all my library blogging

I was in this awesome call last Wednesday with Havi and Pistachio called The Strategy of Not Being Strategic. I learned a lot about connecting with people on Twitter by being myself, and I met a lot of cool people too.

One thing that came up with several people on the call is the question of knowing what “your thing” is. There was quite a bit of chatter on Twitter about this after the call.

Havi touched on this in her post on Thursday and she’s totally right. We care about you, and your “thing” will naturally arise out of who you are.

But here’s the catch.

Some of us don’t know who we are. Actually, a lot of us don’t.

I certainly didn’t. I thought I did, until I received some gifts that opened my eyes to parts of myself I was overlooking, that I was taking for granted, and that I even considered personal weaknesses.

And — this is HUGE — it turned out that these things were the things that most make me who I am. As such, they were the key to my “thing”.

When you think about it, it shouldn’t be surprising that this happens to people. Consider– how many messages do we get in our lives that we should be striving for goals that other people have set for us? In my case, when I had lost sight of my unique personal talents, it was because I was trying to be the person I thought my parents wanted me to be. (Barbara Sher has some good exercises for untangling and analyzing the web of external demands we all experience in her book, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was.)

Over the last six years, I think I’ve done a good job of finding my thing and pursuing it.  Since self-discovery is one of my favorite subjects ever, I thought I’d write up a post about the tools that helped me figure out who I am and what my thing is, and hopefully help others figure out how to figure it out in the process, particularly my new friends from the #notstrategy call.  

Except it turns out I had a ton to say and the first draft was way too long for a single post, so it’s going to be a few posts. This one is just a teaser, sorry. =)

In the meantime, I’d like to give others a crack at offering advice.  Has anyone reading this ever discovered part of themselves that was hiding from view? What self-discovery tools have helped you? I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments.