​3 ways to check if you are living someone else's version of your life

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Thom Huntington, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

​3 ways to check if you are living someone else’s version of your life

Are you living to satisfy a label you’ve put on yourself and don’t even know it?
Don’t let the wake up call be your world exploding.

Steven Spielberg said when we are young, we typically don’t know who we are. For the first 2 or 3 decades of our lives, most of us are taught and told what to think and how to behave. Our first conscious experience in this world is usually the love we receive from our parents. As children, we don’t understand the depths of love, but we do know we like it and want it. We confuse parental disappointment and anger with love ending, so we figure out how to conform to our parents expectations so the love keeps coming. At least it feels like that’s how it works given what we know at the time. We want to make our parents happy and then our teachers happy and our friends happy because we want to feel loved. And we believe it even more when we can point to the very few people in our life who are only able to show conditional love.

As we mature, we grow to understand love a little more. We realize love is boundless and that most likely our parents didn’t stop loving us while they were mad or upset- we just drove them crazy for a bit and the stress changed how they behaved. By then, the habit of conforming to what we thought we had to do to keep love had already been well established in our DNA. When it’s embedded that deep, it’s hard to recognize – especially in ourselves.

Fortunately you can do a little self assessment to see how much of your life you live to meet expectations of someone other than yourself.

1. Make a list of all the things you are committed to- family, work, meetings, groups, obligations, things that take your time. Look at the ones that you dislike and ask yourself, “why am I doing this?” If it has a noble purpose such as charity work, that can make it confusing. Yes you are helping people, but is it because that particular thing aligns with your values? Or is jt because you feel like you should do it? Or perhaps could it be because you’ll be admired for it? Maybe you love it and the admiration is an added bonus. Take the time to meditate on this point to decide if your effort is based primarily on obligation or primarily on love. Is it true that you are the only one who can do that job? If true, would the world continue without you doing it? Does it take away from some other area in your life that might be causing you grief? Could you serve in a different way that is more aligned with your values?

Do you really know what your values are?

At a pivotal time in my life I was so overwhelmed by the work generated from my own choices I had to stop and figure out how I had got myself into that situation. It only took about five pages of journaling from me – a complete non-journaler- to figure out all evidence pointed to a deep yearning to be needed. (I guess getting picked last for the dodgeball team kinda stuck in my head more than I thought :) I realized I was doing a lot of work that outwardly helped other people, but I was also inwardly driven by an unrealized, and unsettling need to feel needed which came at great cost to other parts of life.

There are many things we do that we don’t enjoy to help ourselves and= others, and that is honorable and important work. But there has to be a balance. If you spend all your time doing things that you don’t enjoy, no matter how noble the reason, you will eventually burn out and not be able to help anybody or accomplish any of your goals.

2. If nobody was looking, would you do the same thing? Imagine you have no one real or imagined expecting anything from you. Would you live your life the same way you are now?

3. Can you identify the source of who you are trying to please?

For personal or cultural reasons, some parents make it very clear that there is a path they want their children to take. Many children dutifully start on that path with their limited understanding of love and limited understanding of their own still developing values. The source of someone else’s expectation for your life might come from places you can’t even pinpoint. I know of one friend who is realizing he might be trying to live the life of a movie character that his family loved.

Could living to someone else’s expectation be good for a while? Maybe if it is from a source who knows us better than ourselves at the time. But the trajectory, values, and goals of your life may have been chosen or started by a different version of you. You have learned and experienced so much since then.

What you are doing, the things you are thinking, and where you are going IS REALLY IMPORTANT. But this is not scary stuff.

You are the keeper and decider and where you want to go. It’s your path and it’s okay to change it. I encourage you to set aside some time to deeply consider if your engine is running on your own fuel or someone else’s.

Thom Huntington is a Certified Professional Coach in Cambridge, Maryland