Am I my job, my lifestyle, or the things around me?

A mentor of mine used to say that human beings are funny because we take the parts of ourselves that are around us — our careers, where we work, our children, where they go to school, the sport we used to play — and we intermingle those into our identities.

And we make them mean us.

So if I take all of those different components and I put them together, in our minds we go, “oh, that’s me.”

Instead of really defining ourselves and then saying: those are parts of us.

If you think about your life — the car you drive, where you live, the clothes in your closet — a lot of them are speaking to the same theme around who you’ve created yourself to be.

You curate your environment based on your identity… and then your environment reinforces that identity.

So all you ever really are or show up as is what your environment allows.

And then something changes.

And suddenly, the question hits: “If I’m no longer that… then who am I?”