Are you REAL?

Last week someone told me that maybe I should be more careful about what I post on my blog. That what I say may not be very professional and could actually result in my losing new business. I thought about that good and hard. Then I sat down to try and write a more professional blog, one that is more about my industry and less personal. Then I searched the Internet and found that there are LOTS of blog entries and articles on marketing. More articles on marketing then I could ever possibly read in my whole lifetime. Do I need to write about marketing because I am a marketing consultant?

The answer to that lies in my title for this blog. Am I real? Am I being true to myself? So, to clarify in case anyone is wondering why I write the way that I do, it is because I choose to write about what makes me who I am. I have been in the business world for almost a decade, before that I was a college student and then mommy. I felt like I had a whole series of different "me's" to deal with. In college there was the "me" that had to forget I was a mom and forge on getting that term paper in by the deadline whether or not my baby was teething or I spent the night in the ER with my toddler getting stitches. When I was being"mom" I had to forget I was a young and attractive college student. Other mom's were unimpressed with my "A" in cultural anthropology and could care less of my ability to emulsify the fat from a potato chip and give the chemical equation for the process. In my business life everything was massively intensified. Enter in the shark factor and the immense desire people have to pillage and destroy new and young talent in their own pursuit of "happiness".

Over the many years of being a different person to each group of people in my life I began to feel invisible. I began to wonder if I really was anything at all? Am I really talented at anything? Can I really be successful in anything? Who the heck am I anyways? Then life happened. A bomb exploded into my life ripping and tearing it all to shreds. Everything that I new to be true was false and everything false I didn't recognize anymore. In my horror I decided to re-evaluate who I am and what I am to myself. I looked inward and found I was hiding in all of those people I was trying to become. The REAL me was in there, but I was not even sure if I knew who that person really was. So, I coaxed her out and asked her who she really wanted to be? What kind of wife? What kind of mom? What kind of business woman and what industry? Where did she want to live? What were HER dreams? She spent so many years trying to make everyone else's dreams come true, she wasn't sure she even had a dream anymore. Then it happened... she began to dream again. I began to emerge and that is when I decided some very important things about myself.

I define myself based on what I know myself to be. I have spent time getting to know the REAL me and trying to create a way to love her. I have decided I am not a mom, a wife, a business woman, a marketing constant, a christian who loves Jesus, or____________ ( fill in the blank). I am me, one person. I feel my life is an amalgam of different parts. It is more like a mosaic than a painted picture. If I ever hope to achieve anything REAL in my life I have to be true to myself and encourage others to be who God created them to be too. So, that is what I am going to do. I am going to keep writing my blog and encouraging other people to be who they are. To examine themselves and see if they can bring all the pieces together to create and to dream and to live.