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What the world taught you about yourself is wrong.

When you are born, you are a blank slate.

You were the purest and freest version of yourself before your parents, family, school and society conditioned you into someone you are not (and probably don’t even want to be).

Because you were a blank slate, you used your environment’s feedback to learn about yourself.

Your parents constantly bragged and rewarded how much of a “good boy” or “good girl” you were. Always obedient, pleasant and agreeable.

Today you:

• are terrified of conflict
• can’t stop people pleasing all the time
• hate, doubt or criticise yourself when you make a mistake
• feel used and disrespected because no one cares about your boundaries

Or maybe you grew up in an environment where you’ve been let down, criticised, disappointed and abandoned all the time.

Today you:

• are hyper-independent and controlling
• don’t know how to ask and accept help
• can’t trust anyone to have your best interest at heart
• crave deep and intimate relationships but constantly push people away

Some of these examples might apply and resonate with you, I could give you so many more examples but you get my point.

Your experience as a child strongly shapes the way you show up in the world and the life you are currently living.

My question to you is:

what if what all these people have tried to teach you about yourself is wrong?

Think about it, how could they possibly know who you are since the version of you that came into this world didn’t exist yet?

Who you are should’ve been explored, unravelled and created instead of conditioned.

Humans feel obligated to stay consistent with the narrative they learned about themselves. This is why it is so hard for you to change.

Not only have you been playing this character for years, but all the people in your life expect you to keep playing and being the version of you they have built for you.

The day you invite change into your being and allow yourself to let go of what has never been yours in the first place, you will be met with a lot of resistance from your family, friends, partner, work colleagues etc.

Although accepting this will be hard, it is the sign you are looking for, because it finally means that you are becoming who you truly are.

Stop expecting the world to choose you.

The world will never choose the real version of you unless you do.

But since you don’t know who you are, choosing yourself is a very difficult concept to understand and even harder to implement.

This concept is called boundaries.

It acts as an imaginary line between you and the rest of the world that separates your own desires, dreams, needs, personal power, fears, standards, beliefs and opinions, from the rest of the world.

Someone who has strong boundaries is usually someone who shows up differently in the world.

They are their own individual. They have their own lifestyle, their own opinions, their own way of thinking. Their own sense of worth.

Someone who has weak boundaries is usually someone who blends in with the rest of the world. They act like everyone else acts, they think what everyone else thinks, they have no real sense of self and have rarely spent time questioning anything.

The first step towards loving yourself comes with making the conscious choice to choose YOU over anything else.

This means that you want to commit to choosing:

• your opinion
• your intuition
• your emotions
• your needs and desires
• your passion and interests

over anything else, whenever you can.

This will be really difficult to do at first because you will have the voice of other people’s opinions in your mind judging you or telling you off (because that was your experience in childhood).

But again, you want to start choosing yourself, not the voice of someone else in your head.

To illustrate that, I am going to give you some examples:

You get asked to do something at work that is absolutely not part of your job.

Because you fear being judged and perceived negatively, you agree to do it and end up working an extra hour for your boss instead of doing something for yourself.

You just choose the world instead of choosing yourself (your time and the plans you had for yourself in this case).

Or let’s say someone said something that offended you and created an emotional reaction inside of you. Instead of stepping up for yourself and sharing your honest opinion about their comment you decide to brush it away.

You just choose the world instead of choosing yourself (your emotions and your boundaries in this case).

You will never be able to cultivate love and respect for yourself if you keep sacrificing your emotions, intuition, desires, needs, dreams and opinions to the detriment of who the world expects you to be instead.

Choosing yourself feels very selfish and counter-intuitive at first. But it’s one of the deepest acts of faith because you also choose everything about you that has yet to be discovered and unlearned.

When you step up for how you feel, what you think and who you are, you are showing yourself that you matter. And I know that the world has tried to convince you differently, but your realisation is right, you do matter. And I can’t wait for you to finally see it too.

And with time, (a lot) of courage and perseverance, you will get to meet the version of yourself that has never lacked love in the first place.

I will see you in next week’s letter,

Until then, take care,

Oli.