The ‘who I am’ labels we forget to take off

Posted by Karen Degen on 14th April 2014

Tags: labels, name labels, reserved girl, who I am

You know those sticky name labels we get give at group events that tell everyone who we are?  Well I think we have a number of unseen ‘who I am’ labels that people have put on us over the years, or that we’ve put on ourselves and have never taken off.  I worked with a lady today who said all of her younger life people described her as a ‘reserved girl’.  No school report ever came out that didn’t have those words on it.  She described herself as a reserved girl and said “its an established thing”.  She was identifying with labels people put on her in the past and never thought to question them or take those labels off as she grew older and more confident.  I got her to imagine taking that label off herself and replacing it with one that said “confident”.  I advised her to think every day “I USED to be a reserved girl but that’s not who I am any more”.  We tend to box ourselves in with the idea we have of ourselves.  What labels are on your box?  Do they need to stay there?  Remember that just like a shipping crate with labels of each port on it, they are only labels of where you have BEEN, not of where you are going.