How was your weekend?

Did you get recharged or at least purposefully pause for an hour or two? To be more of who you are…

Who are you?

I did my palliative care education training at Harvard. I had the most exceptional mentors. One of my all time favorite teachers was a visiting professor from Minnesota who was a psychiatrist. He did this exercise with our group of 40 or so people in the room.

I want to do the same exercise with you, too.

Pause for a second if you will. Think of THREE words that you describe or rather like to identify yourself with. Take your time if you have to, then write them down. They don’t have to be in order, but if you feel strongly about one more than another, write them in order.

This is a great exercise, in not only self reflection, but also sharing our threes with people we love and seeing if that is how they see us, too. I just did this exercise again recently, and I can tell you that my 3s are different now than the ones I came up with at that time.

Another reflection at that point was that if we were to do our 3s when we were in our teens, twenties and so on, they also would be different.One of the purposes of this exercise was to realize that:

Humans change.

We keep talking about ‘people don’t change and you should leave a bad situation’. That is true of OTHER people, since we don’t have control over them. But guess what, you have control over YOU, so you CAN change.

If there are characteristics in you that do NOT serve your mind in a positive way , you can work to have a different thought so that you no longer are tied to that characteristic. They don’t define you. You can work to pull yourself out of the weight of that negativity. Another point of this exercise was NOT to be judgmental.

Because when you see someone, you have YOUR idea of what their 3s are. You may see me and think:

“Middle age, immigrant, woman”

Trust me, none of those adjectives describe how I see myself. It’s not like I don’t identify as being a woman, my 50 years of age, or that I was not born here. But that is not how I see myself. Those are not MY 3s.

For us to know people and be compassionate toward them, is to know THEIR 3s first. I hope this makes sense to you somehow. It was such a powerful exercise.

Ask your significant other to do this exercise with you. You ask them their threes and share your threes with them.Then see if the life you are living today is aligned with the threes that you label yourselves with…

Part of living an intentional life is trying to get our life in line with the values we have set out for ourselves.

Have a wonderful day.