Episode 108: Who Are You Without What You Do? Identity, Love & Conscious Living with Dion Jensen

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself: Who am I without what I do?

Without the job title. The achievements. The roles you play. The expectations you’ve spent years trying to meet.

It’s one of life’s most important questions, in my opinion: Who are you, really?

And it’s exactly the question at the heart of my conversation with author, speaker and coach Dion Elliott Jensen, whose new book Conscious Footsteps explores what can happen when we begin looking beyond what we do and reconnecting with who we are underneath it all.

For much of Dion’s life, his identity and sense of worth were intertwined with achievement, career, status and the roles he played. But when life began dismantling so much of what he believed defined him, he was faced with a confronting question:

Who am I when everything I thought defined me is gone?

What followed wasn’t, as Dion describes it, a process of reinventing himself. It was one of remembering who he already was.

I believe so much of our lives can be spent attaching our identity to external markers — what we achieve, how successful we are, the work we do and what other people think of us. So when I discovered Dion’s philosophy of “I am who I am, not what I do,” how could I not take the opportunity to interview him?

And there is so much more to his story than this alone.

In this episode of It’s a Mindset, Dion and I explore identity, authenticity and what it means to live more consciously. We talk about the masks and roles we can accumulate throughout our lives, and what may be waiting underneath them when we become curious enough to look.

We explore the power of journaling and why putting our thoughts onto paper can be incredibly cathartic, as well as the importance of curiosity — not only about ourselves, but about the people around us.

And we delve into Dion’s fascinating perspective on love: why he believes love is the one true emotion and why it can be okay for love to be a one-way street.