“That’s just who I am.”
How often have you said something like that?
I’m anxious.
I’m an overthinker.
I’m a people pleaser.
I’ve got no willpower.
I’m terrible with food.
I’ve always lacked confidence.
I’m traumatised.
I’m menopausal.
I’m just not that sort of person.
Some of those labels may describe something you experience.
Some may explain something you have lived through.
Some may even have helped you make sense of yourself at a time when you desperately needed answers.
But there is a difference between something being part of your experience and allowing it to become your identity.
And that distinction matters.
Because once we start saying “I am…”, rather than “I experience…”, “I have…” or “I learned…”, we can unknowingly start building our lives around the label.
I don’t carry labels. I move through them.
This sits at the heart of my work.
I’m not interested in dismissing what has happened to you, pretending difficult experiences didn’t matter, or telling you to think positively and get over it.
Quite the opposite.
Understanding matters.
But understanding is supposed to give you agency, not somewhere permanent to live.
There comes a point when repeatedly explaining why you are the way you are can begin reinforcing the very patterns you want to leave behind.
That’s when awareness needs to become movement.
Change starts with awareness
Before we can change a pattern, we have to be able to see it.
That’s metacognition.
In plain English, it’s the ability to notice what your mind and body are doing while they are doing it.
Noticing what’s running.
Catching the pattern in real time.
Naming it without judgement.
That awareness gives you access to something incredibly important:
a choice point.
You cannot deliberately change something you cannot see.
But awareness alone isn’t transformation.
You can understand yourself brilliantly and still keep producing the same outcomes.
So what happens next?
Change your state first
Once you can see the pattern, you can begin changing the state from which that pattern operates.
Your state influences far more than how you feel.
It affects what you notice.
How you interpret something.
How you hold your body.
The tone you use.
What you tolerate.
The boundaries you set.
Whether you act, avoid, retreat, react or reach forward.
And that gives us a simple framework:
Awareness → State → Signal → Choice → Outcome
Your state creates a signal.
That signal is expressed through your behaviour, posture, language, expectations, habits, boundaries and actions.
Those things influence the choices you make and the way other people and the world respond to you.
Different state.
Different signal.
Different choices.
Different possibilities.
This is where Science, Strategy and Soul meet
I believe there is something powerful in the idea that the energy we consistently put into the world matters.
You might call that vibration.
Frequency.
Energy.
The Law of Attraction.
But I don’t believe Living Forward means sitting at home visualising a different life and waiting for the universe to deliver it.
For me, Soul needs some spine.
