More Like Yourself – Alan Cohen

As we enter a new business and school season, you are likely setting your vision on how to succeed. You want to find a good job or advance in your current position, increase your income, get good grades, or find a better place to live. Or you want to find a relationship partner, deepen your connection with your current partner, or perhaps you are wondering whether to stay in your relationship at all.

The answer to all of these questions is the same: Be who you are. Be more of who you are. Be all of who you are. Your greatest career and relationship asset is authenticity. To the extent that you are true to your passion, skills, and intuition, you will succeed gloriously. If you compromise, lie, over-adapt, or sell out, you will still be wandering and wondering “What should I do?” There is really only one answer to “What should I do? Just be you.

One of my Life Coach Training graduates is a brilliant and successful businesswoman. She directs an agency that grows more productive and lucrative every year. When she was invited to be a guest on a radio show, to be interviewed about her business insights, she asked me, “What should I do?” I had to laugh. She is so wise and talented that she will wow the audience no matter what she says. “No special tricks,” I told her. “Just be yourself, come from your heart, stand on your experience, and seek to serve.”

You have a corner on the market of you, and no one else can imitate or substitute for the essence you bring to life. When the great comedian Charlie Chaplin was on Monte Carlo, he heard about a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest, so he entered without revealing his identity. To his surprise, he came in third! The world was busy looking for someone else.

Dr. Wayne Dyer learned that a scholastic testing service was using an excerpt from one of his books as an element of their reading comprehension exam. So Dr. Dyer took a test on his own material. To his amazement, he was graded 80% comprehension. When he asked the test formulators how they explained his less than excellent grade, they replied, “Sometimes the author doesn’t fully understand his own material.”

I suggest that you do understand your own material, and that while there may be seeming quirks in who recognizes your identity and worth, the people who most matter will recognize who you are and what you bring to the party. The Charlie Caplin lookalike contest did not matter, nor did the Wayne Dye comprehension test. Both of these talented people have brought great gifts to the world because the people who matter did recognize them. Can you imagine Charlie or Wayne saying, “Hmm, what do I have to change about myself to impress the people who made that contest or test?”

The brilliant metaphysician Florence Scovel Shinn, describing the Law of Attraction, wrote, “You never saw a worried or anxious magnet.” Who you are at your core, the level at which you are completely authentic and aligned with your passion and purpose, is now drawing unto you all the perfect people, events, and experiences that match your true nature and identity. You don’t have to struggle to make this happen. You just have to let it.

This season as you enter your job, school , or living situation, or take your next step in a relationship, whenever you have a question about what to do, simply remember that you carry within you the essence and magic to create extraordinary results. Nothing to add. Just to bring forth.

When you finally trust yourself, you will know how to live.

– Goethe

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Alan Cohen, M.A., is the author of 24 popular inspirational books, including the best-selling The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the award-winningA Deep Breath of Life, and the classicAre You as Happy as Your Dog? He is a contributing writer for the New York Times #1 bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul, and his books have been translated into 24 foreign languages. His work has been featured on Oprah.com and in USA Today, The Washington Post and 101 Top Experts. Alan’s radio program Get Real is broadcast weekly on Hay House Radio, and his monthly column From the Heart is featured in magazines internationally.

©Alan Cohen
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[email protected] www.AlanCohen.com