I have been thinking about what it means to be personal lately.

The first thing that got me thinking was when my blogging coach Courtney Carver persuaded me to write from a personal vantage point on this blog.  I really wanted to believe I had already been writing in a personal voice, but I hadn’t.  When I made that shift to a more personal voice in my blogposts I really started enjoying writing them more.  Then, my blogging buddy, Diane Elkins, decided she would write with a more personal voice on her blog.  I immediately saw her personality coming through in her blogpost “Single-Tasking Put to the Test” when she started to write this way.  I found myself getting really excited for her.

In thinking about being more personal, I always have to think about my work with my psychotherapy patients.  What is therapy but a longstanding, successful technique to get people to be more themselves.  To be more personal.  It’s often said that it is the ultimate goal to be “happy.”  What I’ve found in working with patients is that sometimes, happiness is not the ideal.  Oftentimes, the unspoken goal for patients is to feel comfortable enough to be their crabby, sarcastic selves (as an example).  In other words, patients begin to feel better after some time spent speaking in a personal voice about their experiences in therapy.  They see the difference it makes when they are able to speak in an unfettered way.

I have found when patients/people/I struggle with working towards ideal versions of how we/I should be, we end up feeling not good enough.  What are we to be if we are not supposed to be ourselves?  All of our flaws, our funnies, our idiosyncracies, our quirks.  Really, where would we be without them?  Without them we would be vanilla, flat, and impersonal.  Kind of like a hotel room for a night.  Nice for a vacation break from reality, but — we probably wouldn’t want to live there.  Our stamp isn’t on the room.  When we don’t express our more personal side we become harder to relate to than we really need to be. That idea, by the way, got Disney over $1.07 billion dollars in the form of one great movie — Frozen.  What will you get out of it?

Where can you add your stamp today?  What factors are holding you back?  How would you feel differently if you let yourself be more personal?

News to share:

Diane Elkins and I are putting the (personal) finishing touches on our guide to making a successful transition between high school and college, Stepping Into College.  Read about it in Diane's recent post, “Single-Tasking Put to the Test.”  We'll keep you posted!