Do you desire to change and live your best, most happy, fulfilling life? Then Lauren Zander's book Maybe It's You will serve as an excellent guide. I found this book to be full of so much wisdom and guidance that I wanted to share it.
This article is my cliff note version of Lauren Zander's book, Maybe It's You. I summarize the book chapter by chapter, and highlight her points I found most pertinent. Please note that this is a book review, and the ideas expressed are not my own, but those of Lauren Handel Zander.
Lauren challenges one to dig in and fix the areas of ones’ life that aren’t working. She began her career as a life coach, helping thousands of people have personal accountability, with a revelation that she “would never let [her] own fear or worry over an outcome or another person’s point of view get in the way of [her] doing the right thing." If you desire to get to the root of where your life doesn’t rock, and are willing to do the hard work, then this book is for you. In his forward to the book, Mark Hyman states that “… this book is your road map to happiness. More importantly, it’s your road map to your own mind, heart, and soul.”
Lauren doesn’t just inspire, or give an idea or way of thinking, rather she gives you a method, “The Handel Method.” The Handel method has clear, organized steps to follow. The structure of the book, Maybe It’s You, is that it is broken down into 10 chapters which are coaching sessions. At the end of each chapter, she gives you a written assignment. Throughout the book, she also shares the stories of 4 clients and their assignments to help you with yours. I do not discuss the clients stories in this review, but stick to her main points.
Chapter One: You Must Be Dreaming; Designing the Life You Want
Chapter Two: Maybe It’s you; Discovering Your Own Fingerprints on the Crime Scene
Chapter Three: The Promise Land; Learning How to Keep a Promise to Yourself
Chapter Four: Change your Mind; Getting Your Head Under New Management
Chapter Five: Emotional DNA; Dealing With The Hand You Were Dealt
Chapter Six: The Truth About Lying; Becoming Honest With Your Dishonesty
Chapter Seven: Hauntings; Unraveling Your Past
Chapter Eight: Unstuck; Finding Your Way out of Purge-atory
Chapter Nine: The Mother Load; Cleaning, Unloading and Putting away Your Dirty Laundry
Chapter Ten: Mission I’m Possible; Be You. Only Better.
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Chapter One: You Must Be Dreaming; Designing the Life You Want
Lauren starts off this chapter stating that inside each of us is our ideal life, our true north, but sometimes along the way we have lost sight of what this is. In this book, Lauren teaches us how to course correct to reach those ideals in ALL aspects of our life. She tells us clearly that WE have to be the one to drive our dreams forward. For they are “our” dreams,” no one elses. So we need to stop waiting for someone else to come and save us, but we have to figure out how to drive our dreams forward ourselves. She states that if we stay stuck in the premises that we don’t need to reach our dreams, then we don’t ever have to be fully responsible for causing the change that we deeply desire.
She states that real happiness comes from knowing that you are giving all of yourself in all areas of your life, and not just one or two areas. Lauren breaks our lives into 12 areas and forces us to write up a dream for each area of our life. The 12 areas are the following:
1) SELF: How you feel about yourself, personality traits and habits;
2) BODY: Health, weight, and appearance;
3) LOVE: Dating, marriage, sex and romance;
4) SPIRITUALITY: However you define spirituality for yourself
5) CAREER: Business, work and school life;
6) MONEY: Earnings, savings and money management;
7) TIME: Relationship to time, to-do’s and time management;
8) HOME: Where you live, your space;
9) FAMILY: Immediate and extended family and parenting;
10) FRIENDS: Old and new friends;
11) FUN AND ADVENTURE: Indulgent time, vacations and extracurricular learning; 12) COMMUNITY AND CONTRIBUTION: Participation in your community
Assignment for Chapter One:
1) Write down at least 3 accomplishments you’ve made happen in your life.
2) Write dreams for all 12 areas of your life, and pinpoint 3 areas you will focus on for the 10 sections of this book.
3) Describe your current reality for each area, and where you want to be.
4) Rate your current reality for each area.
5) Explain your rating for each area. Why do you think you haven’t been able to reach that dream in that area?
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Chapter Two: Maybe It’s you; Discovering Your Own Fingerprints on the Crime Scene
In Chapter 2, Lauren discusses how the common denominator in everything that isn’t working in our lives is ourselves, that it is us who has to change. It’s good and bad news. There is no one else to blame, yet, we can actually do something about it. She states that because we are the authors of our lives, then we can change any of it. She states that we each have a little voice in our head that is constantly commentating on everything that is happening in our lives. This voice squashes our dreams and makes excuses for what isn’t working in our lives. She says the we need to distinguish, pinpoint, and name the voices in our head in order to understand that negative impact they are having in our lives.
She names two of them , “The Chicken,” and “The Brat.”
She says that the chicken is conservative, pessimistic, and not the realist it claims to be. Its primarily job is to weigh all options and keep you protected in your life, regardless of the fact that a safe life may preclude fun, profound happiness, and pride. The chickens’ myriad excuses may seem intelligent, wise, and incredibly reasonable, but in reality, they are not.
The brat is stubborn, manipulative, and always running a scam, either trying to get what it wants or get you out of doing something.
She states that other factors that directly impact your inner dialogue are your beliefs and theories.
Assignment for chapter 2:
Sift through your entire assignment for Chapter One and highlight everywhere you were being a chicken, brat, and weather reporter. Make a list for each voice, compiling everywhere you were a chicken, brat, and weather reporter. List your current not so great theories: your truisms about yourself, others, the world, love, monogamy. From the list of theories you just wrote, pick one negative theory from each of three areas you are working on while reading the book, replace each of them with a new theory that aligns with your dream, and start gathering evidence to prove it.
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Chapter Three: The Promise Land; Learning How to Keep a Promise to Yourself
Lauren opens the chapter challenging us as to what it means to be decent people. She says that we have been trained from an early age to believe that if we feel really terrible for not doing what we said we would do that it makes us decent people. She says that if we look sad and say we’re sorry than we are decent. But she questions this premise that feeling guilty, and having an acceptable excuse makes us a decent human being. She says, does it instead make us well-intended liars? She says that people are trained to think that as long as they are guilt ridden, that we must be incredible good people.
Personal Integrity:
She explains “personal integrity,” is the ability to make and keep a promise to ourselves that is a match with our dream. She states, “when you can keep a promise to yourself, you become not only proud of yourself, you can trust yourself. Happiness, self-esteem, and personal pride come from knowing you can count on you.” Your prescription for profound happiness, pride, and confidence is really simple. Do what you say, and have what you say forward your dreams.
Excuses:
She states that in any and every area where your results don’t match what you say you want, you have to figure what your favorite brand of excuse is in that area. She says there are about 8 basic excuses:
The don’t -care excuse, The passive excuse, The genetic excuse, The victim excuse, The everyone else excuse, The past-precedent excuse, The how-things are excuse, The done-enough excuse
Excuses keep us from having to do something we don’t want to do and let us explain why we can’t. However, our happiness, self-esteem, and pride, pay the price.
How to make a promise to yourself:
Be realistic
Stretch yourself
Be specific
Use powerful language
Manage the external world
Get the joke
Truth and Consequence:
Every time you break a promise to yourself, you break your own trust. To keep a promise, you need to figure out the right self-imposed consequence to get accountable for your own dreams. When you make a promise to yourself and attach a consequence to it, you keep yourself aware of your promise and ultimately aware of your own personal integrity. Either keeping the promise or paying the consequence, you keep yourself aware of your promise and ultimately aware of your own personal integrity. The key is to design the perfect consequence. If rewarding ourself worked, then it would have. The reward system doesn’t work. But if we take something away that we are used to, then that’s a whole another story.
Finding the right promise, then keeping it or paying up, is the secret sauce to happiness.
It’s time for you to design promises in the three areas you are working on and come up with the right consequences that will keep your chicken and brat in the right coop and away. What you will find on the other side of keeping the promise or paying the consequence is personal pride, confidence, happiness, and self -esteem.
To prepare for the difficulty in this new system, she explains Newton’s first law of motion.
Newton’s law states that every object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in a state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
So assuming you are the object at rest, we are applying the force (promise) and once in motion (making and keeping promises) the act of making and keeping promises will get easier.
Examples of consequences:
-Annoying consequences: throwing money to the ground, no chocolate, no wine, no coffee, no internet, no TV, donating money to a political candidate you hate, no cell phone, no mincers,
-Scary/embarrassing consequences: saying hi to stranger, being coffee for personal behind you and explaining why, doing an open mic, Singing a song on a street corner
-Truth-telling consequences: confessing a broken promise to someone whom you prefer not to tell
-Relational consequences: calling in law or other family member who yo don’t like to speak to, babysitting for free, asking your spouse or partner for a good consequence.
-Cross-purpose consequences: doing push-ups, adding fifteen more minutes of cardio /weights to your gym promise, running up/down flight of saris, cleaning out a drawer, vacuuming out your car.
Assignment for chapter 3:
1) What’s your brand of excuses? Write down 3-4 of your favorite excuses you use on a regular basis that keep you from doing what you know you should be doing in the 3 specific areas you are working as you read this book
2) Create a promise sheet for yourself: (include 3 areas working on, a kept/not kept column, an excuse column and a consequence column)
3) Come up with at least 2 specific promises for each of the three areas you are working on
4) Come up with an awesome irksome consequence for each of your promises
5) Find an accountability body and share your promise sheet.
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Chapter Four: Change your Mind; Getting Your Head Under New Management
This entire book is about getting into a whole new level of consciousness that we are not tapped into. Getting you in charge of your own mind and narrative. Mastery over your mind comes from the learned ability to choose what is best for yourself to think and feel. To align your life with your desires. Now you are going to invent a higher self to start distinguishing yourself from your thoughts, from your lower self. You will see that every minute you start to ask yourself what you are really like, you have a say over it.
She says there are 5 basic steps to reclaim your mind.
1) Observe: start paying attention to your thoughts. Start using a thought log and write down what you are saying to yourself;
2) Name it: decide which thought patterns you want to eliminate and name it;
3) Stop it: the minute you hear that thought pattern, stop it. The best ways to stop negative thoughts are to either: 1) confess them to someone out loud; and/or 2) make a consequence for yourself for engaging in those thoughts;
4) Replace it: Decide which thoughts you actually want to cultivate instead of your current ones, making sure they align with your dreams;
5) Implement it: Direct your new thought patterns, ensuring that you are thing about what you want to be thinking.
She ask the question: If you are nice on the outside, but mean on the inside, whether to yourself or other, aren’t you still mean? Truth is , it’s not actually nicer to be quietly mean; it’s just more fake.
Assignment for chapter 4:
Three times per day, stop and write down the thoughts you were having over the past hour or two. Just take 5 minutes and challenge ourself to write as many thoughts in that time as possible. Don’t edit the thoughts, just dump whatever is in your brain. Do this for two weeks. Once you have a large amount of thought data, read it and see the thought themes that emerge. Make a list of your thoughts’ themes, such as worrying about what other think decision anxiety, judging/criticizing other people, self-judging/criticizing or doubting, competitive with others/comparing yourself= feeling better or worse because of that comparison
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Chapter Five: Emotional DNA; Dealing With The Hand You Were Dealt
In some shape or form, who you are today, is still a reaction to your parents. She gives us 6 steps to unleash a negative trait:
1. Pinpoint it
2. Observe it
3. Name it
4. Lease it: you are going to put rules and regulations about the trait to stop it in its tracks
5. Replace it
6. Implement it
4 steps to investigate your lineage:
Write out your version: Interview your family: Interpret the data: what do you want to change? Where do you fall in the family lineage? Who are you in the lineage? Upgrade your operating system: make personal laws for ourself that honor the emotional and physical DNA that comes from your families history.
Assignment for chapter 5:
Make a list of your parent’s positive and negative character traits;
for each characteristic give a one word description, write out how that trait plays out in you.
Make the same list for your parent’s marriage traits and dynamics. Pick one of your negative traits and replace it with a new positive trait that is aligned with your dreams, then create promises and consequences to birth that new trait. Follow the instructions in this chapter and investigate your family history.
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Chapter Six: The Truth About Lying; Becoming Honest With Your Dishonesty
Lauren states that we have to stop lying and tell the truth about yourself, so you can connect the dots about the real reason you don’t and can’t believe in yourself and your dreams. The real reason you can’t fully trust yourself is because out in the real world, you are not fully being you. She says that we have gotten ourselves into a bind. You have wrapped yourself pretty darn tight in the pretense of who you want people to think you are. And ironically, the only way to discover who you really are is by getting honest about who you’ve been. She says, what if telling the truth about every which way you don’t tell the truth is the key to personal freedom? She continues by stating that what few of us ever realize is that when we think something, believe something, and then hide what we think and believe, it also becomes real. The list of all the things we think and feel but decide we can’t say gets larger, spreading like mold in a dark environment. Now you are filled to the brim with everything you think but don’t say. You must face every which way you lie.
She says there are 7 main ways people lie:
1) Outright lying; 2) Lying by omission; 3) Lying by exaggeration; 4) Lying by under-exaggeration; 5) Lying by misrepresenting a story ; 6) Lying by avoiding confrontation; 7) Lying by keeping secrets you are taking to the grave with you
Learning to tell the truth is an art:
If you can start to see and feel the difference between who you are being when you are honest and who you are being when you are lying, you can bridge the gap. If there are people in your life where you can’t truly be yourself, these relationships are damaged. They are fake. The process of setting yourself free, of shedding some old friends that knew and loved you when you were not you, is part of growing up and becoming true to yourself.
Secret Society:
If you can’t tell the truth in a relationship, what’s the point of the relationship? If the real you is hidden from the people you love, manipulating what they are allowed to know, is that real love? Are you really okay with that definition of love? Transparency, what we all aim for, is sharing the real you. Unfiltered and unrehearsed. When you are being fully transparent, everyone in your life, gets the real, unedited you. You feel totally alive, honest, current and are dealing in your life, fully. Some people claim the right to hold onto their secrets and this is why they are wrong:
Secrets create reality: The act of keeping a secret is what gives it weight and credence. Our secret becomes an underlying cause of discord in the very relationships we are trying to protect. It gnaws away at our happiness and keep us stuck in a form of purgatory that we don’t even know were in, but we feel.
Secrets hide the real you: If people keep insulating themselves with secrets, they inevitably lose touch with the self they have so deeply hidden away. In essence, they become their secrets. They are bound by the lies they have told, which spiraled until they are stuck with them.
Secrets manifest problems elsewhere:
Secrets isolate you: You cannot sustain deep connections with people who only get to see the carefully edited you. Whey you don’t say what you really think, people don’t know you. You never feel fully loved for who you really are.
Unfortunately there is no way to become the real you without getting real about it. Self -love requires loving your real self. Not by hiding it, but by being it. Just know that when you out your truth to someone, this happens: 1) the big-dealness of the lie dissipates and you discover it was only a big deal because it was hidden and grew exponentially, or 2) the lie gets dealt with.
If you lie to keep other people happy, do you ever have to confront the fact that you must think that other people are more important than you? More important than your own truth? That by lying in the name of others, you are, in essence, locking yourself into being second fiddle, forever. When someone cares more about pleasing others, they erode their own self-confidence and self-respect. They diminish their relationship to themselves. Whenever someone is lacking self confidence in an area of their life, I ask where they are lying in that area. Where they are making themselves #2 and not #1.
People pleasers and matrys don’t believe in their own dreams. When they sell out on their own dreams for everyone else, they never have to be accountable for their own. She says that there is not a more fascinating process to set yourself free than to own your own lies. There really are conditions for cleaning up your life. The more you can clean up, the freer you will be. She states that what she knows to be true is that love, happiness, self-confidence, and personal pride are on the other side of the truth.
The basics for cleaning up a lie: set up a time to speak, a context for the conversations, and why after all this time.
Confess what you need to confess. Ask their experience, memory of the incident. Listen fully to their response. Once they have heard your confession and accepted your apology, forgive yourself and close the book on this incident. If appropriate, make a promise about future behavior.
Assignment for chapter 6:
Make a list of every lie you’ve ever told in your life that you can remember. Make a list of everything you were lied to about. Select 5 lies you are willing to clean up. Start with the easy ones and clean them up.
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Chapter Seven: Hauntings; Unraveling Your Past
Investigating and unraveling what haunts us brings truth to our current and possibly inaccurate translations of important life events, allowing us to grow us, move on, and even respect our own narrative. You need to seek out what is possibly haunting you from your past that is connected to what’s not working in your current reality. If you can figure out why you keep your particular hauntings in your back pocket on purpose. I promise you if the memories didn’t somehow serve a purpose, you would have resolved them or gotten rid of them long ago. You will not know how someone is going to respond or not is by being brave and grown-up enough to ask the other person. What your PR agent and narrative’s legal team will never want to concede is that losing the case and being years upon years inaccurate is exactly where freedom, happiness, love, self-esteem, and the real gown-up you resides. The theory is that everything is your life matters. And by extension, you can fix anything in your life that hasn’t made you wholly proud and call it healed.
Steps to unravel a haunt:
Have a huge amount of compassion for yourself: (this whole process takes an amazing amount of courage) Frame the conversation: letting the interviewee know why you are interviewing them. Letting them know that this is for you to learn more about yourself, and to help you figure out what is real versus made up, as you want and need to know the truth. Show compassion and gratitude for the interviewee. Do not put them on the defensive. Prep them, and get their permission: Explain to them that you need the truth from their viewpoint. Explain to them that you are simply gathering the facts from each person’s perspective and that this is not about being right or wrong. Make sure that the interviewee understands that you need honest answers only, and this is not about you judging their answers. Understand that sometimes there are important issues that you need to resolve before diving headfirst into these.
Assignment for chapter 7:
Write out the incidents from your life that haunt you. You should have at least 10, with 3 sentence descriptions. Go thru your list and write down patterns or themes that you see about yourself and your life. Choose 3 hauntings to unravel and follow the steps to unraveling them.
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Chapter Eight: Unstuck; Finding Your Way out of Purge-atory
Whenever someone is stuck in an uncomfortable situation that they seem to want to change but can’t, they should do a purge. A purge is where you write down everything that is upsetting and frustrating you in a stream of consciousness. Its amazing things what seem legit in your head but nothing on paper. Whatever you believe and keep in your head you’re proving. A purge allows you to set your narrative free, off leash, so you can see it fully and use it to learn from it.
Steps on how to purge:
1) Write out everything that’s in your head-on the subject
2). Write your purge in first person
3). Be brutally honest. Dump it all out. Don’t worry if you contradict yourself. Just say everything in your head.
There really is a voice inside you that knows what to say in regard to your purge. It’s more than likely what you’d say to your friends if they are down and reeling. But, when it comes to yourself, you’ve somehow misplaced that ability.
Assignment for chapter 8:
This assignment is meant to help you discern some of your deep, negative theories about why you can’t have something in your life.
Follow the steps in the chapter and do a purge about a person, a situation, an area of life etc. that you are stuck or struggling with. Located in the purge is a bevy of insights and information about yourself or the situation. Go through your purge and label the elements below: excuses, chicken, brat and weather reporter, traits, lies, hauntings, bad logic, theories, missing actions/promises/practices, missing information. After labeling the elements in your purge, make a separate list for each element. Once you have dissected your purge, do a talkback for each line in the purge. Write out a list of action items to work on from these insights—confess to the right person, find out the truth about a past incident, interview a family emergency, make a promise, anything to get to the truth.
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Chapter Nine: The Mother Load; Cleaning, Unloading and Putting away Your Dirty Laundry
The reasons many relationships deteriorate over time is that we often don’t know how to address and resolve issues as they come up. The result, is that we end up with a long list of unresolved complaints about each other. They grow. They spread and they become more and more true. Most of us are pretty tolerant with our relationships being fine. But if we are not deeply happy or inspired by ourselves in the relationships, the odds are we have a laundry list of issues and resentments. So many that we have become two-faced, separating what we think about a person and what we actually say to them. This creates two realists, a fake outer one and a real inner one. In order to keep relationships healthy, we must address and resolve all issues as they come up. There is no simpler formula for staying in love. Until we tell the deep, honest truth to ourselves about what is not working for us, there is no getting intimacy back. Wouldn’t it be freeing not to have a list on anyone, because everything new on that list got cleared up when it happened. Because, in fact, the was nothing that you, the CEO of your own life, wasn’t saying.
The laundry list is a compilation of everything that bothers you about that person. It is an opportunity for you to clear up old hurts, grievances, and points of anger that cloud your relationship and keep it from being honest, intimate, fun, and flourishing. You need to open up about your innermost thoughts and feelings.
How to compile a laundry list on a person:
1)Spew on paper
2) Step away from the list so you can come back to it with fresh eyes
3) Get real: modify the list to be 100% truthful
4) Have compassion
5) Keep it real: see in the list where you are prone to exaggerate and use always or never.
6) Cover everything
7) Give examples
8) Keep it current: if the issue is a complaint you’ve made many times before and things have improved but are still not fully handled, say that.
9) Keep it on the list anyway: even if you think that one of your laundry items sounds hypocritical, juvenile, or mean, see if you can sometimes talk ourself out of feeling that way in an attempt to get it off your list, you should, still include it.
In an example laundry list from one of her clients, the client writes: "I am not allowed to stay quiet when I feel something is off or if I am unhappy about something. Nor am I allowed to sit back and judge, blame, or watch you hang yourself. Being afraid to make you or anyone else angry by telling my truth is not an excuse to keep quiet or a measure of how well a conversation has gone. I am working with my coach on creating promises and consequences around suffering, complaining, and staying quite."
Assignment for chapter 9:
Make a laundry list for your relationships that have grown less intimate. Write up your own list on what you think that person has on you. With the same person, discuss all the departments the two of you have in your relationship. Together, divide up all the responsibilities so that the right person is in charge of the right department. Remember who is best at it or complains the most is the criteria to determine who should manage the department.
Follow the instructions in this chapter and write a blended, fair, and mature letter to your mother and father, separately. Make sure to include the following: all the things you are hurt by or sad about, all the things you need to account, clean up, and apologize for, all the things you’ve been hiding from him or her as a parent, ask questions about anything you still don’t understand, write the most honest version of your experiences that you can, without justifications or protecting yourself. Follow every warning.
Use this assignment to grow up about your relationships with your loved ones, not blow them up. Use it to get closer, understood, and understanding of them.
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Chapter Ten: Mission I’m Possible; Be You. Only Better.
“Having discovered, through an uncritical observation of your reactions to life, a self that must be changed, you must now formulate an aim. That is, you must define the one you would like to be instead of the one you truly are in secret. With this aim clearly defined, you must, throughout your conscious waking day, notice your every reaction in regard to this aim.” Nevill Goddard
Lauren says that we all have “freak flags,” those things about ourselves that we are not going to change. Flying your freak flag is about being true and honest with yourself and others about who you are. It’s about being accountable for what you love, don’t love, and are either going to change about yourself or not. It’s about not lying or feeling bad about yourself, ending our own two-facedness, and taking care of the people around you who simply might not be your freaks’ biggest fan. You need to fly your freak flag at the start of a relationship, that way the relationship starts off with honesty and gives people a choice to accept it or not.
Steps on how to fly your freak flag:
Make a list of what you are simply not going to change about yourself. Accept your freak flag: Tell everyone about it: Make a list of complaints that you may have about other’s freak flags that you need to accept.
Now you get to write who you are going to be. To dare, stretch, and scare yourself big as you did in chapter one when you allowed yourself to dream. Now you are going to write your personal manifesto, the truest of true pledge of allegiance to yourself.
Assignment For Chapter 10:
Write a list of what you are not going to change about yourself (your freak flags). Write your very own personal manifesto. Do it in your own flavor, but make sure to answer the following questions: who are you, what are you putting an end to, what do you refuse to accept, what do you take responsibility for, what do you want your life to be about, what will you stand for, what are you taking on next, and what are you promising? When you have written your manifesto, read it to your nearest and dearest friends. Find a buddy who you want to practice designing your day with.
Here’s to becoming the YOU you want to be
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