I’m Still Finding My Way – Why You Don’t Need Your Old Self Back
Have you ever caught yourself saying, “I just want the old me back”?
I know I have. I’ve heard it from hundreds of clients too. It sounds comforting because we believe our old self represents certainty, confidence and stability.
But what if that’s not really what we’re looking for?
In this deeper dive I explore an idea that completely changed the way I see personal development. Instead of chasing an old version of ourselves—or even trying to discover some perfect “real me”—perhaps we’re simply finding our way.
Because your way changes as you change.
I’ll share part of my own journey through depression, identity and the work I’ve been doing around my North Star. Together we’ll explore why identity isn’t somewhere you arrive, but something that keeps unfolding, and I’ll guide you through a simple reflective process to help you reconnect with the qualities that have always been part of you.
If you’ve ever felt lost, uncertain or caught between who you were and who you’re becoming, I hope this episode helps you realise that maybe you haven’t lost your way at all.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why wanting your “old self” back may be keeping you stuck.
- The difference between identity and the qualities that never leave you.
- A simple “Museum of Selves” exercise to reflect on every version of your life.
- Why your future isn’t about becoming someone different, but continuing to unfold.
- Practical journal questions to help you take your next small step.
Remember…
You’re not going backwards.
You’re still finding your way.
And your way changes as you change.
If this episode resonates, please share it with someone who needs to hear it: https://personaldevelopmentunplugged.com/486-im-still-finding-my-way/
and if you’d like me to explore a particular challenge, email me at feedback@personaldevelopmentunplugged.com.
Oh! And there’s a video of me recording this. It’s rough and ready because that’s all it needs to be https://youtu.be/hWcLgtawcp0
Until next time…
Have more fun than you can stand.
Shine Brightly 🌟
Paul
Hey there! I’d love to hear from you—questions, feedback, requests—all welcome. Drop me a line or leave a comment. If you’ve enjoyed this episode or any other, please share and subscribe! You can reach me at feedback@personaldevelopmentunplugged.com.
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And the transcript WARNING if you’re a lover of the written word this may make you frustrated, or angry – you have been warned – is it an ‘ism
So the longer podcast, we’re back again for the deeper dive, the deeper dive. And if you listen to the FMQ, the seed of this longer podcast, I hope you did listen. It was, I would just want my old self back.
But I thought to myself, that’s not really the thing. The more I thought about what we’re going to be talking about, I got a different idea. You see, it’s more about finding my way, finding your way, and why you don’t want your old self back.
Now that’s a completely counterintuitive, turn it on its head spin, isn’t it? Think about this. Have you ever caught yourself saying something like this? I just want the old me back. I know I have.
I’ve heard it hundreds of times from virtually every one of my clients. We go through the problem, I said, what do you want? And instead of I want more confidence, I want this. I just want my old me back.
And that’s been a generalisation. But since ever, I’ve been working with clients, seems to be the goal that some want. And I don’t think you do though.
I really don’t think you do. You see, I thought that’s what I wanted. I really did.
And guess what? It wasn’t at all. That’s not what I wanted. I realised something completely different.
You see, I think there are three identifying, or not, say it again, Paul, three identities that we have. And they’re usually, I say that word again, too, usually edited, they’re filtered, filtered for all the good bits. Oh, it was so good back then.
You know, they’re usually romanticised and very often, totally incomplete. If you’re thinking about this, you know, the real self, what do you think these deeper values might be? The real you, the real self, what are your deeper values? Because these are the qualities that remain. They’re constant.
You see, for me, there’s a mixture. Could be curiosity, being curious of what I want, what’s available, how I find it. There’s kindness.
Talked so much about kindness. Creativity. You know, really getting into those creative juices.
And you don’t have to be an artist. You don’t have to be a writer. It’s just creatively thinking about you, the world, and other people.
There’s humour. Some people don’t get mine, but I’ve got a bit of humour. But there’s humour.
And there’s love. Soppy. But there’s love.
Love for life. Love for your friends, your family, and love for you. And those qualities I was thinking was, you know, they all survive.
They survive things like depression. They survive things like change. And changes can be weird, can’t it? You see, this is all about, not the old you, but the emerging you.
The emerging self. But it’s the emerging you. It’s the person you’re becoming.
You’re not finishing. You’re not getting to a point and then starting again. No, it’s not fixed.
It’s fluid. It’s always evolving. Yeah, you get that? And to me, this is where I got this from, because it was all from my personal North Star work that I’ve been working on over the last, I don’t know, six months, maybe a year.
But it’s certainly the six months and I’m going to go through that in different podcasts. These are the type of values I’ve been looking for behind that romanticised old me. Now, here’s the thing.
Forget the old romanticised old self, because you don’t need it. You don’t want it. Yes, I do, Cluffy.
I do. No. This is what I think you want.
You want to have a confidence and a competence, you know, in a feeling of, I can do this. And you know, you’re right. You’re not overconfident.
You want certainty. Everybody wants a little bit of certainty. And it’s difficult in this ever changing world, but have some certainty about yourself.
You want a bit of energy. And above all, we always want, and your unconscious mind wants it for you, safety. Yeah.
And we always, when I say romanticise, we always associate with that period in the past, different things, not those. Or maybe we just, you know, take the good bits out. Now, let me tell you a story.
True story. My story. A long time ago, I was in a very deep black hole.
Emotionally, very broken. I had brief thoughts of, you know, do I really want to be on this little old planet earth anymore? No, only brief, but it was that low. I never realised you could get that low.
I’ve talked about it before. I’d worked with people who went to the bottom of the barrel, because I always used to think you have to get to the bottom of the barrel before you start changing. But this was something affecting me in my life.
And suddenly, everything had disappeared on me. And I was trying everything. I was being my own therapist, going through every blooming thing I could think of, because all I was looking for was the old Paul.
The old Paul. I was desperate to find the old me. And then I had this little breakthrough.
I didn’t want the old Paul back. I really didn’t. Because it didn’t fit.
The old Paul was part of that old problem. I was part of the choosing of creating that black hole. I was part of that depression.
I was part of that breakdown. And even chasing that real me. You know, I wanted the real me, the real me.
And that became another destination. Oh, who’s the real me? I was chasing and chasing now another, say, another direction, another destination. Another identity, as it were.
Then I came to another aha moment. And what it was, and it’s so simple. I’m just still finding my way.
That’s all it is. I’m finding my way. And my way changes as I change.
That’s it. Let’s just think about that again. You’re still finding your way.
And your way, whatever that is, changes as you change. Oh, and that was really powerful to me. Really was.
You see, there’s so many different changes, isn’t there? There’s the teenage self, the young parent that I was, there was my career dreaming self. I got pretty successful at one particular career. Well, I think I’ve been pretty successful at different changing careers, but I was successful in myself, I thought.
But then I’d lost myself. Can you appreciate each one? Could you learn from each one? You see, let’s think. Just bear with me.
And if you can close your eyes, that’ll be great. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter. The only reason you close your eyes is just to take a few distractions away.
So you can really focus on my voice and what I’m saying. But if it’s not safe to do so, keep your eyes open and, you know, just listen. Just listen and let it go in and when it, things will happen.
See, I want you to imagine something. I want you to imagine that we’re walking through a museum. You and I. Well, in fact, it’s really you.
You’re in this museum, and it has this wonderful corridor. And we’re walking through this corridor. And there’s so many different doors leading to different rooms.
Some of the doors are really ornate. Can you see them now? Some of them have little nameplates on. And you see, these are your rooms.
Because each room contains that version of yourself. A previous version. Let’s go back to what I said before.
That previous version of your teenage self. You know, if you went into that room, you would see, become aware of who you were then, back then. As a teenage, as a teenager.
The you that was a teenager. What were your thoughts? What were your dreams? Maybe you had some worries. But then if you come through to the next door, we close that one.
And we go to the next room, there’s the young parent. If you’ve been a parent, like I was, I was very young. But you might have acted as a parent to other people back then.
And then look at the door that says career. That career self. What was that like? Over the years? Maybe there was a different you in each part of your career, the steps along the way, things you learned.
Maybe the things that you, what gave you a bit of anxiety, maybe, because that’s another room. As you come out into that corridor. There’s times when we’ve been anxious, isn’t it? Anxious, worried, maybe scared.
That’s another room, that’s another part of the self. The anxious self, the worried self. How do we cope? What made it happen? What did we learn? What didn’t we learn? Then maybe there’s another room of the confident self.
All the skills, all the skills you’ve learned, making you competent and making you feel confident now. Yeah, through all different events, events, context in your life. Maybe that room leads to or links to the successful self.
You know, when you just felt, oh, I feel so good. Because there’s so many different ways of feeling successful, isn’t there? And maybe there’s another one. One that’s called the lost self.
Yeah, I had that one. I had that one. That was a big room for me.
The lost self. So we can walk through each room. You can take time to do this again.
But just appreciate each one because they’re a different aspect of your identity, aren’t they? Of your history, your personal history. We can appreciate them. We can learn from every one of them.
But just don’t go back into any room. Because you don’t have to keep moving back and forward, move back and forward. Because you see, museums are really just for the visit.
They’re not for living, are they? They’re just records of the past. They’re just records of the past. Things that we can learn from, I guess.
Yeah. How interesting was that? It was really interesting when I started doing it. All these different identities of you, of me.
You tend to think we have one identity. So instead of thinking, who am I? Think of this, consider this as a question. Get your journal out if you want to.
This is something that you could do with a lovely journal and just sit back and relax and take a breath and then ask yourself, what qualities do I want to grow tomorrow? Not the identity, it’s a direction. Maybe you want to be more curious, more compassionate, maybe. And that compassion to me is such a wonderful thing to grow in yourself.
If you can have that as a skill, an ability to be more compassionate every day. I think that just leads you to that curiosity. It makes you more playful, doesn’t it? Maybe you just want to be more playful.
You know, with the things that we look forward to and dream of, maybe you want to be more courageous. That’s another one, isn’t it? More courageous. So many different things.
What else? What are the examples, the qualities that you’d like to grow more of tomorrow? Write them down. You see, now when we think of it this way, the things you desire for yourself, your identity becomes a movement. It’s not a destination.
Does that make sense? I struggled with it a little bit, but it makes sense to me now. And you see, trying to put all things together, connecting the dots. So you can only connect the dots of the past, you can’t connect the dots of the future.
But as I said in that FMQ, The Seed, my way changes as I change. Your way changes as you change. Even if you go further from that, I tried to think of it this way.
Life isn’t asking us to become somebody, someone is asking us to keep becoming. Whoa, that got me. And that becoming is only limited by your imagination.
Your imagination is limitless. So the sky is the limit to become who you desire to be. Now that’s a completely different mindset, isn’t it? Do you get it? Now, all of that is not NLP, it’s not hypnosis, because they’re just blooming tools.
They’re bloody great tools though. So this is more about what I’ve discovered in my North Star philosophy that’s coming to fruition now, I think, in my mind. But we’re going to talk about all the tools that you need to get this direction, to get this becoming.
And we’re going to talk about those in many episodes, you know that. You see, I want you to think about this as a little bit of a philosophy. We, I, you, are never finished.
Now that can be a little daunting, but think about it this way. We, you, I, are always unfolding. Imagine that as a picture of your life, you’re unfolding, you’re seeing new things, new directions.
That’s, in some ways, what all of these, or certainly the last, I don’t know, five, six deep dives, they’ve all been heading this way. They’ve all been pointing me to this. And it’s part of my work, my own personal North Star work.
I think where I’m expressing this, that’s where I’m getting these thoughts from. So let me pose a couple of things to you. I’d like you to write them down, and then take a bit of time to consider the implications.
Here’s a question. Which version of me am I trying to go back to? That was a difficult one for me, because of all those different rooms in the museum. Which version was I trying to get back to? Was I really getting back to a version? And when I think about the old me, what did that version give me? So, because there wasn’t one version, was it? But there’s different versions.
What was it really trying to give me? But here’s a real good thing. Great question, this. Well, not the question, it’s the answers you get to this question.
What qualities have never left me? And that just reminds me, I did an episode, I don’t know when it was, but it was all about my qualities. I’ve even got it on the hypnosis tracks at paulcloughonline.com forward slash podcast. All about my qualities.
When you look at your qualities, you feel absolutely bloody awesome. When you remind yourself how good you are, first time I saw in all this time, but it is, you’re so fucking good. You really are, you’ve got so many wonderful qualities.
So when you think about what qualities have never left you, never left you at all. And when you know that, and you know your dreams, your desires, what qualities do you want to grow now, next? That just go in a minute, what qualities do I want to grow? Think of your dreams and desires, what qualities would make them come to fruition richer, bigger, better, brighter. And when you think of that, dreams, the desires, the goals that you have, and the qualities that will help them grow, maybe here’s a question.
If I’m still finding my way, and we are, you, I are still finding our ways, what would today’s next step look like? You put them all together and you start to find a way to help embassage this evolution of you. So I don’t know, hopefully that’s given you loads and loads to muse, to sit down quietly with your G&T, your cup of tea, your glass of water, whatever it is, quietly, to ruminate, to allow the muse to take you to tea. But I’d like you, I’d like to continue sharing my adventure in finding a directional path of my North Star, my North Star exploration.
And maybe you can join me with yours. Let’s do it in parallel. Let’s really grow together.
And it doesn’t matter what age you are, you know, I’m a little bit older than most, but I’m still searching to make my life even better, even richer, because I’m evolving into different contexts, different genres of my life. And I want the qualities that allow that to become so meaningful to me. So, yeah, I’m still finding my way.
I’ll always, I think, keep finding my way, keep taking the next step, having new dreams, new desires. And I want you to come with me. And I want you to, well, I want just to support you in those dreams, those desires, to create the best version of you every day.
Now, sometimes you do need those tools, as I said. And if there are anything, or any things, or anything that is giving you like an obstacle, maybe there’s a block, you know, on the way, something in your way that you need help with. Maybe it’s emotional.
Maybe it’s physical. Maybe it’s whatever. There’s something happening that you need a bit of help with.
Do please email me. Feedback at personaldevelopmentunplugged.com. Do that. Good old Cluffy.
I’m the only one here. And we’ll create something for you. I will.
I will also keep going through this continuing adventure of mine, and sharing it with you, because hopefully that will give you the inspiration to find your steps, your way to create a better world. Better world for you, better world for the people around us. And ultimately, little old planet Earth.
That’s my dream. And because it’s my dream, I’d love you to share my dream with others, if you would. I know I haven’t really brought an awful lot to the table on this particular one, because it’s more about thinking, considering, getting us to maybe just take a step forward by taking the step and considering.
But if you could share this with everyone you know, because I think we can all do with this little pause and realise it’s not the old me. It’s not the old self. It’s who I’m developing into, evolving into.
And how do I want to evolve and develop? So come with me on that. I’ll share everything I can. And hopefully we’re going to find a wonderful new world.
Let’s be that butterfly that flaps and creates a wonderful wind, a storm of change. I don’t care. Let’s just make change happen now.
So until the next time, my friend, you go fly. It’s time to fly. Be brave, my friend.
Personal development unplugged.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.