Why Becoming Who You Are Meant to Be Begins With Discovering Yourself, Not Fixing Yourself
William Wordsworth wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”
I have always been fascinated by that idea. What if, when we come into this life, we already carry some sense of who we are meant to become? Not a detailed plan for the career we should have, the person we should marry, or the life we should create, but an inner direction. We arrive with a brain organized in a particular way, psychological needs that drive us, capacities waiting to develop, and the potential to become more fully ourselves.
Then life starts happening.
From the moment we are born, our brain is responding to the world around us. In the early years, it is rapidly creating neural connections, strengthening the ones that are repeatedly used and eventually pruning others as it becomes more efficient. At the same time, we are learning something much more personal: what it takes to live successfully in the family and environment into which we were born.
We begin noticing, long before we can put any of it into words, what brings people closer and what pushes them away. We learn what gets a smile, what earns praise, what creates tension, what makes someone withdraw, and what helps us feel secure. Little by little, we adjust.
Perhaps that is where some of the forgetting begins.
We Learn to Adapt Before We Learn to Know Ourselves
Maybe you learned to be responsible because that earned approval. Perhaps you became the peacemaker because conflict felt dangerous, the achiever because success got noticed, or the independent one because depending on others led to disappointment.
Those adaptations can become so familiar that we start calling them our personality. We become the capable one, the helpful one, the strong one, the agreeable one, or the person who never needs anything.
Then those same patterns begin to create problems. We take on too much, avoid difficult conversations, need control, seek approval, overwork, or struggle to know what we actually want.
And that is often when we start trying to fix ourselves. Instead of becoming more curious about who we are, we turn our attention outward and become increasingly dependent on signs that other people approve of the adaptive persona we are creating. Their approval reassures us that we are getting it right, so we invest even more energy in becoming the person who will be accepted, valued, successful, or loved.
At the same time, our relationship with our inner world and our authentic self begins to weaken. We spend less time reflecting on what we feel, what we need, what matters to us, and what feels genuinely enlivens us. The quieter voice of the authentic self becomes harder to hear beneath all the expectations, roles, and adaptations we have accumulated. Eventually, we can become so practiced at being who we think we should be that we lose touch with who we actually are.
The Way Back Is Inward
By the time we recognize that something is not working, our first instinct is usually to figure out what is wrong with us and try to fix the behavior. We want to stop overthinking, pleasing, controlling, overworking, avoiding conflict, or worrying about what other people think. But focusing only on the behavior keeps us working on the adaptive self we have already created.
The deeper work is to repair our relationship with our authentic self.
For years, we may have been directing most of our attention outward, monitoring what other people need, expect, value, or approve of. Our primary attachment is external, not internal. Reconnecting with ourselves requires us to reverse that orientation. We need to become interested again in our own inner world: what we feel, what we need, what energizes us, what matters to us, and what we are being pulled toward in our development.
We stop being dependent on others to regulate our self-esteem and manage our attachment anxiety. By looking inward and using ourselves as our source of authority, we become the primary reference point for who we are and who we are meant to be.
Stop Fixing Yourself and Start Discovering Yourself
This is where the Striving Styles Personality System can help. Instead of giving you another aha moment or insight into what might be wrong with you, it helps you understand yourself from the inside out.
Your Striving Style helps you see how your brain is naturally organized, your dominant function (the psychological need that drives you), the capacities of your authentic self that are naturally developed, and those that require development because they are connected to your less preferred functions. It also helps you recognize when you have moved away from that developmental path and started using your personality primarily to gain approval, avoid rejection, maintain control, or protect yourself.
That understanding changes the question. Instead of asking, “What do I need to fix or change about myself?” you can begin asking, “What capacities do I need to develop to be more fully integrated?”
As you become more connected to your authentic self, you also begin to notice how often your choices have been shaped by the outside world. You can catch yourself looking for reassurance before trusting what you already know, saying yes when something inside you is saying no, or choosing what will be approved of rather than what supports your own development.
The goal is not to stop caring about other people. It is to stop abandoning yourself in order to remain attached to them.
Prioritizing Your Authentic Self
Reconnecting with yourself requires more than insight. Your authentic self has to become a priority in your life.
That means paying attention to your psychological needs rather than continually overriding them, making room for reflection instead of filling every moment with external demands, and developing the capacities your personality needs to move beyond its familiar protective patterns. Gradually, your inner experience becomes something you consult rather than something you dismiss when it conflicts with what other people want from you.
This is where strengthening your authentic self and self-actualizing system begins. As the relationship with your authentic self becomes stronger, approval becomes information rather than direction. Other people can have expectations of you without defining you, and disappointment no longer automatically means you did something wrong.
You begin making choices from a different place, not because you have finally fixed yourself, but because you know yourself well enough to stop continually leaving yourself behind.
Becoming Who You Are Meant to Be
The Striving Styles doesn’t tell you your life purpose or prescribe the life you are supposed to live. What it can do is help you begin looking in the right place. It is the first step that leads you back to yourself, the place where your potential resides.
Becoming who you are meant to be requires moving your attention away from the endless search for external confirmation and back toward the self whose development has been waiting for your attention. As you understand how your brain is organized, what you genuinely need, and what capacities are trying to develop, you begin to separate who you are from who you learned you needed to be.
Perhaps Wordsworth’s idea of forgetting describes this better than we realize. We do not necessarily lose our authentic self. We simply become so attached to the external world and the persona we created to function within it that we stop listening to ourselves.
The journey back is not about creating a better version of that persona. It is about restoring your relationship with your authentic self, prioritizing its needs and development, and allowing it to become the increasingly conscious guide for how you live your life.
That is where the journey to remembering and becoming who you are meant to be begins.