Your True Identity: Beyond Titles and Facades

By Philip Joks

“The most damage that I can do is lying to myself."
Experiencing Love Ep 133

Hello and welcome to Experiencing Love. I'm your host, Philip Joks. And I'm so glad that you're here. I'm here, I'm alive, I'm happy, and I'm healthy. I've been thinking recently once again about what it is that I'm doing here and more importantly, why am I doing it? What do I want out of life? If I had everything right here, right now and I didn't have to worry about money, what would I love to do every single day?

I want to start collecting conversations. I want to talk to people. When I really think about it, that's one of my greatest strengths. I used to say that jokingly, and now I see some truth in it, that it's more than just talking to people. It's connecting with them. It's sharing this human experience with another human.

I often wonder which of my ideas is going to be the one that launches me into my future. Right now, I have many ideas that take me a few steps forward at a time. I look at my business, I look at coaching, and doing mastermind groups—and those are two things that are very important to me and I've derived so much value from. And yet, they may not be my forever; they may not even be in my near future.

Started realizing that maybe instead of advertising what I want to do, what I would like my life to look like, I instead take a more present day approach, a more honest approach and just talk about what I'm doing. Now, if I had to be honest, I wouldn't describe myself as a coach or mastermind facilitator. I would say I'm just aspiring to do those things. So, if I'm not that, if that isn't my identity, who am I? What do I do? I realize what I do most nowadays is I'm a podcast host.

I might even call myself an automator. I love to automate things. I may just call myself a mindset content creator until my business is further than it is. Right now, I truly am just a content creator. In saying that, I'm not even mad about it. I actually enjoy it. I used to believe that I really disliked social media. The truth is, I dislike the way I was using it before, and I haven't found the way that works for me yet. That wasn't until I started playing around with the automations that I was talking about before.

One of the things that I spend at least a little bit of every day doing is building this ultimate social media creation platform. Or I don't want to call it a platform; I would say this ultimate social media content automation workflow. My goal is to record this podcast every day, like I already do, and have a bunch of processes happen in the background that help parts of this podcast end up on other social media platforms. And I'm talking about any platform that I can think of: that would be Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter X, or whatever. Blue Sky, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr, Discord. I even looked at Snapchat for a little bit. There are options to post stories on Telegram and WhatsApp. And I say all these things not because I want to spend more time everywhere, but I see a challenge that I can overcome and learn from in that how many different platforms can I automate? How many different platforms can I incorporate into my workflow that doesn't take up any more time than I put in right now. How can I do it that everything happens in the background?

This is currently my big project, and I love sharing about where I'm at now because I'd rather be honest and I'd rather be real than put up this facade that I'm in a different place than where I'm at, that I have more in my life than I have. The most damage that I can do is lying to myself. I've done it enough in the past. I don't need to keep doing it. So by being honest with myself, I become honest with you.

I just want to get back to writing, writing my book. It feels weird to say that because this nagging voice chirps up, saying, "Philip, why are you writing a book if you haven't figured out your money situation? Philip, why are you writing a book when you don't even have the audience to buy the book? Philip, isn't there something better that you could be doing to move the needle forward?" And when I hear all these voices or all these doubts pop up into my mind, it can be difficult to move forward. Yet, I made a commitment to myself at the beginning of this year that I would show up every single day.

I truly believe that you can become better than most people in the world at a certain thing if you stick with it for a whole year. If you do something every single day for a year to the best of your abilities, I promise you will come out on top. It's because not many people are willing to put in a year of their life into one thing. There are a lot of things that I'm trying now that I admit only last a couple of days, a couple of weeks at a time, maybe a couple of months. For those things, I look at them as part of my playground. They're things I test out. I don't believe that everything that I do has to last a year. There are a few things that I commit to for that year, and everything else is a temporary test. What works, what doesn't? But more importantly, what feels good to me, what feels good in my heart, what feels right to be doing, and what doesn't. When something feels right, I follow it.

I used to be skeptical about following what feels right, mainly because of a long list of insecurities, fears, and limiting beliefs. I'd believe that maybe the thing that feels right isn't actually the right thing to do. It may be true that it's not the right thing to do forever, but it could also be a very important step, one that I can't skip. So now, I often just remind myself that everything happens for a reason. Anything that feels right, as at this present moment in time, feels right for a reason. And sometimes, it is to dig me deeper into a hole. When I'm in that hole, that's when I really perform my best. When I have that pressure, the pressure that I've put on myself, or the pressure that it feels like God is putting on me, I work harder, I focus stronger, and I perform in a way that I rarely perform, and I perform in a way that feels few people may ever experience. That's not my day to day because I don't always have that level of pressure. I'm just lucky to have that pressure when I do.

Part of what we get to do in life is create that pressure for ourselves and use it to create the life that we're meant to have. The life that we want is right behind the challenges that we currently have. There's a fear right in front of us that is calling us to face it. And right behind that door, right behind that fear, is the land that we're looking for. We're looking for that land. And then we'll find, once we're there, that we want to keep going. And we'll see the door right in front of us. And we get called once again to face a new fear.

So, it feels right for me to be writing, to share what I know, to share what I believe, because it gives me one more thing, one more place to send someone to. If someone doesn't want to spend the many hours it would take to listen to this podcast, or they don't have the ability to directly speak to me for long periods of time, then they can go to the book. They can read the book and understand what drives me, what makes me do what I do, what's gotten me through my darkest times and has helped me appreciate my lightest ones.

In front of me, I see in big letters, "Who's your provider? Is it your business or God?" And of course, there's emphasis on God. Because my business isn't going to give me everything that I want. My business will not give me the relationships that I want. It won't give me the mindset that I want. It won't give me the family that I want. It may provide an avenue towards the finances, but that's only one part of the wheel. My business will not provide me with the health and the body that I want. What will provide all those things is God. Me, God and taking action and doing the thing. I'm a creator at heart, and I just want to create more and not feel bad for it.

I hope today's episode made a little bit of sense. I know it was a little bit all over the place. I did work today and fried my brain as much as I can handle to get as much work as I could get done. So, I'm not thinking clearly, and the benefit of that is my head almost hibernates and my heart comes out to play. I speak from my heart, I don't second guess myself, and whatever comes to me comes to me, and I say it. So I hope there's a 15-second snippet that stood out to you. If it did, bookmark it, re-listen to it, do something about it. And after you do something about it, I'd love for you to tell me about it.

While you go out and do that, I hope you have a splendid rest of your day. Remember to always fill up with the love, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. I love you.

Dive deeper into the heart-to-heart conversations and unfiltered insights with Philip Joks on 'Experiencing Love.' Don't miss out—listen to the full episode and journey with us into the essence of living, creating, and loving with all your being. For more revelations and moments of truth, click here This Episode On Spotify to tune into the episode that inspired this blog.

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