Leo Babauta wrote a post in his zenhabits blog yesterday on the source of contentment.
In his post he discussed how people's happiness is often dependent on how they answer the question "Who am I?"
When the answer to that question is dependent on what you do, what others think of you, or what you have, sometimes you'll be happy and other times you won't. The problem is that you're not always in control of these things. You may stop doing well or succeeding through no fault of your own, you can never control what others think of you, or you may lose what you currently have.
Leo's post talks about redefining yourself as your core values or your essence, which could be something like love, compassion, or connection.
Funnily enough I do something similar, and tying in to yesterday's post, rather than stating that I am my key values, I have been practising "being the possibility of" my values.
Being the possibility of love, connection and communication, which are my core values, builds in the fact that I am human, definitely not perfect and that I'll frequently fail to live up to those possibilities.
Stating it as a possibility rather than a fact recognises that I'm a work in progress, and doesn't label me as a failure when I don't live up to that possibility. All I need to do is recommit to being my possibility, no judgement attached.
What possibility are you, or as Leo also suggests, would you like to pretend to be?
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