Season 2 Trailer: Who am I? | Some Scuffs

This season, we set out to find our authentic voice.

Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

 

The Twenty Statements Test is a psychological instrument that was designed to assess self-concept.

The instructions are simple:

There are twenty numbered blanks on the page below. Please write twenty answers to the simple question ‘Who am I?’ in the blanks. Just give twenty different answers to this question. Answer as if you were giving the answers to yourself, not to somebody else. Write the answers in the order that they occur to you. Don’t worry about logic or ‘importance.’ 

1. I am                                                       .
2. I am                                                      .
3. I am                                                      .
4. I am                                                      .
5. I am                                                       .
6. I am                                                      .
7. I am                                                       .
8. I am                                                      .
9. I am                                                      .
10. I am                                                      .
11. I am                                                      .
12. I am                                                      .
13. I am                                                      .
14. I am                                                      .
15. I am                                                      .
16. I am                                                      .
17. I am                                                      .
18. I am                                                      .
19. I am                                                      .
20. I am                                                      .

 

If you think it sounds easy to complete this test, you should try it. It’s hard to fill in all 20 blanks. I myself get stuck at number 6.

But what’s very telling is often the things on the top of your list are the aspects of yourself that are core to your identity.

Our first season was all about getting to know and coming to terms with the parts of you that make you squirm in your own skin. We were learning to grow into ourselves and finding ways to be comfortable with our insecurities.

I’m slowly getting to a place where I’m okay with who I am, and I feel like I something to offer. If you’ve made this journey with me, then I hope by now you know that you’ve got something amazing to offer too.

But what is it, exactly? How do we put a finger on something so nebulous? It really goes back to that question: Who am I, an what do I bring to the table?

Once you’ve established that, you must also be able to communicate this to others in a way that is authentic, genuine and fair to yourself that they may see your true value and receive from you without reservation.

These days, we’re always trying to impress be it on social media or at work. It’s considered naive to take someone’s word for face value. We assume people are trying to sell us on an idea of who they are to extract something from us. Do you doubt the authenticity of startup owners, or question the kindness of colleagues? Do you question brands who paint their stories of social responsibility with shiny marketing campaigns? I know I’ve been conditioned to.

We want to be understood for who we really are, but that means we have to learn how to project our true selves in a language and tone that they can best receive it. In other words, we must find a unique and authentic voice that will resonate with the people who need to hear it.

This is the idea I’ll be exploring in season 2. How do we use our voices to allow others to see us clearly, and is it even possible to strive to be completely authentic? We’ll meet a yoga entrepreneur who’s writing a book about an obscure meditation technique she wants to share with the world, a musician who ventured into the rainforests of Brazil and lived on the vast plains of the USA to discover her own song, and many other people with beautiful stories of how they found their authentic voices.

I hope that from within these stories we can learn how to formulate our own answers to the question, “Who am I?”

 

Sound design was by Lee Zhe Ren.