Description:
When was the last time you felt immense clarity regarding your identity, purpose and future?
Well, this week’s episode shares 3 simple yet profound questions to help you deepen your understanding of yourself. And it was actually inspired by a med school essay prompt back in 2010!
So whether you’re facing a period of uncertainty, going through a transition, or just looking to gain a deeper understanding of yourself, these questions are for you.
You will learn:
- Three simple questions that can help you gain a fresh perspective and rediscover your true self when you’re feeling stuck or lacking clarity in your life
- How to take control of your life and create a future that reflects your innermost desires and aspirations, particularly on those days where you feel like you’re just going through the motions
- How to tap into your innermost thoughts and feelings and unlock the answers that are already within you when you feel as if you don’t know what you’re doing with your life
In this episode, we share three basic yet profound questions to ask yourself when you’re feeling stuck or in need of clarity:
Who am I beyond the labels that define me?
What am I really doing here?
Where am I going if I continue on my current path?
We encourage you to physically write out your responses and dive deeper to uncover your essence, purpose, and values.
Don’t let labels or routine confine you.
Step back, think, and envision your future.
These questions may be tough, but they’ll give you the perspective and clarity you need to move forward.
Transcript:
00:00:00
Hey, are you feeling stuck or lacking clarity in your life? Well, the good news is this episode has three simple questions that will help you gain a fresh perspective and rediscover your true self. Now, these questions may sound really basic, but they have the power to make you think deeply and reflect on who you truly are. And believe it or not, they were inspired by essay prompt from a med school rotation back in 2010. You’re listening to the Purpose Filter podcast, the show that helps you take action on what matters most in life.
00:00:38 I’m your host, Dr. Dr. Kathy Zhang, hospice doctor and life coach. I care for the dying, so I’ve learned a thing or two about living. In this episode. We’re going to dive into these three questions who am I?
00:00:51 What am I doing here? And where am I going? And explore how they can help you get unstuck and gain more clarity in your life. We’ll also share some tips about journaling and self reflection that will help you unlock your innermost thoughts and feelings. So whether you’re facing a period of uncertainty, going through a transition, or just looking to gain a deeper understanding of yourself, these questions are for you.
00:01:19 So it’s time to take control of your life and create a future that truly reflects your innermost desires and aspirations. You ready? Let’s get to it. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Welcome back to another week here at the Purpose Filter podcast.
00:01:39 Hope you are doing incredible this week. I wanted to talk about a few questions that might be able to help you get unstuck if you’re feeling stuck or maybe to help you get more perspective or clarity at this point in your life. I talk to a lot of coaching clients, a lot of people who just feel like they feel like, I am so stuck, I don’t know what to do, what my next step is, that sort of thing. And this actually was taken from a writing exercise that I had to do an essay prompt back in 2010 and fourth year of medical school during my internal medicine rotation. And thank goodness for Google Drive because I’ve had it all of these years.
00:02:31 And the questions seem really, really basic, but they are so striking because it really makes you think about your answers. It really makes you think about and evaluate where you are at this point in your life and where you want to go. Questions that I think everyone, myself included, can benefit from. And over the past 13 years, 13 years, I’ve gone back to these questions time and time again, especially during times of uncertainty transitions when I feel like I have no idea where I’m going. So I wanted to share these with you today, and these can get a little bit existential, and that’s part of the process.
00:03:15 We kind of have to dissociate a little bit and zoom out from feeling like we’re, I don’t know, drowning underneath all of our to dos to be able to get the clarity and the perspective that we truly, truly need. So, there are three questions. I invite you to journal your responses to these questions. Physically writing them out is ideal because it engages more of our body, engages more of our brain than simply typing it out. And there may be a point where you get so in flow and you’ll write as if a different part of your brain or yourself is activated.
00:03:56 Your handwriting, it might shift slightly, and that could be really transformative and informative to you, as well. If you really can’t or you don’t want to write, you can type it out, right? If you really can’t do that, say it out loud, but record a voice note while you’re doing that, because you will want to listen to this to pick up patterns and to be able to dive deeper when you listen to it again. And look, you don’t have to do anything. You are welcome to listen to let this marinade in your head and let it be a pleasant, thought exercise, right?
00:04:32 You do. You boo boo. But if you’re really stuck, I invite you to actually set aside the time to answer these questions not for me, but for you, for your future self. Okay? So, the first question is, who am I?
00:04:50 Now, if you ask most people this question, I want you to notice how they respond. Most people will describe the roles that they play in life. Oh, I’m a lawyer. I’m an engineer. I’m a sister, an uncle.
00:05:05 I’m a parent, I’m a pet lover, a business owner, an investor, whatever, right? If we stripped all of those labels away from you, who are you, really? And here’s the thing. Labels feel defined. There’s structure in it, right?
00:05:22 I’m a doctor, so I do doctor things. Someone says, I’m a parent, so parents do this type of thing. There’s safety in the known, in labels, in confinement, especially if you’ve only known structure and rules your entire life. Like that guy in Shawshank Redemption, the movie who was set free, and then he held a knife to his fellow inmate’s throat so he could get sentenced and stay in prison rather than go out into a world, one that he barely remembered because he had been in prison for 50 years, where he would be actually a free man. And Morgan Freeman says, these walls are funny.
00:06:05 At first, you hate them. Then you get used to them, and enough time passes, they get so you depend on them. That’s wild, right? It gives me chills just saying it. Once the body decomposes, like, what’s left?
00:06:22 If you believe in having a soul, who are you? As a soul, as a spirit? This can be really, really difficult to answer. I was actually in a group coaching call once, and someone asked me this question to describe myself. Who are you?
00:06:37 And I could not give a straight answer. And so much of what has changed for me over the past few years is gaining a deeper understanding of who I am and then also liking that person, giving compassion to that person, and celebrating who that person is. Start where you start. You can say all those things above to describe yourself. You can label yourself.
00:07:01 That’s totally fine. But I invite you to get a little deeper. What’s underneath that? Read it over, and then go to a clean section and dive even deeper. Try to get your essence.
00:07:16 And here are some examples. I am someone who and then describe something. I’m someone who cries when I witness genuine displays of human connection even when it’s sad. Another prompt. I love it when I love it when someone discovers their true potential and steps into their real power.
00:07:38 I’m obsessed with I’m obsessed with sour candy. I’m obsessed personally with coming of age movies, redemption arcs, anything like that. There are no wrong answers here. These questions are exercises to get you to think deeper so that you’re like, okay, so when someone Aka me does these types of things, what does that say about my personality? What does that say about my values?
00:08:05 What does that say about my priorities in life? And then you can start to see who you are at your core without the labels that you’ve placed upon yourself or without the labels that others have placed upon you. So that’s question number one. There’s three of them. Question number two is, what am I doing here?
00:08:29 And here, quote unquote is a loaded word. If you don’t know how to answer this, you can start concrete. Start at the surface like most people will. What am I doing here at my job? What am I doing here at home?
00:08:44 What am I doing here in this city, country, location where I live? And then you might start expanding a little bit further out. What am I doing here on Earth? What legacy, what purpose, what impact am I leaving on those around me? Do I even want that?
00:09:05 The first few years for me out of residency, when I was an attending physician, I woke up most days and I remember thinking to myself, what the fuck am I doing? Sorry for the expletives. And it was a rhetorical question. I never really answered it. I just woke up every day and I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on.
00:09:26 And I just kept going through the motions because I was so used to it. Because I was so used to asking myself a question and being like, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m just going to keep on going without really any intention or direction of where I want it to go. Because if I had, I know now that looking back, I probably would have saved myself a lot of time and energy and pain and I don’t regret any of it because it all works out as it should. But I didn’t know any better back then. I do now.
00:10:03 And hopefully these questions can help shed some light onto your situation as well. So what are you doing here? What are you really actually doing? And I want you to notice that this may be a prime spot where your brain’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing, okay?
00:10:20 And that’s very normal, and it’s okay to say, all right, I don’t know. What if I did know? What do I know? What is true? Lay out the facts and then go from there.
00:10:36 Dive deeper from there. The third question, this is a doozy. Okay? The third question is, where am I going? So we talked about identity.
00:10:46 Who am I? Present tense. What am I doing here? Future. Where am I going?
00:10:52 This is what we call future pacing, right? If your life continues the way that it does, without changing anything, what will life look for you in five years? What will it look like for you in ten years? 20 years? Really ask yourself.
00:11:08 Paint a realistic picture of your life, your day to day, from the moment that you open your eyes in the morning to the moment that you close them. What thoughts do you have? What emotions do you feel? What experiences are you having or not having? Do you have meaningful connections?
00:11:27 Are you fulfilled? Are you doing meaningful work? Are you in a loving partnership? If that image, that vision of your future, feels good to you, congratulations. That’s amazing.
00:11:40 Okay? Like, you are on the path, and I want to be right there with you. But for those of you who are like, actually, that’s not really what I want, or no way, no how am I going to let that be my future where I wake up five years from today and absolutely nothing has changed? I’m still doing exactly what I’m doing now, and that is unacceptable to me. If that is what you’re saying, this can be an opportunity for you to step back and ask yourself, what needs to change for me?
00:12:14 What needs to change right now in the near future? So I do not keep going down a path that I have already said I do not want for myself. So much of this podcast, my content, my coaching, palliative care, hospice is to encourage us to be intentional about our lives, to just take a step back and reassess, because it is so easy to get lost in the shuffle. I’m sure you have days or even chunks of time in your life that are just a blur, right? Like, how the fuck is it 10:00 p.m.?
00:12:53 Or where did the last two months go? Did I not just wake up every single day and live the last two months of my life? The more you can be like, hold up, pause. Let’s check in? Am I who I want to be?
00:13:12 Am I going where I want to go? If the answer is yes, carry on. Okay, you’re a badass if the answer is not. Really, let’s change course a little bit. And if you’re feeling stuck, I want to remind you that not knowing and the I don’t know is a manifestation of the conscious mind.
00:13:33 And it’s so, so much easier for our brains to say I don’t know rather than I’m scared. This happens all the time, every single person, when we’re trying something new, when we’re stuck, when we don’t know. And this happens to every single person, especially if we start considering and thinking about doing things that are new, that we’ve never done before. If we start thinking that we’re going to push the boundaries of our comfort zone, of course you’re not going to know because you’ve never done it before. And I’m willing to bet real money that there have been instances in your life that you have not known what to do and you figured it out anyway.
00:14:21 And so if you find yourself saying, I don’t know, ask yourself, do I really not know? Maybe yes. Do I not know how to get the answers? I don’t know if that’s true. There’s Google, there’s the Internet, there’s answers out there.
00:14:38 Or am I actually just really scared and telling myself I don’t know so that I feel better about the fact that I’m scared to do something new which is totally human and normal? Right? I’m a firm believer that every single one of us already has the answers within us, within our unconscious mind. As a coach, I am 1000% sure that you already have the answer. Not me.
00:15:06 I don’t know everything. I don’t claim to know it. We all have the answers within us. We’ve either deluded ourselves into thinking we don’t or we have so much going on we can’t see or think straight because everything is fuzzy and blurry. Or you need someone to believe in you when you’re unsure.
00:15:26 Or you already know, but you’re too scared to do anything about it because you don’t know if you can handle the consequences. How’s that for a mic drop? A stab to the heart or the gut? Right? Each of these questions, hopefully will get you thinking about your present state, the trajectory of your life.
00:15:48 And by answering these questions, your brain being your brain, will inevitably ask a different question who am I? Well, who do I actually want to be? What am I doing here? Well, what do I want to be doing here? Where am I going?
00:16:07 Well, where do I want to go? Like, even when I wrote this essay, even before I knew I wanted to pursue in medicine, I wrote, human beings often only begin to live once they know that death is near. carpedium, we’re told. But how many of us actually manage to squeeze every last drop of opportunity from our waking days, do we consistently tell our loved ones the extent of our emotional bonds with them? I certainly don’t, and it’s something I’m working towards.
00:16:41 I wrote that back in 2010. These three questions have been transformational for my life in many, many instances when I felt stuck, when I was like, I just don’t know what the path is. And I hope that by answering these questions for yourself, you will find some clarity. You will get a little bit closer to the answers that are already within you, that just need to see the light of day.
00:17:15 So there you have it. As we navigate the complexities of life, it’s easy to get stuck or lose sight of what truly matters. But these three simple questions can help us gain clarity. And I’ve personally gone back to them time and time again over the past 13 years. So if you’re feeling stuck or unsure about your path in life, I invite you to take the time to journal your responses to these questions.
00:17:42 And if you want more guidance and support, I’m here to help. Whether that’s to guide you through a process of self discovery and acceptance, uncovering your values, passions, and purpose, or creating a roadmap for your future and providing support as you navigate any obstacles that come your way. Together we can gain clarity and create a life that’s aligned with who you truly are and what you really want. Click the Work With Me link in my Instagram bio at purposefilter and book a pro bono call with me. Until next time, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.
