Not another bio…

Does your LinkedIn bio capture your essence? Would you want it etched on your headstone?

These days, we are constantly asked to define ourselves: a bio for every platform, networking intros, elevator pitches, who are you, what are you selling, what will you buy? In a world where money and marketing dominate, we’re encouraged to pare our characters down to their most marketable elements. Even personal spaces, such as dating apps and social media, have become like dystopian funhouses: distorted digital mirrors based on the self-penned headlines of our lives.

With the blurring of commerce and personal life, it can be challenging to discern where branding ends and identity begins. If I ask you who you are, you’re likely to reel off a list of roles. Pressed, you’ll add some adjectives you think describe your behaviour most of the time, but will likely omit traits perceived as “negative”. If you do mention them, it will probably be with a degree of shame or at least qualification. While it’s natural to put our best foot forward, denying the spectrum and fluidity of our behaviour creates resistance, which often manifests as stress.

Of course, self-definition helps create a positive self-image, which is necessary for building self-esteem and fostering community. But much of our sense of identity comes from our formative years, sometimes in the form of unhelpful, unsolicited prescriptions which are never revised. Until old programs are examined, they keep running in the background, undetected.

Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist James Low, in his lecture No Inner Essence, discusses the absurdity of labelling things at all. “What is a river? It’s a flow of water… The River Thames is an empty signifier that has no fixed referent because the referent is flowing and going, and you can’t catch it.”

We, too, are ever-evolving from moment to moment and place to place, shaped by mood and hormones, by the weather, our audience, and the myriad variables of each day. But many of us spend an extraordinary amount of time reinforcing our self-definition without fully acknowledging fluctuations or engaging in regular self-inquiry. And if our self-image is too fixed, it’s impossible to grow.

So how do we stop operating from unexamined, rigid self-definitions? Investigating how we truly regard ourselves (and others) is a great place to begin. Then, acknowledging the fullness of our characters without excessive judgment, self-criticism, or self-deception is the key to divesting more unhelpful tendencies of their power. It begins the process of demoting them from being drivers of our behaviour to becoming occasional disruptive passengers.

As psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman puts it: “Wisdom is the ability to hold seemingly incompatible things in your head… and recognise your own contradictions… and see those contradictions as an integrated whole.”

Do you operate from an integrated whole? What's your method of self-inquiry?