Actualized Living w/ Erik

And we are live. I'm gonna start just a minute early here today. So if you're somehow already on this live welcome. I'm gonna give it some time to breathe and let some people join in here today. I'm gonna think of something. What's maybe a good question prompt to get us started off just to get a feel for who's in the live today. If you can think of what's one thing about the winter season you look forward to the most one thing about the winter season that you're actually excited for. I know sometimes this colder months can be difficult for some people, and giving ourselves an opportunity to find the things that we're looking forward to can help our perspective a bit.

So if you're here with me today and you feel so inclined, what's one thing this winter season you are looking forward to for me this coming up winter season, one thing I'm definitely looking forward to is celebrating Christmas with my daughter. She'll be four here soon, and so it's just a very magical time of year for her. And it's nice to get to feed off of some of that excitement that is hard to come by in the Christmas season as an adult. And so it's always fun to see her excitement and anticipation of the holiday season.

Take a sip of coffee. Let it breathe. That's kind of been my. My motto for today is let it breathe. I'm gonna jump right into things. If you're listening and you read the description to the live today, it's accepting the average. And accepting the average may seem like an odd way to title a live stream and maybe a little bit convoluted intentionally, but I'm going to start this live by asking a question, which is, what is your identity? What is your identity? It's often a very dreaded question we get in life.

There may be a sense of panic that arises when we hear that question or a bit of a scramble to really nail down something in our mind of who I am. Who am I? For me, when I'm in this office here, I'm a therapist, counselor. When I step out of this office, I go home. And aside from the biological reality that my daughter's father, I take on the identity of father in being directly with my daughter. And maybe in other places, I'm other things. But here's a question that's maybe a little bit easier to answer.

What do you definitely not want your identity to be? What are those first few things that come to mind? For me, it's failure, stupid, embarrassing, which is a feeling. But in the sense of somebody who constantly becomes a fool, a fool there it is a lot easier for me to come up with. The problem is that our identity isn't as important as we make it be. And here's why. Because our identity is constantly changing from context to context. Just like when I'm here, I'm a therapist, and when I'm there, I'm a father, and when I'm there, I'm so on and so forth.

And so, despite all this change in the roles we take on, the masks we put over our face, there's one consistent and no, it's not failure. In fact, there's times when I fail, and in that instance, I am a failure. But the second the context changes, I am no longer a failure. The one consistent is average human. Average human. That is the one thing that from context to context, does not change. The importance of acknowledging this change in identity is that when we acknowledge that we are average human, we give ourselves space to, at the game of chess, be a failure and then not be.

To make a mistake in our job and have to be corrected to try something new and fall flat on their faces. Our identity becomes a big deal when we make our identity a big deal. When I look towards myself as an average human, I can say, sure, in that chess game, I was a failure. But the one thing that doesn't get taken from me is my ability to try. And that's where importance is. To try towards the things that I choose are important to me. To fail my way to the things that are important to me. To be an average human trying towards the things that are important to me.

So I'm going to ask myself this question, Eric, what is your identity? Into that I say, I don't know. What I do know is I'm an average human trying towards the things that I've chosen are my values. I hope that this message resonates with you this week. If you haven't yet, I have some new videos up on my page that discuss things in this frame of mind, addressing the places where we find ourselves most stuck. And so I'll encourage you to go check out some of those. And with that, go ahead this week and try from one average human to, hopefully, many other average humans.

I look forward to talking with you again next week. And there's the five second countdown.