Week 1 · Lesson 1
Understanding the Real You
Week 1 of 23 · Identity and Purpose
Who were you at nine?
Before any of it. Before you had to watch how you moved. What did you like, what were you into, what did you do when nobody was around.
Some of you can answer that fast. Some of you have to sit there a minute. And a few of you cannot get to it at all, because nine was already the year something happened.
Wherever you land, hold that, because that person is still in there and this whole thing is about finding him again.
Key ConceptNobody Sat You Down and Told You Who to Be
You started being around certain people. Started listening to certain things. Certain things happened at your house that you never told anybody about. And you moved a little at a time, so slow you never felt it.
Then one day you looked up and you were somebody. If somebody asked you when that happened, you could not tell them. There was no day.
Ask a person how they got here and they will tell you about the big days. The day everything changed at home. The first time they got in real trouble. The day they lost somebody. Those are just the days you can see. What actually moved you was small and it never stopped.
If you picked this, then you are just built wrong, and nobody who believes that ever tries. If you drifted into it, you can steer.
That is the difference between the two, and it is the reason this lesson exists. Drifting only goes one direction. You have to actually turn the wheel, and that is a different problem than being a different person. It is a smaller one, and it takes everything you have.
Journal Question
When did people stop treating you like a kid? Write the year. Then write what changed about you that year, and how much of it you decided.
Teaching PointSix Things That Were Moving You
None of these are excuses. You cannot steer out of something you cannot see.
Where you grew up taught you to read people fast. To know when somebody is about to switch. To feel a room change before anybody says a word.
That is real intelligence. You learned it to stay alive, so it reads danger well and it reads opportunity poorly. Same skill, one setting. The work is not losing it. It is pointing it somewhere else.
Eight hours a day of anything becomes the voice in your head, and that voice is what talks to you when it is hot and there is no time to think.
Some of what you listen to is somebody telling you the whole story, including what it cost him. Some of it is somebody selling a costume he does not wear at home. Knowing the difference is worth more than any opinion anybody has about what you play.
Your circle is not something you picked. It is who was there when you were eight. That is not friendship, that is who was standing there.
So the question is not who is real. Everybody in your phone is real. The question is who is going where you are trying to go. People can love you and still be headed somewhere you cannot follow.
If you decided the world is a setup, you play it like a setup. Fast money, because slow money looks like a trap. Move first, because waiting looks like getting caught slipping.
That is not dumb. That is the right answer to the world you were shown. The only question is whether the world you were shown is the whole world.
Somebody put hands on you. Somebody left. You watched somebody go. That changed something. It made you hard where you used to be soft.
Hard works. Hard kept you here. But hard does not heal, and scar tissue is not skin.
All of that was real, and none of it moved by itself. You moved.
Holding both, that you drifted and that you still chose, is the hardest thing in this program. It is also the door. If it is all environment, you are stuck waiting on the world to change. If it is all you, there is no point in any of this. It is neither.
Activity
Pick the two that moved you the most. For each one write what it gave you that you actually use, and what it is costing you right now. Same source, two different bills.
ScenarioThe Version You Put On
There was a time you were just yourself in front of people. You said what you thought. If something hurt it showed on your face and you did not think about it.
Then something happened. Somebody laughed. Or you said something true and it got used against you later. Or you showed how you felt and the room changed.
So you put something on.
Maybe yours is quiet, and you let people guess. Maybe yours is funny, so nobody gets close enough to ask a real question. Maybe yours is hard, so nothing reaches you. Maybe yours is agreeable, no problem, easy, because keeping the peace is how you got through your house. Maybe yours is busy, always moving, because sitting still is when it catches up with you.
Whatever yours is, it worked. That is the honest part.
Here is the cost. The version people know is the one protecting you, so nobody is getting to you. And after enough years you can forget which one is real. You end up around people all day and still by yourself.
Journal Question
Which version is yours? Write when you started putting it on and what it protects. Then write who, if anybody, has ever seen the one underneath.
Spiritual Takeaway
God walked up on a man hiding in a hole and called him a warrior
There was a man named Gideon. His people had been getting robbed for seven years, everything they grew taken by whoever came through. When God came for him he was down in a winepress, a pit in the ground, trying to work where nobody could see him.
Hiding. Broke. Beat down.
And the angel of the Lord walked up on him and said, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior.
Gideon argued. He said my family is the weakest one out here and I am the least in my family. He had his own name for himself and it was least. God did not go back and forth about the details. He just kept calling him what He called him, and after a while the man started walking like it.
That is not one story. Simon was unstable and Jesus named him Peter, which means rock, and Peter still folded and denied Him three times in one night, and Jesus still built on him. Jacob lied his whole young life and God renamed him Israel. Saul was hunting people who followed Jesus and God called him Paul and sent him to the same ones he was hunting.
God does not name a man by what he has been doing. Jeremiah 1:5 says before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart. Read who that is talking to. Not you after you get it together. You, before you did one thing, good or bad.
So whatever you have been answering to since you were thirteen is not your first name.
Gideon argued with God about it. Do that. Out loud, by yourself, one time. Tell Him every reason He has the wrong man. Say the whole list. Then sit there for a minute after and see if anything answers.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 1 Lesson