You Built a Life of Approval. Now Build a Life of Alignment

There’s a lot of chatter about our authentic selves, but I haven’t seen a definition of it that I connect with.

So I went into my creative sandbox, and created my own definition of authentic self:

Our authentic selves are the unlived lives within us that we sacrificed on the altar of other people’s approval and acceptance.

Midlife reinvention isn’t about creating an entirely new version of yourself.

It’s about connecting and breathing life into the version of yourself you abandoned decades ago to be who you thought you needed to be.

We dedicated the first half of our lives to following the hand-me-down blueprint of success and chasing externals to be who we believed we needed to be.

It’s why when we reach midlife, with the shadow of death lurking in the distance, we conduct an informal inventory of our lives, look at all our external markers of success, and still say to ourselves,

“Is this all there is?”

I propose an alternative model for the second half of our lives if we want to create a life of purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.

We must stop chasing the hand-me-down blueprint of success, and instead write a connected version of success…