Being Addicted to Who You Are Supposed to be

Who are you making decisions as?!

Wellcome back once again dreamers, to the Dream With Dan Blog. Today we’re talking about being addicted to who you are supposed to be. 

I hope you’re enjoying these and finding them enlightening. If you are, it would be of massive service to me if you would leave a comment below and share this blog, wherever you think it would serve the most people. Thank you so much!

So – are you addicted to who you are supposed to be?

I think many of us can relate to this notion, even if only partially. I’m sure many of us have caught ourselves at one time or another, making a decision that was more in keeping with our projected self. 

Being a ‘nice’ person, for example, is often a driving force for a lot of people. Where I grew up, in England, this is probably more acute than in other cultures; but being polite and inoffensive is ingrained in us fairly early on. With that tends to come a big helping of conformity, with playgrounds nation-wide full of fingers pointed squarely at ‘the outsiders’. 

The daft thing is: English (and British) culture is equally about rebel culture. Carnaby St, punks, pop music, fashion etc… all have their origins in England. Think back to the champions of Great Briton in recent memory and it’s The Beatles, Queen, James Bond et al who dominate. These may have all become institutions in their own right, but at the time they bucked trends, not adhered to them!

Now this is a great thing of course. Lots of people love London for this very reason: it’s an incredibly tolerant, vibrant and diverse city – but still with an ingrained sense of itself. You’re hard-pressed to find a capital city in the world more steeped in tradition and history, yet it is also a cultural melting pot. 

It’s not without its problems though. Gang culture, poverty, crime…these are also particularly high in London.

As David Strickel and The Stream point out:

“We can only grow and expand through polarity.”

The point being that; without contrast, we can not see how we need to grow! This is why cultures that exist in the parts of the world with the most acutely changing seasons, often became the most innovative in history. 

Caveat! This is not a claim of supremacy, or anything of the sort (much of this innovation was used for bad as well as good). It is just to say that where the need for adaptation was so demonstrably apparent to all in a society; human creativity and ingenuity advanced most quickly. For obvious reasons!

Don’t ‘make hay while the sun shines’: then you won’t have hay when it doesn’t. If the sun shines all the time…less immediacy required. 

So with that ‘Dan-gent’ out of the way; here’s why being addicted to who you are supposed to be, is so destructive. 

There are varying degrees to this of course. One example in my own life was in my last relationship, before I met my lovely wife. Because of my addiction to being a nice guy, I stuck it out for probably a year more than I should have. Who was that serving?! 

Now of course: hindsight is 20/20 vision and all that. I thought I was making the right call at the time, and didn’t have that top-down view of what I was doing. Nevertheless:

I was making decisions that supported who I was supposed to be, instead of who I am. 

It was the breaking away from this situation, and starting to make decisions confidently from who I really am, that led me to where I am now: living in paradise, happily married with a beautiful, burgeoning family. 

Tied into all of this wealth and abundance creation, as I often say: is doubt. Doubt, masquerading as ‘healthy skepticism’, can creep into our decision making all the time. We can not create from a space of lack, and that’s what doubt really means! 

What enabled me to create wealth and abundance for myself and my family, after having had failures in the past, was certainty. Just like building muscle memory for sport or dancing; I had built certainty for myself that I could succeed again. 

A vital component of this for most people though, is breaking that addiction to who your are supposed to be. It’s just the same as doubting yourself. If you are basing your decisions on what you are supposed to look like to others, then you are invariably creating doubt (and therefore lack) as a basis from which to create. You don’t know what others are thinking, not really.

Who f**king cares what they think you are supposed to be anyway?!?

Show up as yourself, authentically, and the rest will follow. How can anyone have a misconception about you then?! And if they do: that’s their mistake. Meantime – you are able to go about making decisions that you know are in alignment with who you are. Confidently and abundantly. 

You will also be able to handle more polarised situations, because you know with certainty which choices to make in order to navigate them. 

So my call to action for you this week is to really start taking stock of your decision making. What motivates you to make certain decisions? Are you aligned with your true self? Or are you addicted to who you are supposed to be?

Be honest with yourself and see how your awareness starts to shift. 

This blog was inspired by a guest appearance I made on Gull Kahn’s Money Mindset Podcast. Please check out the full episode here:

Thank you so much for reading this blog, from the bottom of my heart! If you enjoyed this, I produce regular Do It With Dan blogs, podcasts and videos. I have three books published now: Stepping Beyond Intention, The Dreamer’s Manifesto and From Time-to-Time (a really great book on time mastery). All of these are here to serve you and make you part of the journey as well. 

For more guidance on how to change your internal programming, to attract greater abundance and experience greater freedom: please click on the link below for free access to my…

“3 Secrets to Becoming a Harmonious MONEY MAGNET: REVEALED”