Before you read on, you might pause for a moment.
Take five slow breaths, if you’d like to. Let your body soften, and let your attention settle, out of your head and down into your chest.
Nothing here needs solving. There’s nowhere to get to.
And when you’re ready, sit with a question. You don’t need to reach for an answer. Just notice what comes.
Who did you want to become?
Whoever came to mind, notice that they came from somewhere. We don’t really choose our first heroes. We absorb them. They’re in the air of whatever time we grow up in.
When I was young it was the eighties and nineties, and the people held up were the famous ones. The musicians, Michael Jackson and Madonna. And the ones who had made fortunes, Packer and Bond here, Branson over in England, and a little later the fellow from Microsoft. Later again it shifted, and the ones we admired were the founders, the Silicon Valley names. The faces changed. What stayed the same was that the culture kept pointing at someone and saying, quietly, this. This is what it looks like to have made it.
None of that is a criticism. It’s just what culture does. It holds things up. And a young person still working out who they are takes it in without ever deciding to.
Because a hero was never really a person. A hero is a value, wearing a face. Success. Freedom. Being seen as someone who matters. We think we admired Branson, but what we took in was the value he stood for, and that value went somewhere deep and quiet, and it stayed.
And this is the part worth sitting with. That value may still be making decisions for you now. Not loudly. Underneath. In what you reach for, in what you call a good job, in what you would feel a little ashamed to want less than. A sense of what a life well lived looks like that you may never have actually chosen. It was handed to you, at an age when you were absorbing rather than discerning.
Exercise
The ones you looked up to
You might take some time with this one, on paper if you can. Across the different seasons of your life, who did you look up to? Not only the famous ones. The first boss you wanted to impress, a teacher, your father. Beside each name, see if you can feel for the value they really stood for, underneath the person. And then the quiet question: where might that value still be choosing for you now?
If you sit with that honestly, something usually surfaces. Often it’s a memory of a moment the admiration slipped.
We tend to file those moments under disappointment. You got close to someone you had looked up to and saw they were ordinary. Or you reached the very thing the hero stood for, and it didn’t feel the way it was meant to.
Talk to a lottery winner, or someone who becomes CEO, or a musician who writes a hit, and ask them how they felt the moment after they’d achieved what they’d been reaching for.
Back to you — look again at your list. Sometimes these moments aren’t you growing jaded. That was perhaps the first time you trusted what you saw from the inside over what you had been told to admire. Something turned. For a moment the measure came from within you, rather than from out there.
And that turn is the braver of the two directions, though it rarely feels brave at the time. Looking outward is easy, in its way. There is always someone showing you what to want. Turning inward means going on without that. No one up ahead telling you that you have done well. No scoreboard. Only your own quiet sense of what’s true, which is a harder thing to stand on, and it’s usually some kind of difficulty that finally makes us willing to.
Exercise
When the shine wore off
Think back to the moments something turned. When a gap opened between the hero and you, and some part of you began to trust its own knowing instead. They needn’t be dramatic. Often they are quiet. A time you felt something was true from the inside, and it turned out truer than the advice you were given. What were those moments, for you?
Which leaves a gentler question underneath all of it. If the values you have been living by came from the ones you looked up to, what is actually yours?
I want to be careful here, because the mind will want to answer that with a list. Five words to live by. A new and better definition to become. But that is only another hero, this time wearing your own face, and another standard to fall short of.
What’s yours isn’t really a definition at all. It’s closer to a feeling. Something you sense in yourself as true, that you can’t quite put into words and don’t need to. The things we take on from outside arrive as words and images, as people to copy. The thing that is yours arrives as a feeling. You tend to know it when you’re near it.
Joseph Campbell wrote about the hero’s journey, the one that runs through all the old stories. We picture it going outward, off into the world to become someone. But the journey was always inward. The hero is not a person you finally become. The hero is the going. The turning toward what you already are.
That doesn’t mean you stop needing anyone, or that you are suddenly right about everything and done listening. You still have guides, people you learn from and love. The difference is quiet. A guide points you back toward yourself. You simply no longer hand someone else the final say on whether you are enough.
We are offered that turn inward more often than we take it. Most of the chances, we have looked up instead. Which is no one’s failing. Looking up is what we were taught.
Exercise
The feeling that’s yours
This one isn’t really written down. Sit quietly, and let yourself feel for what’s true in you, underneath the values you took on from others. Don’t name it. Just feel it, as a kind of quiet knowing in the body. And then, holding that feeling, the only question that matters. Could you make your next choice from here?
Whatever crossroads or challenge is currently presenting, could you make it from this feeling?
That’s the whole of it, really. Not a new person to become. Not another hero, out there or within. Just a feeling you already carry, and a choice in every moment.
Take another breath. Can you recognise who you are.