Become Who You Might Have Been
By Pamela Latour, Ph.D.
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
(George Eliot was really Mary Anne Evans that published under this pen name in the 1800’s)
When did I decide who I am? I think this sense of “Who I Am” slowly crept up on me. The gradual build-up of living for more than a few decades convinces us of our identity. We believe that we are the accumulation of everything that we have experienced. All the decisions, the memories, the joys, pain, love and hate that we have lived, becomes how we see ourselves. We’ve worked on forgiveness, we’ve worked on being a good, loving person, but have we achieved our own dreams? When we were young, we knew we could be, do, have and live a wonderful life. Have we achieved that dream or something close to it, or did we get distracted and possibly even stuck along the way?
I have spent years teaching a course in “The Power to Change Reality” and I have come across this issue over and over again. Women have raised families, devoted themselves to a company, or a man, or generally other people’s lives. When you ask them “What do you want to be, do or have in your life?” they’re just not sure. We know who we were, but it’s difficult to know who we are becoming. When we look at New Year’s Resolutions for 2019
we see ourselves forcing our bodies into exercise, quitting sugar, procrastination and other bad habits. In other words, taking this old framework of identity (who we were yesterday) and making it who we will be next year, in 2019. In addition, we add a lot of pain to make ourselves change. This is why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work! We don’t like pain and as long as we see ourselves as this same old identity, we will be that same person who doesn’t exercise, who eats sugar and procrastinates and so on.
What if we could be who we might have been? What if we could live in the magic and unlimited possibilities of the present to create the future? How do we go from who we were to who we want to be?
Everywhere we look, from science to religion to esoteric theologies we find the same message. Quantum physics says that we live in a dream state that appears real and as such, whatever we think about, feel and believe manifests in our world. Science has known this for a long time. Albert Einstein said in the 1920’s, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Jesus, (a little earlier than that) said, “You can do anything I can do, and more.” I might add that if you don’t know his story, he did a hell of a lot of amazing things. And esoteric theologies have revealed, in the last few decades, the “Law of Attraction” which says that whatever we think about, focus on and feel will be attracted to us and show up in our lives. With all of this evidence to our potential greatness, why do we live the same life, in the same way, every day?
The culprit is habits. We brush our teeth when we wake up in the morning. We don’t have to remember to brush our teeth, we just do it. We don’t think about how to walk or drive a car, our body has it down as a habit. Thoughts operate in the same way. We think between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts every day and most of those thoughts are the same as the ones that we had yesterday. These habits of thought are what hold us in the same place and that keep us in the same emotional state. It is our habit of thinking that ties us to our same identity. Our body loves this as it means survival.
It’s clear that if we look at the future with the same thinking, feeling and beliefs that we operated on yesterday, we are going to get the same life tomorrow. This is how you change the game.
Breaking a habit of who you used to be, comes down to three things.
1. Breaking the image of your surroundings. It’s important to change the pictures that your brain takes over and over again. Do something different. Go for a walk or go to a restaurant you’ve never been to before. Change what your eyes are seeing.
2. While you’re there create a stronger, more powerful, passionate and loving image of yourself. Imagine yourself living your potential and being who you’ve always wanted to be. Are you the traveler, adventurer, artist or are you the entrepreneur, full time mother or lecturer? What values do you have? What emotional state do you experience? (I’d suggest gratitude.) What are you contributing to your family, to yourself, to the world? Even if you don’t know what this will look like, imagine what it would feel like. Over time the details will fill in and you will step into that identity. Let that feeling be in your body as long as you can.
Think and feel it every day. Whatever you create, write it down and keep it where you can find it easily. For example, “I am so happy and grateful now that I have more money than I need”. “I have a wonderful man/woman in my life that I love and who loves me”. “I have plenty of time for vacations and family”. “I’m back in nursing school”. “Now I run a productive business”.
3. When you begin catching yourself thinking of your life in the old way, (i.e. I don’t have enough...money, love, time), pull that paper out that you wrote and read it again. Make sure your body feels it’s real, as you need to convince your subconscious that it’s true. By the way, your subconscious is your body. The trillions of cells that your body consists of, are aware and are listening to everything you think and feel. So those cells, your body, is who you have to convince that you and your life are different. If you get good at tricking your body into believing that it’s already true, it will be.
This article will begin a wonderful change. If you would like more help and information, you are invited to attend either a private counseling session with Pamela or a group ‘Life Planning Workshop’ to be held on February 3rd, 2019, in 17816 U.S. Highway 41, Lutz, Florida, 33549. Call Pamela Latour to RSVP at 813-520-8894, as space is limited. Welcome to the new you!