Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

by Martha N. Beck

Anne’s social self (with lots of input from the “three P’s”: peers, parents, and professors) had decided that she should go into a field her essential self loathed.

Same here! My social self and input from the three P's (especially my parents) decided I should study business for my bachelor's degree. I hated it, for three years I endured until finally I finished it. Am I happy I did it? Sure, but every fiber of my essential self was screaming.

“You can’t just obey your essential self,” they say. “You can’t just say ‘no’ every time something unpleasant comes along. People have to do what they have to do.” This, of course, is the battle cry of the social self. It has learned to say “yes” in aversive situations because it believes there is no way out.

I call this feeling the Urge to Merge. It’s an intense, almost chemical reaction that comes out of nowhere and makes some person, place, or thing so attractive to you that for a while, you can’t think about much else.

Many people experience their true path not as something that happens to them but as the simultaneous loss of self and complete connection with the universe. When the essential self is really in its element, you may be so involved with the work at hand, the people around you, and the things you’re learning that you won’t be aware of yourself as separate from them.

Our social nature makes us long to fit in with a larger group, but it’s difficult to hold the tastes and opinions of more than five or six individuals in your mind. So the resourceful social self creates a kind of shorthand: it picks up on a few people’s attitudes, emblazons them on your brain, and extrapolates this image until it covers the entire known universe.

No matter how deeply your essential self longs to find the real love, the real mission, the real meaning of your life, your social self will not let you embrace these things as long as Everybody disapproves.

The social self isn’t opposed to your reaching your North Star, per se; it just won’t allow you to proceed toward it until you get Everybody’s permission. Actually, the social self would prefer that you don’t do anything, anything at all, until Everybody kneels down and begs you to do it.

The social self wigs out when you begin to listen to the essential self, because the latter immediately begins to suggest that you do things your Everybody might not like.

What your social self doesn’t know is that 1) very few people actually feel this way; 2) these people are not likely to be the best source of information about your ideal life; and 3) there may be a whole bunch of other people who would actually praise and accept you for doing exactly what feels best to your essential self.

I’d rather take the quick approach by exchanging your present generalized other for a whole new Everybody.

None of them had any idea how much their adolescent teasing had influenced him. As one of them succinctly put it, “Why would you pay any attention to us? We were total idiots.” Leo’s Everybody consisted not of his real brothers but of three pubescent figments of his memory and imagination.

An important point about your Everybody list is that it’s probably made up partly of loved ones and partly of hated ones. Yes, it’s true: Every single day, you hand over control of your life to the very people you most dislike. This irony is almost universal. Especially when you’re striking out in a new direction, feeling a bit scared and vulnerable, the voice of Everybody begins to sound just like the most demanding, rigid, narrow-minded, and, frankly, stupid people you know.

Why? Because the social self is programmed to avoid danger, and nasty people are far more dangerous than the loving, accepting folks in your universe. If you’re sitting in a room full of ten darling, harmless little puppies and one big, deadly king cobra, you’re not going to igno...

And so you fill the few chairs in your Everybody committee with the most insecure, vindictive jerks who have ever hurt your feelings. In fact, your social self is so devoted to this merry band of lowlifes that it tries to pre-empt an emotional thrashing by imagi...

As children, they accurately assessed the situation, then shut down their essential selves to keep them from getting damaged any further. That’s a healthy defense mechanism. It becomes unhealthy when people leave a dangerous environment but continue to believe that Everybody is an extension of those who hurt them.

Listen carefully: Your family of origin does not know how to get you to your North Star. They didn’t when you were little, they don’t now, and they never will. It isn’t their job.

Each time you go past the magazines at the supermarket checkout counter, or sit down for an evening to watch television, or glance at a billboard ad, you get a powerful dose of how Everybody thinks you should act, think, dress, talk, and look.

As long as the media keep pumping out images of the ideal human, my social self will continue its proud tradition of pathetic, groveling longing to please Everybody.

But if you were raised with beliefs you no longer consciously accept, and you’re having trouble making your life work, you might want to re-examine those early lessons.

In school, you learned that being smart is the most important thing in the world. This was closely followed by working hard, being quiet, keeping your belongings tidy, and not causing any trouble. Being happy probably never made it onto the academic value chart. It’s not that the school systems wanted you to be unhappy, but as long as you were smart, diligent, quiet, and well organized, nobody paid much attention to your emotional state.

Personal friends contribute to your Everybody in a slightly different way than the overall herd of people your own age. You may run with various different crowds at any time from babyhood to old age, but their effect tends to be strongest during adolescence and early adulthood, when people are trying to establish an identity independent of their families.

Even if you view an organization as an alien force, within which you are merely an observer, any group with which you come into regular contact influences your social self. If the organizational culture comes close to your essential temperament, this will be exciting and empowering—you’ll feel like Everybody loves you. If you and the organization differ, however, you’re liable to abandon your essential self and conform to the majority.

we all have a psychological tendency to give unwarranted power to certain individuals.

If you can convince it that Everybody approves of your true path—and remember, the social self needs only three or four opinions to draw this conclusion—it will automatically begin to disassemble the barriers that keep you from your own North Star.

The social self will turn virtually anybody into a generalized other, given two conditions: exposure and repetition. This is how you got the Everybody you have today. At some point, you were exposed to conditions and people that sent a powerful message about you. Then this message was repeated over and over and over. Sometimes the repetition came from outside the self:

During this period you’ll have to consciously, actively, forcefully repeat the truth. You will experience frequent setbacks, as your social self panics and tries desperately to keep you from developing the confidence that might make you forget to honor your hostile Everybody.

No matter. If you keep taking the steps below, your social self will end up believing in you, and it will begin to tell you that Everybody else believes in you too. Your mind will still know that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but your heart will live in a much friendlier universe.

True, after a few months of watching, reading, and listening to people who are passionate about their particular interests, these folks start to sound a little strange. They forget that not Everybody is on their wavelength; they assume Everyone knows the names of all the great stock-car racers, or bass fishermen, or restaurateurs, or what have you. While you may want to keep a compartment of gray matter that acknowledges the diversity of people’s worldviews, this is a benign sort of delusion. The Everybodies that keep us from our dreams are every bit as exaggerated as those that support us, and not nearly as useful.

One is that your daily activities bring you into frequent contact with certain people. If this happens at work, you should keep conversations to a civil, functional minimum. Many of my clients greatly improved their work relationships when they realized that not all their colleagues have to be friends.

If your hostile Everybody is a family member, even a spouse, learn to excuse yourself politely and seek solitude when you’re feeling overwhelmed by social-self demands. In very codependent or enmeshed relationships, this may hurt the other person’s feelings. However, if you continue to violate your essential self in order to avoid minor conflict, you will end up storing large amounts of anger and really messing up the relationship.

If your Everybody committee members aren’t convinced by your initial arguments, they aren’t likely to yield to repetition or escalated debate. Detaching, finding your true path, and becoming a whole, strong person will put you in a much better position from which to influence them than staying locked in a dance of futile control efforts.

But while Holly’s voice was upbeat and pleasant, her body told me a different story. It sat there cramped and brittle, head stuck at that weird angle, doing everything but semaphore to communicate distress and anxiety.

People who are lucky enough to inhabit emotionally safe environments start mending almost as soon as their injuries occur. The rest of us don’t improve so quickly. We were hurt on emotional battlefields where there wasn’t even a safe place to rest, let alone anyone skilled enough to administer first aid. So we patched our wounds as best we could and battled on, still bleeding, still carrying shrapnel in our souls.

I believe that almost everyone who feels as stymied, aimless, or directionless as Ron is carrying an unresolved emotional wound. A lack of enthusiasm for life is always a sign that the deep self is hurt. Every person’s essential self is pure productive energy, and yours will send you into a fulfilling life almost automatically if your emotional psyche is in good repair.

If someone you deeply love wounded you emotionally, you may spend years in futile efforts to convince that person to change, to see how valuable you are, to treat you as you deserve to be treated. When these attempts fail (because they usually do), you’ll feel magnetized toward romantic partners, friends, and sometimes even employers who are similar to the person who hurt you. You’ll try to get them to treat you right, because that would feel a lot like getting love from the original injuring party.

you may well need to confront your exploitative boss, your abusive ex-boyfriend, or your manipulative stepmother at some point on the road to your North Star. But don’t go to these people when you’re trying to heal your wounds.

As a result, many people end up telling only part of their stories in a therapeutic setting. They shade the details to make things look better than they really were, or paint themselves as victims of evil when they were actually participants, or leave out important details.

People whose hearts have been injured armor themselves against further pain, rejecting anything with the potential to touch them deeply. If you tend to respond to love by running or panicking, don’t push yourself. You must eventually get over the problem if you want your emotional wounds to heal, but you can’t force this to happen. Just try to accept as much compassion as possible, in whatever form you can stand it. Persist in this effort and, over time, your resistance to love will relax.

I’ve had any number of clients with an uncanny knack for winding up in the job situations and relationships that echoed their painful pasts. This “repetition compulsion” has the effect of pulling you back to the source of your pain, so that you have a chance to heal old wounds and learn new, more self-supporting responses to people and events. Once you’ve fully grieved the original wounds that scarred your psyche, you’ll stop unconsciously seeking and repeating them.

“I don’t know what to do when I don’t feel bad,” she explained. “All I’ve done, my whole life, is deal with pain. I go to my job, then I go home and cry—it’s always been that way. Therapy made it even more intense for a while, but now the pain is almost gone. Frankly, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my time and energy.”

It requires creative problem solving, and many unhappy people don’t want to work that hard, even to improve their own lives. They want someone else—their bosses, their spouses, their parents, the government—to figure out what would make them happy, prepare it for them, and serve it to them nicely browned, with an apple in its mouth. I’ve known people who spend their whole lives in a state of furious self-pity because this never happens for them.

The essential self will come up with wild, out-of-the-box, often unworkable ideas. The social self, without mocking or censoring these ideas, gets to modify them with its sophisticated practical knowledge of various physical and social rules for living. As I’ve already mentioned, the social self is a terrible master—but as a loyal and intelligent servant, its contribution is priceless.

Of course, you should refuse to play social games that are immoral, or toxic to your essential self. There will also be times when, to be true to your essential self, you must break the rules of some social system. However, there’s nothing wrong with abiding by the rules of a game you enjoy, and the social self, with its cultural savvy, can tell your essential self how to do that.

The confidence that your capacity to experience joy is internal and indestructible grows as you let go of joyful experiences and find that they are replaced by others even more wonderful. You can learn to hold your own happiness lightly by remembering that you are its source, and that there is an infinite supply.

Letting go of people is hard but you must open yourself up to new experiences lest you lose joy.

she had always seen suffering as a terrific way—possibly the only way—to get loving attention from others. This is a fairly common misperception, especially for people who were ignored during childhood until something tragic happened to them. People like Tiffany believe that giving up suffering literally means giving up love.

Have you ever learned a word you’ve never heard before, and then stumbled across it five or six times within a week? Whenever your mind is focused on a given topic, your attention will sort through the infinite bits of information you encounter every day and zero in on things relating to that subject. This is why it’s always a good thing to clarify and specify your desires. Visualizing exactly what you want or need preps your brain to find it in the world around you.

Go to a bookstore or library when you have at least fifteen minutes to spare. Wander through the shelves without any particular intention. Try to feel if some books or sections seem to “tug” at you. This “tug” is a wisp of the same kind of curiosity you used to feel when you were a little kid, whenever something really interesting passed your way.

But for a person who’s stuck in the wrong life, setting out on a North Star quest has all the combined attractions of suicide and childbirth. To complete it, you’ll have to kill off the old You and give birth to a different You, someone nobody has ever seen before. Neither side of this process is painless, and they’re both scary as hell.

However, this might not work as well as you think when people who have known you as your old self will doubt or ignore that you have killed the old you and gave birth to a new you. Usually, when I move to a new place it’s a good opportunity to connect with people (who don’t know you yet) with your new self. Or, if you haven’t seen a person who knew your old self in a long time, this will work as well since you can explain better that you’ve changed.

An opportunity always looks like a lucky break. It happens when you encounter the possibility of making a huge jump toward the life your essential self wants to live. Unlike shock, it’s not imposed on you; it simply offers you a chance at something alluring.

Some people will avoid an opportunity out of an aversion to change, pure and simple. These people end up bitter and regretful. I urge you not to join them. Take the plunge and grab the opportunity.

I definitely took the plunge and grabbed an opportunity this time when I saw a chance to become a TEFL teacher in Japan I signed up quickly. Sure, I’m excited about it but also still nervous. As I learn more about what is required in this new adventure, my fears and self barriers ease away.