The Unbecoming: 5 Lessons I've Learned In Seeking Authenticity

How I'm navigating change and challenge in this season of life.

The last 5 months have felt like a deep unraveling for me.

A shift in how I see the world. I’ve become a seeker of authenticity.

The moments that have normally been filled with rush, work, hurry and goals have distilled themselves down into space.

In this space, I’ve been asking myself many questions. Who do I want to be? What do I want to spend this life doing? What do I really want?

For 10 years, my identity has been wrapped firmly around being a 6 figure earner, CEO, powerhouse, productive business owner.

But there was a point last year when I asked myself whose goals I was chasing.

These desires I spent my waking hours chasing weren’t mine.

They were a careful collection of the voices I brought into my sphere of influence.

And it all sounded great until a podcast I listened to that asked one question: When is enough, enough? (You can listen to this story HERE.)

This entry of The Freedom Diaries feels intentionally vulnerable. I hope it serves you in some way.

Another Walk, Another Moment

Out on a family walk the other night, my husband shared a quote with me.

“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” - Paulo Coelho

Oof. This was it, the journey of seeking authenticity that I’ve been on.

I’m having to unlearn and let go of everything I didn’t decide for myself.

This has been a season of doing new things and leaving wide open space on my calendar.

I’m painting. I am writing again. I want to wear dresses. I’m exercising much more gently and healing old injuries with physiotherapy.

The further down this path I walk, the more bubbles of expression pop up.

I want to dance again. I want to learn photography. I want to experience culture and life outside of our bubble.

So in this unbecoming process, I’ve unlearned five lessons so far that I’d love to share with you.

These are lessons from my Freedom Diaries.

Lessons in Unbecoming

Things I’ve had to unlearn:

1. A home is where you live and what you own.

We have 5 weeks until we move out of our home and intentionally release a home base.

We will have no place to call home for the foreseeable future as we head out on this new adventure.

But it was a YouTube video I watched years ago that has grounded me.

“What is it that makes us mourn the loss of a structure? It’s not the great architecture or the way the light pours in through the windows in the morning. It’s the loss of the vessel that held our memories.

It’s almost as if leaving a home rich in such a lived-in history causes our memories to spill out everywhere, and we feel like we’ve spun out of orbit, scrambling to collect them.

But we have to remember that we have lost the vessel, not the memories. We just have to build a new place to hold them.” - Thuy Dao

Our new place to hold them is not a place, but with us instead.

A building does not make a home. Stuff does not make a home.

Family is where home is.

2. The answers are outside of me.

In the 10 years I’ve owned my business, I’ve spent many of those moments seeking out coaching. Help. Advice. Mentorship.

Someone to answer my questions. Put me on the right path. Guide me.

To fill my head with their goals, their journeys and their “right answers”.

I had subconsciously developed this belief that the answers to my curiosities, problems and questions lay outside of me, in someone else’s brain.

I had forgotten how to turn to myself for the answer.

Because, we always know what to do.

We may need a new skill set or reflection of our thinking on occasion, but constantly drowning out my voice in the pursuit of more, growth and doing it “right” has silenced my voice.

For the first time in years, I’ve gently let go of always having a business coach.

Since February, I’ve been on my own.

Not only is my own voice starting to speak again, but I have relearned what it feels like for something to be a YES in my body.

When you always seek someone else’s answers, you stop your intuition from guiding you.

I can hear my intuition again.

3. The known is safe.

Partly due to my upbringing, partly due to parts of me that I’ve accepted and never questioned, I’ve unintentionally created a belief that familiarity is safety.

I ate the same foods for the first 25 years of my life.

I traveled only to one country to an all inclusive resort where I believed I could predict my experience.

I’ve strong armed change into submission to protect myself.

I’ve begun to break this belief, beginning with our 2 month trip to Panama in January of this year.

Living in a foreign country with a 1 & 3 year old where we can’t understand the language was a wonderfully challenging experience for me.

And now, I seek it.

There is very little known in my current future.

Where we will live. What it will be like. Where we will travel. How my business will evolve.

What do I know? It’ll be an adventure I’ll never forget.

I’ll be with the 3 people I love most in the world.

And most importantly, we’ll figure it out.

4. Money will make me feel certainty, safety and successful.

This one I’ve had to come to terms with in a brutally blunt way recently.

In this place where we no longer need to work for money and can travel extensively, I would have thought my brain would have calmed down by now.

But it hasn’t.

I remember when I used to think when we reached $4000 of monthly dividends, I’d feel SO expansive, certain, safe, successful.

When it didn’t happen, I felt for sure $6000 would do the trick.

And here we are, at $7198/month and my brain told me yesterday that these feelings will finally unlock at $8000/month.

THEN I can finally start living.

I see you brain. I see you.

The horizon keeps moving.

What is all that money for if not to travel freely? Experience my kids growing up and to live now?

I shall not put it off one minute longer.

I decide how I feel.

The last five months have been an awakening for me, a coming to terms with my own scarcity.

I see you brain.

5. The “path” must be a logical one.

We all know the path.

Get a job. Maybe graduate from university. Get married. Have kids. Work work work. Retire. Maybe travel. Die.

It’s as if our life has been predetermined, organized into a sequential series of steps that follow a timeline.

‘A’ must happen, then ‘B’. And it should take this specific amount of time.

But through this unbecoming, I’ve found this spiritual side of me that I’ve never met before.

A welcoming of consciousness, universe and energy into my life.

The path is not linear, nor is it logical.

It can quantum leap forward, or take decades longer than planned.

Life doesn’t happen on my timeline. It also doesn’t happen in order.

Once I recognized that and released control of needing control, things moved.

There are so many days where I look at Flynn (my husband) and tell him the universe heard us.

Just in the last month alone:

Flynn and I cautiously explored the idea of ending or house lease on purpose while hiking. The next day, we got the eviction notice.

The other day, I said to Flynn I would love to have a coach for one hour to help reflect back my blind spots as I’m going through this Unbecoming. Yesterday, a coach I wildly respect offered me a free hour to do just that.

Flynn and I also got a full body YES hit on a move that will move us forward financially in the next 6 months. Something we weren’t even looking for.

The universe is listening.

I’m intentional about what I’m opening up to receive right now.

Final Thoughts

Authenticity is feeling bare, transparent and connected to who I am and what I want.

No longer living and guiding my life by anyone’s voice other than my own.

This journey isn’t about becoming anything.

It’s about unbecoming.

These are the 5 lessons I’ve learned.

Tanessa