There is a version of you that the world sees.
And then there is everything behind it.
A Swiss psychiatrist called Carl Jung spent his life mapping the distance between those two. His map is around a hundred years old, and it is still one of the clearest explanations I know of for why capable people hold themselves back.
Who Carl Jung was
Carl Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875 and died in 1961. He was an early colleague of Sigmund Freud. The two fell out, and Jung went on to found his own school, which he called analytical psychology.
You already use his language. If you have ever called someone an introvert or an extrovert, said somebody has a complex, or talked about an archetype, those are his words.
Freud saw the unconscious mainly as the place where we push down what we cannot face.
Jung saw something far bigger and to him it also held your creativity, your instincts and everything you have the potential to become.
The map
Picture a circle. The top edge faces the outer world: other people, your work, everything out there. The bottom edge faces the inner world.
The upper half is conscious, which is the part of you that you are aware of. The lower half is unconscious. Jung called it the unconscious and I say subconscious. We are pointing at the same territory.
Jung named the main parts of that circle. Here they are, from the outside in.
The persona: the mask
Persona is the Latin word for the mask an actor wore on stage. Jung used it for the face you show the world.
Everybody has one, and you need it. You are a slightly different person with a client than you are with your kids, and that is healthy.
If you run a business, your persona has a name: your personal brand. The expert. The one who has it together. The one with the answers.
The trouble starts when you forget it is a mask. The more of your worth you tie to the image, the more energy it takes to keep up, and the more you have to hide. That feeling of being about to be found out often lives in the gap between the persona and what you know is behind it.
The ego: the "I"
The ego is the centre of your conscious mind. It is the part of you that says "I". I decided. I think. I am this kind of person.
It believes it is in charge. Jung's whole point was that it is in charge of far less than it thinks. The ego is the centre of what you are aware of, and what you are aware of is the smaller part of you.
The shadow: what you hid
This is the part of Jung's work that matters most for anyone who feels stuck.
The shadow gets mistaken for a dark or bad side. Jung meant something wider: everything about you that did not fit.
As a child you worked out very quickly which parts of you were welcome and which were not. The welcome parts went into the persona. The rest went into the shadow.
Think about what a lot of children are told. Don't show off. Don't be greedy. Don't answer back. Who do you think you are? So the child puts away the part that wanted to be seen, the part that wanted more, and the part that said no.
Now look at what a business asks of you. Be visible. Ask for the money. Say no. Believe you are worth it.
Everything the business needs from you is sitting in the place you were taught to hide it.
| What you were told as a child | What your business asks of you |
|---|---|
| Don't show off. | Be visible. |
| Don't be greedy. | Ask for the money. |
| Don't answer back. | Say no. |
| Who do you think you are? | Believe you are worth it. |
The shadow does not disappear because you ignore it. It shows up in three ways.
Projection. The traits you have disowned are the ones that irritate you most in other people. The competitor who promotes themselves without a flicker of embarrassment. The person who charges three times what you do and sleeps fine.
Overreaction. A response far bigger than the situation deserves is usually the shadow being touched.
Self sabotage. You get close to the thing you want and something in you pulls the handbrake. I wrote about that in Why you know what to do and still don't do it.
Jung was clear on how this gets resolved. Nobody becomes whole by picturing the best version of themselves and ignoring the rest. It comes from being willing to look at what is in the dark.
Anima and animus
In the diagram this sits deepest, facing the inner world.
Jung believed every man carries an unconscious feminine side, which he called the anima, and every woman an unconscious masculine side, the animus. That was the language of his time.
A more useful way to read it today: these are the qualities that did not fit the role you were raised into. For one person that is softness, intuition and the ability to receive. For another it is assertiveness, directness and drive. Whichever set you were steered away from is still in you, waiting to be used.
Two layers underneath
Jung split the unconscious into two.
The personal unconscious is yours alone. Your memories, your experiences, what you have forgotten and what you have pushed down. The beliefs I work with live here.
The collective unconscious was his most original idea. He proposed that beneath the personal layer there is one we all share, inherited and not learned, in the same way we inherit the shape of our hands. It holds what he called archetypes: patterns such as the Hero, the Mother, the Rebel and the Wise Old Man that turn up in myths and stories in every culture.
You can see archetypes working any time a story or a brand hits you harder than it logically should. The brand archetypes used in marketing today are built on Jung's idea.
The Self: the whole of you
At the centre of the map is the Self, with a capital S.
The ego is the centre of your conscious mind. The Self is the centre of all of you, conscious and unconscious together, and it is also the whole.
Jung called the journey towards it individuation: becoming who you really are by bringing back what you hid. He saw the first half of life as building the ego and the persona, and the second half as the turn inward to recover what was left behind.
Jung's aim was wholeness, which is a long way from perfection.
Jung's most famous idea is usually put like this:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Think about what that means for you. When you keep attracting the same kind of client, hitting the same ceiling on your income or having the same argument in a different relationship, it is easy to put it down to bad luck, bad timing or the market.
Jung would say none of it is happening to you by chance.
A belief you cannot see is making your decisions for you, and because you cannot see it, the results look as though they are coming from outside.
That is what I mean when I say your external reality is a direct reflection of your internal state.
The moment you can see what has been running underneath, it stops being fate and becomes something you can change.
But seeing it is only the start.
Jung's map shows you where to look. He was also clear that looking takes real effort, and anyone who has tried knows that naming a pattern and being free of it are two different things.
I have written about that gap in Why understanding your problem doesn't fix it, and about why the conscious mind cannot simply overrule what is underneath in Why your mind rejects what you tell it.
Three exercises to find what is in your shadow
You need a pen, paper and ten quiet minutes.
- The mask. Write five words you want clients to use about you. Then write five you would hate them to use. The first list is your persona. The second is your first look at your shadow.
- The irritation. Think of someone in your industry who gets under your skin more than they should. Write the three things about them that bother you most. For each one, ask: where was I taught that this was not allowed? Then ask: what would a healthy version of this give my business?
- The admiration. Now pick someone you admire or envy, and write three qualities you see in them. We project the good as well as the bad. The qualities you put on a pedestal in someone else are often your own, unclaimed.
If something heavy comes up when you do this, stop, and speak to someone you trust or a qualified professional.
What this means for you
The part of you that would post the video, name the price and take up the space is still in you. It was put away a long time ago by a child who needed to fit in.
Getting it back is the work.
To see how I approach that, go to The Rewire Code. For a quicker read on where it is showing up for you, the Identity Gap Finder takes about three minutes.