What if you were already complete?

Underneath the practice of becoming yourself is a premise worth surfacing.

Most of us arrive to self-improvement or personal development work sensing something in us is missing or broken, and the implicit job of the work is to find what's wrong and fix it. However, my coaching is founded on the opposite premise: what if you were already fundamentally whole and complete?

This question comes from my teacher Steve March, who puts it more directly:

"What if nothing is missing?"

— Steve March, Aletheia

I understand that this may not feel true to you. Our minds are very good at creating stories about ourselves. However, this question isn't an invitation into fantasy. It's a grounded request to look at the fundamental reality of who and what you are.

Think about it this way: in each cell of your body (save for red blood cells) lies the DNA that encoded your very being. Your body and mind grew itself, and prior to you even recognizing yourself in a mirror at around age 2-3, you had already developed the basic capacities of locomotion, speech, and begun interacting with, exploring, and learning about your environment. You feel feelings that escape language, and convert the food you eat into energy that combines with oxygen to power your musculature. I could go on!

This is not to suggest you are perfect or infallible, but I am pointing towards the fundamental intelligence, adaptability, and resourcefulness you have always possessed.

What if you could stay in contact with this sense of yourself as you sought to improve? What might be different about learning or developing yourself from a sense of intrinsic sufficiency?

In my experience, something internally begins to shift and soften. When we understand that we are already equipped with everything we need to express ourselves further, we seek improvement from a sense of fullness not lack. This supports a sense of playfulness in the journey. You can fail without the failure reinforcing a feeling of self-deficiency. You can even learn that you're not very good at something, know that you tried with all your might, and then move on with acceptance and grace.

This is not to say that this shift into a sense of inherent sufficiency is easy. The premise of our innate wholeness can land intellectually ("That makes sense!") and yet it stays hard to live from that place. Why is this?

A part of us has been working hard for a long time based on a false assumption.

Most of us have spent decades living from an inner place of lack. Very early, when it was hard to imagine that the world or our caregivers were the ones not meeting us correctly, something in us interpreted those experiences as proof of something missing within us. Ever since, it has been diligently protecting us from ever having to encounter that reality again. Often its strategy is to keep us mobilized into self-improvement, into endless effort. It believes, "If I slow down, I risk falling back towards deficiency, so I can never stop."

Yet after many years, we begin to feel exhausted by this. What started as a drive and ambition to get better has now become a never-ending treadmill of attempts to fix ourselves. This is because it was always founded on an assumption of brokenness or lack. We rarely ever stop to investigate that foundation.

When we believe something in us is fundamentally broken or lacking, no amount of "fixing" will solve that. The surprising and paradoxical truth is that we support a return to our sense of wholeness by embracing the very parts of us that believe we're incomplete.

It happens through a welcoming of all parts of ourselves — including the parts that believe we're deficient — back into presence with our innate wholeness.

Completeness was always here. The work is recognizing what's been getting in the way.

Further reading (optional):

What is unfolding? — Steve March on the ontological ground of the Unfoldment Paradigm