I’ve been reading a book recently that repeatedly says things like:
You can change your thinking.
You can change your behaviour.
You can choose differently.
And a question occurred to me.
Who exactly is “You”?
If You can observe your thoughts, are You simply your thoughts?
If You can question your beliefs, who is doing the questioning?
And if You can change an automatic response, who is doing the changing?
It led me to wonder whether there are actually two different meanings hidden inside the word you.
Small-y you is the person life has helped to create — shaped by experience, upbringing, relationships, beliefs, successes, failures, fears and the responses we have learned along the way.
But perhaps capital-Y You is something different.
You is that which can become aware of all those influences, take responsibility for the choices they have produced, learn from them and consciously choose what happens next.
And that made me think differently about responsibility.
Responsibility isn’t blame.
I don’t need to blame the people or experiences that influenced me. They too were acting from the knowledge, understanding and experiences available to them at the time.
Nor do I need to blame myself for choices I made before I understood what was influencing them.
But they were still my choices.
And accepting responsibility for them allows me to become curious:
Why did I repeatedly choose that?
What belief sat underneath that choice?
Where did that belief come from?
Is it actually what I believe — or simply what I learned to believe?
That is where responsibility becomes something much more powerful.
Response-Ability.
The ability to understand our automatic responses and progressively develop better ones.
And perhaps something even deeper is happening.
Perhaps taking responsibility for our choices is one of the ways we begin discovering who we really are beneath everything life has taught us to become.
This is where, for me, the idea connects with Human Agency — our capacity to influence what happens next.
Perhaps Human Agency begins when You becomes aware of you.
And perhaps Response-Ability is how You increasingly becomes the author of you.
The more I have thought about this seemingly simple question — who is the “You” that self-help books constantly address? — the more profound I have found it.
Because it takes us beyond better decision-making into questions of responsibility, conditioning, identity and ultimately who we really are beneath what experience has taught us to become.
There is far more to explore than I can reasonably put into one LinkedIn post, so next Wednesday I’ll publish a longer article exploring where this seemingly simple question has taken me..
In the meantime, perhaps just sit with the question:
Who is the “You” making your choices?