at a certain thing? Did parents or family members ever tell you this crap? This is mind-crap that we can get rid of later down the line, but we need to look at what is the stuff that we are carrying around with us, the baggage that we get from other people, so that we can eventually unload it if it no longer serves us. So some of this is going to be supportive; it is going to be enhancing to your life; it is not all going to be crappy crap, some of it is going to be: you are really good at such and such. Maybe someone told you: you are really good at school and that motivated you to try harder. Or you are really good at sports and so that you grew up thinking that you were good at fitness stuff. I grew up thinking I wasn’t good at sports, I was really bad at PE in school because it was all related to ball sports and now I know, probably because of my autism, I am terrified of flying balls and Physical Ed was all about flying balls. So, it took me until I was in mid-twenties to finally realise that I could be a sporty person and I could run, and I could do physical stuff. And, now, that is a really important part of my life, now that I am mid-forties, it has been for the last twenty years but it took me a long time to uncover the fact that I could do that stuff, because no one ever told me that I could do that stuff because I thought: either you are good at sports, or you are good at school. Not a lot of people, no that’s not true, there are a lot of people who can do both but for some reason I thought I couldn’t do both, or I couldn’t be good at both, I just had one or the other so I just had my own self-imposed limitation. So, again, take a look at all this stuff without judging it, just look at it, what serves you, what doesn’t serve you, what do you want to keep and what do you want to let go of? All of this stuff you can let go of by doing the mindset work.

Looking back at your life, what are some recurring situations? Or what are some recurring types of people or personalities, that you have had come into your life over and over again? So for me, recurring types of people are narcissists, my ex-business-partner was a very toxic narcissist and apparently that wasn’t enough for me so I went on to attract another couple of people in my life in the last ten years that were very similar on a much lighter scale which meant that it was much more subtle and it took me a lot longer to recognise these people for who they were and what they were. I kind of hit myself in the head by attracting a really big, bad person for about ten years, and then attracted some lighter versions. So look at the kinds of people you have attracted into your life and the situations that you have attracted in your life, that serve you, that don’t serve you, and look at that because if you have attracted these people and places and things for a reason. To learn something from them, to grow as a soul, to grow as a human being, sometimes that feels like crap, sometimes that’s really difficult. On the other side, perhaps you have attracted a number of really supportive people in your life, look at that as well, again this is not all digging up the crappy crap it is also looking at the good stuff, the supportive stuff that feels good, the people, places and things that feel good. Look at recurring situations both good and bad, positive and negative, I don’t like those words because it is all stuff that has served to support us and challenge us and give us learning opportunities in our lives. Don’t judge but sometimes using these words: good and bad; positive and negative; enhancing; limiting, whatever, can help us dredge up this stuff so that we can look at it. And again, you are going to be dredging up stuff that is supportive, you are going to be dredging up stuff that you want to get rid of, you are going to dredge up all kinds of stuff, don’t judge it.

Finally, is looking at your fears, your blocks, your limiting beliefs. Now all this stuff that I have talked about for the past 25 minutes is going to form a part of your fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs, but just start writing it down. What sort of stuff are you afraid of? What areas in your life do you feel you have a block? What are your limiting beliefs? What are your beliefs that: I can’t do this, I am not good enough, I am not worthy? What are they? And I have written a bunch of books about this, my mindset books, they are all based around business, but they are all stuff that can apply to life. So the books are really inexpensive, they are eBooks, you can download them online; if you are a Patreon at a certain level you get them for free, but you can download those books and just use them to help them dig up what your own fears, blocks and limiting beliefs are.

So, how does it feel to look at this stuff? I think it can be really triggering sometimes and I think this is work that you are going to have to do over and over again, same as answering the first question, because sometimes we can only do so much of this work at a time. And sometimes we can only see so much of this work at a time. As I do this work with myself it is like peeling the layers and it take me time to be able to see the next layer, so I think this is stuff to revisit over and over again. Again, if looking at this stuff triggers your crap and you feel like it is too much get help, get support, get professional help and support, get help from your friends, get help from your family whoever you need. However this is important stuff to do and maybe if it feels like too much maybe do it little by little, revisit one of these topics at a time and then get the support to work through this stuff. I think that sweeping all this stuff under the rug and then refusing to look at it, is not the way to go, it is the stuff that is going to keep us stuck where we are. And if you want to change your life, if you want to change what you are experiencing we need to look at the stuff that we are currently experiencing that we don’t like and also the stuff that we do like because that is also really important to know: this is what I like, this is what I want to keep, this is what I want to change or let go of or transform in some way.

So, I hope you find this episode interesting and useful, again this is a half-hour podcast episode, there is only much I can do, and I don’t want to overload you by doing a two-hour masterclass, I am going to leave that for later with the book, with the workbook, with the online program which will at some point happen. This is to help you get started on your journey and I hope to provide more support for this in the coming weeks and months, this is a topic that has been super-important to me and I think that’s why it keeps coming up for me over and over again. These three questions: who am I? where am I? where am I going? are super-super important to help you more easily create the life, the lifestyle, the business, the career, the whatever, that you want for yourself. So digging up this stuff and looking at it is a really important part of planning the life that you want for yourself because next week we are looking at your vision for yourself, where are you going? What do you want to experience? And how are you going to get there?

Again, I welcome your feedback and I hope you found this interesting and useful. I just said that a second ago, but it is really important for me that this is not just entertaining stuff, I hope that you get some use out of this. So, please, drop me a line, let me know what you thought. You can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there. I would also love for you to join me on Patreon, membership starts at $1 a month, if you find this podcast useful and would love to support it, I would love to have you on Patreon, you get done-for-you heart-centred energy work, all kinds of stuff, depending on what tier you sign up at; that’s http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there!

Again thank you so much for listening and remember to visit http://HollyWorton.com/316 for the show notes on this episode and check back in a couple of weeks for the transcript. The vast majority of episodes that I have done over the years have transcripts up there, they are available, I copy and paste them within the show notes and I also make a PDF available to download, no opt-in required, just click and download the PDF or read it on the website.

So, again, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. I hope you have a fantastic week!