The Story You’ve Been Told About Who You Should Be

I grew up being told I could be anything I wanted to be. As long as it was a doctor.

And to be honest, for a long time, I believed it too.

I had shown interest early, and my family held onto that. They weren't projecting something foreign onto me. They were reflecting something back that I had said, and supporting it the way loving families do. What they didn't do was keep asking. As I moved through high school and began quietly toying with other possibilities, nobody sat down and said: What else are you drawn to? What is it about being a Dr. that calls to you, and where else might that live?

I held on to the dream of being a doctor into my sophomore year of college. Partly because pieces of it were genuinely mine. There were things about that dream that I valued, ways of helping people that felt true. And partly because I knew how much my family loved the idea. A doctor. That meant something to them, and honestly, to me too, because society values that. It carries weight. Letting go of it meant letting go of their dream and mine at the same time, and that is not a small thing.

What I didn't have then was anyone helping me ask the harder question: how else could I apply what I value? What other paths lead to the same place?

That question came much later. And it changed everything.

The workplace had its own version of this.

Early in my corporate career, I was passed over for an opportunity that included travel. When I finally asked why, my leader's response was simple: "Well, you have a family."

He didn't ask. He decided. On my behalf. Based on an assumption about what I must want, or must not want, because of my personal situation.

That moment stayed with me. Not because it was unique. Because it wasn't.

"It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for. It takes years to find your voice and seize your real estate."  ~ Amy Poehler

Years. Not weeks. Not a workshop. Years of noticing, questioning, and slowly choosing differently.

The messages that shape us don't always arrive as criticism. They come as assumptions. They come as expectations. Expectations that are so embedded in the culture around us that we absorb them before we have the language to question them. They come from people who love us, leaders who mean well, and a society that has very specific ideas about what success looks like.

And then one day, sometimes decades later, we look up and wonder why we've been living someone else's answer to a question we were never asked.

The clients I work with are somewhere in that process. They are accomplished, capable, and quietly carrying a version of themselves that was assembled, at least in part, by other people's expectations.

The question I ask them isn't “Who do you want to become?”

It's “Who were you before you were told who to be?”

That question changes everything.

Ready to explore it? Let's talk.