Who is 'Me'?

Posted on July 02, 2019 by Charlotte Haggie, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

I have had great epiphanies when writing. Examples include when I was writing my post for 18 July and on Monday, when I was writing my icebreaker speech for Toastmasters which I gave last night. It seems that writing is an incredible way for me to realise things. Unfortunately, I don’t often take the time to sit down and write unless I am forced to do so. The blog and the speech were times when I made myself sit down and write something and both times brought up such interesting thoughts and ideas that I THINK I am going to try to do this more often! In the meantime, I hope that you enjoy reading the speech that I wrote and that the message might be as helpful for some of you out there as it was for me!

Speech Title: Looking Back and Learning Me

Good evening everyone. I am really excited to be here this evening and to be doing my icebreaker speech. When I was young, I always wanted to be an actress but that dream faded as I got older, thank goodness! Now, I am a social development practitioner, a personal trainer and I am doing my life coaching course, hoping to get into group facilitation where I believe my acting skills can be put to good use!

Tonight I wanted to talk to you about the title of my speech which is ‘Looking Back and Learning Me’. One of the things that I have learnt from my coaching course is to slow down and look at myself. I used to fly through life at a million miles an hour and I now fly through it at about 900 0000 miles an hour. Every now and again, I now take a bit of time to stop and to spend time with me, all of me and not just the mum, wife, friend, daughter and other roles that I think I should be playing. In this time, I often find myself looking back.

When I look back at the younger me, I realise that when I was at school, I tried everything. I was in the hockey team, the 7th hockey team that they created just for me and one other girl. I tried out for the swimming team every year and every year the coach said ‘Thanks for coming but don’t worry about coming back next week’. I was in the choir and the choir mistress told me she loved my facial expressions and that I was the only person who came to EVERY practice but could I please just lip sync when it came to the actual singing. I was never deterred by anyone and I just kept on going, even when others perhaps thought I shouldn’t.

But as time went on, I realize that I started listening to those out there rather than to myself. As I look back, I can see where I started to believe that perhaps I shouldn’t try out for the swimming team this year, and perhaps standing at the back of the choir, mouthing the words, was a waste of my time and everyone else’s. There were other things that happened in my life that led me down the path of ‘I’m not good enough, I’m not this, I’m too that…’, things that I think many of us have been through.

But as I wrote this speech, looking back on who I was when I was young and unaffected by those thoughts, I realized that that person is still there. I see her in situations that I have been in when I have felt most alive. When I joined the rowing club at UCT and eventually got into the first crew. When I decided to start a charity for all the children I could see in need in the area where I lived. When I decided to jump out of an aeroplane in Namibia while my husband stayed safely on the ground waiting for me. When I was co-facilitating a workshop and the main facilitator fell ill and I had to present the whole workshop on my own. All of these are examples of times when I have been challenged and pushed out of my comfort zone and when things have been asked of me that made me stretch and grow. These were times when I realized that I can overcome the words that people have said and the voices that are now in my head.

The liberation of looking back and recognizing those moments when I tried really hard and perhaps didn’t succeed but then also those where I did succeed makes me so excited. It makes me want to be that little girl again, doing things that the world says that I shouldn’t, or more that I THINK that the world says that I shouldn’t! I want to join a choir (mmm…maybe not literally) and I want to be an actress. I want to take chances and not be contained by the expectations of the world and of myself. I want to get to know me again, the me that was prepared to try anything and to not be deterred, the me who did gymnastics but could barely flop around the gym room. The little girl who eventually stopped gymnastics but only because she had stuck chewing gum in the pants of her leotard so she couldn’t wear it anymore and she thought there might be something else she could try rather than getting a new leotard!

I have recently started a new phase of my life, having had a baby in January 2018. This has put a whole lot of other pressures on me as I try to fit in all those things that I feel I ‘should’ be doing and I realize that I have pushed aside all those things that I WANT to do. I have been bending to the whims of the voices that I hear and to the expectations that are probably more my own than those of the world. But as I watch my son grow, I realize that I want him too, to hold on to the little boy that will believe that he can play rugby or that he can be a ballet dancer, whichever one he chooses. Although he weighed about 12kgs at 7 months old so he is probably unlikely to be a ballet dancer!

And so, as I came to a point in writing this speech where I thought ‘what is my point’, I looked again at the title. ‘Looking back and Learning me’. I think that as I start to recognise the vestiges of the little girl Charlotte, my hope is that in looking back and learning more about her, I can bring her with me into my days as a grown up. I can bring her freedom and her joy in the small things in life and her utter determination to revel in that joy. And hopefully, in my work, I can help others to recognize the little girl or boy that they were and help them to welcome that little person with his or her hopes and dreams into their current reality, offering them a new perspective from which they view the world. And hopefully this perspective will liberate them from all those voices who have held them back, those of the world and those of themselves.

Thank you