Discovering the Life You Were Meant to Live

Discovering the Life You Were Meant to Live Hi, I am Martha Beck. I am the author of several self-help books and a columnist for O, the Oprah Magazine. And I also am a life coach who also trains coaches. So I have had a lot of experience doing lots of counseling in lots of formats. The way you can discover the life you were meant to live is first and foremost, by learning to tune out other voices that may be distracting you. I like to say there are two parts of the human psyche, the essential self and the social self. And they are both good and they are both natural. So there’s no problem with either one of them. The essential self is who you were sort of born to be genetically. It would be the same whether you were born here or in China or in Germany. The social self, however, is geared to make you want to pay attention to other people and to please them and to fit in. And there’s no conflict between these two. If, for example, say you are a kid who loves school and you have to go to school – great! No problem. But what if you are, say, a dyslexic kid with ADD and you are expected to go through our school system. Well, your essential self is going to be at odds with some of the things that your social self is being compelled to do, and at some point almost everyone ends up overriding part of the essential self with part of the social self. That’s where we lose our way because the essential self is the only part of you that really knows your destiny. So, my work is mainly to help people who have lost their way because as Kabir says, they become tangled up in others. To help people who are tangled up in others find their essential selves, find out what those essential selves are asking them to do and then sort of making a way through the social self to fulfill their dreams instead of deviating from them. So, finding your essential self is your first step. It’s like finding your compass, your charts, your own North Star.