Of late, I’ve been pondering the difference between two ideas – what you are doing and who you are being. On the one hand, they seem closely related. One might imagine that what you do generally flows from who you are. But, that assumes you walk what you talk and vice versa.
Whenever there is a gap between what you are doing and who you are being, you come across as inauthentic. We’ve all experienced this with people we’ve met – that feeling of dissonance, that sense that something isn’t right.
And, on the flip-side, we’ve likely been on the receiving end of someone’s mistake. But, given we know how much they care (or who they are), we’ve been happy to forgive them.
In an age where there’s media everywhere around us that lionizes people who succeed, it has become more important than ever before to understand if what we do is aligned with who we want to be. We might do many of the “right” things, but if they aren’t consistent to who we are being, then it isn’t going to work.
After all, people don’t remember what we said or did. They remember how we made them feel.
A Learning a Day 
