Transcriber: Đăng Nguyễn Huy Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Consider this for a moment, if you would.
What if there was something that we could do
that could actually change our perception about what was actually possible
in the way we could live our life?
Would you do it? Sounds interesting.
And what if we could decide how we’re going to show up
and then live as that authentic person,
despite what we’ve learned and been told by other people?
Well, the good news is, if you’re interested, you can.
It’s a process called individuation.
Let’s start here, though.
If I said which came first,
most people would say I was referring
to the never ending chicken or the egg debate.
They’d be right.
Science will tell us, though,
that it’s actually the egg that came first.
Now it turns out that the chicken is what came out of the egg,
but the egg came from a different species,
which was most likely the jungle fowl ofSoutheastAsia.
That’s evolution.
And like that first chicken.
Well, who we are from birth
isn’t necessarily who we were meant to be as an adult
and becoming who were truly meant to be is a must for us
and all those around us.
If we want to truly live a happy and successful life,
it's our personal evolution into individuation.
So if I could give you an idea what individuation was all about,
I would start by saying
it’s a fairly thick psychological theory with many different facets.
So if I could take some liberties and simplify it,
I would say that it’s like adult puberty.
Now, stick with me for just a moment.
But puberty, no matter what our childhood upbringing is like,
most of us have a sense that around the age of 13,
something’s going to occur.
And with that,
it’s going to change the way we behave and feel about things.
Individuation, on the other hand,
is something that nobody’s ever told us about.
What, like puberty,
it, too, changes the way we behave and feel about things,
and it affects all of us potentially several times throughout our life.
Now, a clinical description of individuation
would come from Carl Jung,
who is one of the forefathers of modern psychology.
And Jung describes individuation
as the central process of human development.
And he goes on to say,
“It encompasses the philosophical,
spiritual and mystical areas of the human being.”
And in the broadest sense of the term,
individuation can be defined as the achievement of self-actualization
through the integration of our conscious and our unconscious.
And the way I like to say that
is that it’s like taking all the desires and dreams
we’ve had about the life we could live
and making them a part of our everyday life.
Now, part of the disconnect
and the reason that we need to go through stages of individuation as we mature
actually starts when we’re growing up.
You see, as children, we need to take on the persona and personalities
of the families we were with so we can be accepted as one of theirs,
be taken care of and hopefully feel loved.
So we quickly learn that we need to go along to get along.
But in doing so, we fail to blossom into the person we're innately meant to be.
Now, as we mature,
we have a responsibility to evolve as an individual
into that person we’re actually meant to be.
So we can bring our true gifts and talents to the world.
And at the end of the day,
that should be something we would want for everybody,
especially the ones we love.
Now, I think what it must be like for that first chicken.
It potentially went from predator to prey in one generation.
And I can picture two lions in the jungle.
One and one says to the other,
“Hey, I wonder what jungle fowl tastes like.”
And the other one says,
“I bet it’s just like a chicken, looks like you call it chicken.”
So I have my own chicken and the egg story.
You see, sometime ago I hired my first executive coach
to help me get a promotion that I was working on.
But so far he was unsuccessful in achieving.
What the coach and I quickly discovered
was that the reason I wasn’t getting the promotion
had nothing to do with my job performance.
It was because I was still behaving like that little boy, you know,
the one I thought my family expected
and me desperately trying to please everyone around.
Now, I’m sure you can see how that type of behavior
really would have worked well in the corporate setting.
And my coach clearly had his work cut out for him.
Now, that way of being, that type of behavior for me
started when I was growing up
because like many children,
I didn’t feel like I was getting the attention I wanted or needed.
And so I had a hard time understanding what I was supposed to be doing
and really how to go about doing it.
Looking back, I would say
that what I went through was PADD
Parental Attention Deficit Disorder.
Now, that’s not a real thing.
I just made that up.
But what that PADD gave me was the ability to understand
how I could be in service to others in order to get what I needed
and to take care of myself.
And going through that was both a plus and minus.
Right? Because on the one hand,
it caused me to feel isolated and wanting the attention of my mother.
But on the other hand, it taught me to be self-sufficient.
Life’s funny that way.
So as I got older,
I realized that if I had a job with status, you know,
something that was important,
well, that could probably help me
get some of the attention I wanted from my mother.
So when I found an opportunity to apply for a bank manager job,
I jumped on it because I knew that that would be a career choice
that would meet her approval.
Now, I didn’t belong in the banking industry
or my learned childhood people pleasing social skills.
Well, they kept me in the game and moving along until eventually
I had a promotion roadblock that I could get passed.
And so I strategized that if I would hire that executive coach I mentioned,
I could get the promotion.
And you know what? I was right.
On the day that my promotion was made public
After the announcement, I called my coach to tell them the good news.
In speaking to him, I broke down into uncontrollable tears
that I didn’t understand.
I mean, what was going on?
I just got the promotion of a lifetime.
And here I was melting down emotionally.
That was the first sign something wasn’t right,
but I didn't yet understand what was going on.
Turns out that six weeks later I actually quit that job
and I quit because I realized that the only reason I was doing it
was to prove that I was worthy of a love and attention
from my wife and my mother.
But it wasn’t doing it for me.
Now, it’s the second sign.
Something wasn’t right this time, though,
I knew something was about to change.
So after consideration,
I decided I’m going to go back to school full time
and get a master’s degree in counseling psychology
with an emphasis on career development.
And I didn’t talk about
the idea with my wife or my mother.
I really didn’t care what they thought.
This felt like, for the first time,
I was making the decision for me, by me, damn,
whatever the consequence is.
Now, possibly,
I couldn't think this through completely because as a full time student,
I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to survive financially.
And then one day out of the clear blue as life sometimes does,
I got a call from one of my previous direct reports from the bank, Julie,
who now was a fashion design teacher at a local continuing education school.
And she said, “Hey, Anthony,
I want you to come down and teach professionalism to my students”.
“Do you want me to do what?
I’ve never taught a class in my life.
I don’t know how to put something like that together.
Plus, you know, I’m scared stiff of public speaking.”
But I also realized that I’m the type of person
that if somebody asks for help,
I can, I will.
So I did the best job I could of putting something together.
And a week later, I was down into this class giving the presentation.
And here’s the kicker.
Not only did it go over well, but it felt great.
For the first time, I felt like I was being recognized
for my true talents and skills
rather than what I experienced most days,
which was to produce scenarios where clearly I had shortcomings.
Word got around about my presentation, and before I knew it,
I was getting paid to speak on the topic of professionalism
at schools all throughout the area.
That was the start of my individuation journey
by no longer being who other people expected me to be
and discovering and becoming the person I was meant to be.
I think back to that jungle fowl in the chicken and I think like them,
individuation is a generational chicken and the egg question:
Which came first?
The healthy family or the individuated child?
I think that a child who grows up in a healthy household,
who’s encouraged to go out and be their best
and discover their true talents and skills,
well, I think that child has the best chance of going through
at least the initial stages of individuation early,
like maybe when they’re going off to college,
potentially University of Essex
choosing a major that they want to do for the rest of their life.
And somebody who goes through individuation early and often,
has the best chance of living a healthy and successful life
and then passing that experience on to the next generation.
Now, if I could give you a real life condensed version of everything
we’re talking about here, because I know it’s a lot,
I would tell you about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Now, politics aside, and no matter how their tail ends,
there's a tale of individuation.
They’re breaking away from the royal family and the expectations put upon them
to insist on being able to live the life that they felt was right for them
and to pursue the things that were important to them.
Well, that’s what individuation in this talk is all about.
And let’s be clear, this isn’t about being selfish or self-centered.
This is about giving everything you have in this one life
in the only possible way you can,
and that is to be who you’re meant to be.
Now, if you find yourself going through a stage of individuation,
you’re probably going to find that it’s a rough and bumpy road
because individuation usually involves change.
And for most people, change isn’t easy.
For me,
well, that change consisted of the loss of my marriage of 19 years
and the relationship with my mother.
And I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
But I would tell you today
that I’m the happiest, most successful I’ve ever been.
And let’s be clear, it’s not because I’m a banker.
Some of the last words my wife said to me, as my wife, was:
“You know what, Anthony, status is important to me
and you don’t have it anymore.”
Okay.
And my mother, while she was willing to keep in touch with me via text
on birthdays and holidays and so on,
but she was never willing to go back to having a relationship with me
unless I was willing to go back to being the person she expected me to be.
And I would say that my individuation choices were sealed in eternity
when I sent her the last Happy Birthday text.
This is the response I got.
“Hello, Anthony, I had a wonderful week after my pacemaker implant,
but I left this Earth and went to heaven on June 27th at 10:34 a.m.
official cause of death, heart failure.
I have been cremated as per my wishes
and my ashes reside peacefully at home
in the blue and white China urn Randy and I picked out for the two of us.
As I am no longer here, there is no need to continue texting me.”
I can’t imagine anybody would want to receive a text like that.
I mean, I know I didn’t and the best I can figure is
that it was my stepfather who sent me that text,
but he sent it to me on my mother’s phone in words
my mother herself would have spoken.
It was haunting.
I received his text 14 days after I sent mine
and three months apparently after my mother had passed,
which was the first I had ever heard of it.
You might say, yes, but that’s got to be
one of those type of things don’t always happen,
and I would say, well, I work with countless clients,
young, mature and everything in between.
And so many of them share similar tragic yet successful stories
of how they uncovered the unaddressed roadblocks in their life
through the disconnection of relationships that were no longer serving them.
So here's what I want to do now.
I want to give you three very simple questions
so you can possibly look at your life and see where you are
on your own individuation journey.
Question number one, Is who you are, who you’re meant to be?
Think about it, is it your life you’re living,
your career you’re pursuing,
your hobbies you’re enjoying,
or are you doing things that somebody else has said,
“Hey, this is what you should be doing with your life”?
Question number two,
Whose expectations are you fulfilling, yours or someone else’s?
And question number three,
Are the things that you do each day, the things that make you happy
and come to you naturally in the difficult things,
or do you struggle every day to fulfill your basic requirements?
I know they’re three very simple questions,
but if you give them the needed time and space to truly be considered,
you'll probably be amazed at the answers that you come up with for yourself.
So here it is in the end,
explore your life, ask questions,
talk to people,
find a mentor and find what matters to you
and where you feel like you can thrive.
We need to believe that who we are
and the things that we want to accomplish in life matter
and are the best path forward for us,
no matter what those around us think and feel.
Doing so is the quickest way for you to discover your true potential
and the impact you can make on not only the world but yourself.
And at the end of the day,
that should be something we would want for everybody,
especially the ones we love.