درسنامه اصلی

Hi, this is AJ, welcome to this month’s coaching lesson.

My first time living abroad, living in another country, was in Seoul, Korea. I got a job online teaching English in Korea. And I remember, y’know, the flight over feeling excited, right? This is going to be this huge adventure. Something completely unknown and new and different, living in another country for a year.

So I arrived in Seoul. The people at my job picked me up, took me to my apartment and, y’know, the city was completely different and new for me. I had never lived in a big, big city like that before. And, of course, it was a completely different country.

Now, in the beginning everything was new and exciting, right? New food, new places, everybody spoke a different language, the job was new. Everything was new, new, new, different, different, different.

Now, for a while that was very exciting. So I was excited. Oh, wow, cool. The big adventure. And that lasted for maybe a month, six weeks, something like that.

But after that time, the excitement wore off, meaning the excitement got less and less and less and less. And instead something happened, something changed. And then suddenly everything being different, different, different all the time, I mean everything different from what I was used to, started to become more and more stressful.

I began to miss things from my life in America. I mean food was a big one for me. I mean, especially at that time, I was vegetarian at that time. So in America it was quite easy to be vegetarian, but in Korea not easy.

And I couldn’t communicate, right? I didn’t speak Korean. So it was hard to communicate at restaurants to tell them I didn’t want to eat meat. And so it was always a kind of stressful situation to go to a restaurant.

So I began to get stressed, more and more and more. I guess that food was what— I just began to miss foods. I missed Mexican food, for example. I missed pizza. I just missed some of the what we call comfort foods from the United States.

Comfort foods are foods that— usually they’re foods that you ate when you were young, when you were a child. And they make you feel comfortable, right? They give you kind of a warm feeling. They’re just certain foods, everyone has different ones.

So I began to miss those. And even though I liked some Korean food, some of it was kind of weird and strange for me. And eating it every single day, I got— it got tiring.

Communication was a problem. The work culture was very, very different, right? The mindset of management at the place we were working at and, in general, the Korean way of thinking about companies and hierarchy, meaning your ranking, very, very different than America and very, very stressful.

And so what happened is after, y’know, six weeks or so of being there I began to experience what’s called culture shock and that’s when, y’know, everything’s so different it sort of hits you as a big shock.

And then I became stressed more and more and more and usually that stress it came out in two ways. Number one was anger. I began to get angry.

For example, I got very angry at my job, really angry with my bosses, the way they talked to us, the way they treated us because it was very different than America and from my perspective, from an American viewpoint, it was kind of rude, not nice.

And so I started getting angrier and angrier and angrier. And I started getting frustrated with everything and I started getting frustrated that I couldn’t communicate. I started getting frustrated with the food situation and that probably went on for a month or two.

And then eventually the anger and the frustration started to turn into depression where I just started getting just sad and depressed, where I missed my life back home, right?

Everything totally different and I just didn’t belong there, right? It’s the feeling of not belonging or you’re somewhere, everybody would notice me. Everywhere I walk, I was very obvious, right? In America, walking around nobody notices me. I look like everybody else. I can obviously speak the language.

But in Korea I was totally different. Everyone was noticing me. Lots of people would try to come up and practice English with me. In the beginning, that was nice but then after a while I started getting tired. I was teaching English all day. I felt like, oh people are trying to use me to practice English and I just became depressed, sad, missing all the comfortable things from home.

I didn’t know who I was anymore because, y’know, my identity, my life had always been in America growing up. And all these things that I took for granted, meaning that I accepted as just always being there. And suddenly they were all gone and everything was weird and different and confusing.

So that went on for several months. And then finally, I started to reach maybe a little more of a balance. At work, not really, honestly. But in other parts, y’know,

I started to find favorite Korean foods and just got used to eating Korean food all the time. Started to explore the city of Seoul, got more comfortable there. Got used to being in the city. Got used to being in a big, big, big city. And started to adjust.

And then finally, when I look back, y’know, when finally I left, I realized I left as a different person.

Number one, more confident because I got through this completely new and different experience. And number two, with a much wider view, a wider life viewpoint, a wider perspective on life, on the world really.

When I came back to America, I saw America very differently, right? Things that I didn’t notice about my own country, I started noticing again.

And I’ve lived in other countries since then and, y’know, one thing about being an immigrant and living abroad for a while, at least, it actually gave me kind of a, I would call it a more mature patriotism.

Now for a while, I was kind of negative about America because I started to see some of the negative parts of my own country that I didn’t realize before. So that can happen when you live abroad for a while.

But then as time went on, I also began to see and understand the positive things about my country that were actually special, that I value and that I love.

And that’s why I call it a kind of mature patriotism, meaning that I can start to— I can love things about my own country but in a more mature way, not just blindly because I’m programmed, but because I have a wide viewpoint. I’ve seen many places in the world and now I can appreciate, oh, I appreciate these things about the United States. And I also can appreciate things about other countries, their strong points.

So when I think about this, now of course you may not ever become an immigrant, you don’t need to. But when I think about it, this whole process that I went through, it’s really the process of identity change.

And this is a vital, meaning a super important part of life that we all need to go through. Through our whole lives we will go through this process several times if we’re healthy.

We need to, it’s necessary for us to grow and become wiser. And really, it’s necessary for us to feel happy. If you don’t do this in different parts of your life, you will be less happy, less satisfied.

So number one, what is identity? Identity is just— it’s your beliefs about yourself, right? It’s how you think of yourself when you think “I am.” I am what? I am what? That’s your identity. I am intelligent. I am handsome. I am athletic. I am patient. I am whatever, right? Everyone has a different—different ones.

You have a list of ideas in your mind, I am this. I like this. I believe this. That’s your identity. It’s who you think you are.

Some people seem to think that’s always the same. They keep the same beliefs their whole life. I am this person. I am this, I am this, I am this. And their whole life they don’t change it. That is unhealthy. That is sad.

Because we need to grow. In fact, if there’s one essential human quality, I would say it is this need to grow. And by grow, I don’t mean physically grow, although we need to do that when we’re children.

I mean like to evolve, to learn, to widen. We constantly need to be doing that, but especially at certain points in our life, we will change our identity a lot. If you don’t do this, there’s something wrong with you and you will be less happy.

I mean think about it. Let’s think like when you’re a teenager and you have certain ideas, y’know, I am— I love rock and roll. I like to party, for example, whatever. You have these ideas.

Well, okay, maybe that’s okay when you’re 15 years old. But what if you’re 70 years old and you still have the identity of a teenager?

Well, I think most of us, you can see people like this sometimes. You’ll meet them and there’s something a bit sad about them. It’s like they never grew. They never grew, they never changed from age 15 until 70 and they’re still trying to act like a teenager. You see this sometimes with stars, like movie stars or musicians, right? Famous pop stars.

Maybe they were 15 years old and they were really sexy, right? And they wear all these little sexy clothes and they try to act crazy to get attention. Well, y’know, when they’re 15 or 18 or 20, everybody—maybe people think it’s, y’know, it’s sexy. People think it’s cute.

But then when they’re 65 and they’re still acting that way, they’re still trying to be the same. They still have the same identity, we can see, oh, there’s something so sad about it because they’re not 18 anymore. And quite honestly, they’re probably not very sexy anymore.

And it just kind of like— they haven’t learned anything. There’s no maturity. There’s no wisdom. They’re still acting like kids. And you can see it that they’re not happy people. There’s something sad. They’re still trying to get attention and so there’s a sadness there.

On the other hand, you can meet people who, y’know, maybe they— when they were younger they were jerks. They weren’t nice people. They were terrible. But then they learn, they grow and they have these changes of identity in their life and then then they mature into becoming just incredible people when they get older.

Carl Jung, many people talk about Carl Jung as a good example of this. They say that when he was young, he was kind of really, y’know, restless. He wasn’t a happy guy.

But something happened, I can’t remember what age but let’s say around 50s or 60s, that as he got older something happened in him. He changed. He got mature. His identity changed a lot and that he became just such a friendly, warm, loving, happy person in the second part of his life.

So we need to grow. We need these identity changes. But sometimes these periods of life of identity change can be painful, right? But they’re predictable. Here’s the good thing. That’s what I want to teach you. They’re predictable.

So let’s talk about the process of identity change. How does it happen? How does it happen, when does it happen?

When, usually it happens in, y’know, major transitions in our life. Y’know, maybe it’s from you— when you leave home, for example. You’re a kid, you’re a teenager, whatever, and then you leave home to live on your own, become independent. That’s a major turning point in life.

It can happen when you have children. It can happen when you get— when you change jobs, change careers. It can happen, y’know, when you reach a certain birthday, 40 or 50 or 60 or something.

So what happens? Number one, there can be— usually the first stage is excitement. Not always, but often there’ll be an excitement, right? When you leave to go off to school. You leave your family to be independent. A lot of kids are really excited. Yay, finally I’m free, yay! And there’s a lot of excitement.

I see this with my cousin, Phil, for example. He got out of college. He’s off on his own. Got his first apartment living by himself. Excitement, yeah!

So there’s a lot of excitement during these identity changes and that lasts for a while. But you need to realize what’s going to happen next, because it almost always happens, is the next phase, phase number two, is stress.

So first those big changes seem exciting but then the next thing that happens is stress because everything has changed so much and then your identity starts to change. What you thought was true before, now you’re seeing maybe it wasn’t true.

And that hurts. It hurts to see some of your old beliefs die. It hurts to see that, ugh, things I thought were true are not true. Especially things about yourself. I thought I was this person but I’m not, maybe I’m not anymore. That’s usually a painful process.

And again, just like me in Korea, it usually has two parts. Number one can be a kind of anger or frustration, sometimes just a confusion. And then number two, what usually follows after that is a kind of sadness or depression where you’re almost like mourning.

Like grieving, like something’s died, like some part of the old you, your old beliefs, your old ideas, your old life is dying. And you kind of, you feel sad about it and that’s why you get depressed for a while.

Now, some people get stuck in the anger or in the sadness and that’s the danger here with these key identity changes.

You don’t want to get stuck. You’ve got to keep moving forward and so the next step, you must focus on what’s next. You must create your new identity.

You must consciously think about what’s my new identity? Who am I now? How am I different now? How have I grown? What are my new beliefs? What old beliefs am I going to replace and what are the new ones? What are my new ideas about myself? What are my new ideas about life?

And this is the key thing, the new identity, that’s step number three, stage three. And you can just ask it with one question. Who am I now? Now is the key part of that question. Who am I now? Who am I now? Just ask yourself that every day.

You have to have the courage to let go and be different. See, I know you have people in your life, they think of you in one way. Oh, you’re always the funny guy. Oh, you’re always the serious one. Oh, you like this, you do that.

So when you change, people around you, sometimes they can get confused. Sometimes they can even get upset. But you have to have the courage to just not worry about them.

You have to decide who are you now. What’s different now? You must do this. Don’t hold onto your past self. Don’t hold onto your past life or else you become like, right, those old rock stars still trying to be 18 years old. It’s sad. It’s pathetic we say. Pathetic means just kind of sad and almost disgusting.

You don’t want to do that. This is an important part of life. Your identity is going to change. This needs to happen at several points in your life. It’s necessary. Don’t resist it. Embrace it. Accept it.

Alright, so I want you to think about this this month. Number one, I want you to think about your past.

What identity changes, what life transitions, life changes, identity changes have you already had? Think back to yourself as a teenager, when you were 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, that area. Think about who you were, your identity. What did you believe about yourself then?

And then think about, number two, how are you different now? How has your identity already changed from then until now? I mean, even if you’re 25 years old, your identity now should be different than it was at 18. And if you’re 40 years old, or 50, or 60, or 70, it should be super different, I hope.

So think about that already. Think about your identity change. What has already changed? This will show you that your identity is something that changes. It’s not, y’know, fixed. It’s flexible. It changes. It moves. It flows. It needs to. You need to be a different person at different points in your life.

And then step two, what I want you to do this month is think about your next identity. Look ahead.

Maybe it’s happening now. Maybe it will happen in a few years but try to predict. How does my identity need to change in the next five years? Maybe your life situation is going to change so your identity needs to change to match it.

So think about what new identity do I need or want in the next five years? How do I want to change my beliefs about myself? You can share those with me on social media if you’d like.

Alright, have a great month and don’t be afraid of changing your identity. This can be a very positive, in fact it will be a very positive and exciting process so don’t resist it, embrace it.

See you next time. Bye for now.