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By Jill Berquist, Now What? A-Team

To figure out WHO you are, examine what you are living for.

Thomas Merton said: “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person.”  (Thomas Merton was a monk, and one of the best Catholic authors of the 20th century. He also sounds like the consummate career coach:-)

It is easy to live in the more superficial level that Merton describes.  Just yesterday morning, as my daughter shook sleep off her 13-year old body around 9:00 a.m. to get ready for a Bar Mitzvah service for a friend, she was a billboard for outer layer concerns.  As are the masses of tween and teens in the world. Is my hair okay or does it look ugly?  Will people think I am wearing the same dress too many times?  But teens are not the only ones concerned with this.  Issues of status, appearances, compensation, lifestyle, and career titles (attorney, sales director, consultant, controller) –the outer layers of one’s existence, are huge for many and certainly many of my clients in transition. We get very attached to that element of ourselves…sometimes it really feels like our identity.  Figuring out what lies beneath this is not easy. Yet, if you are here reading this, consider yourself in the small percentage of soul identity adventurers who at least dare to attempt it.  article continues here