I’m So Glad You’re Here

Welcome! If you don’t know me, my name is Taylor Bamgbose (pronounced Bam-BO-shay), and I’m a certified professional coach with a passion for helping women understand, share, and be their whole selves—the people they were created to be.

I’m a firm believer that most of the problems in our life grow from the soil of self-ignorance. We lack an accurate understanding not just of our desires, motivations, gifts, and personality traits—but more crucially, the ways in which we try to manipulate life to meet our needs or the ways we hide to avoid vulnerability or rejection.

The truth is, we cannot become our true selves if we are driven by fear. Fear of seeing ourselves as we really are, fear of expressing ourselves through our words and choices.

Having gone many years feeling like fear was in the driver’s seat, I can attest that it’s not the most peaceful or pleasant way to live life—and the people around me felt the impact.

If you’re here, I’m guessing you might be feeling that familiar frustration. The good news is, you’re in the right place! I would love for you to join me on a courageous journey to wholeness and truth. I won’t lie to you—it’s not for the faint of heart. But I do believe with every ounce of my being that it’s worth the effort, as the deepest levels of fulfillment and highest potentials for serving others are only possible when we truly know and express ourselves fully.

How we lose touch with ourselves

The question is, were we ever really our real selves? Where did we lose our way?

For some of us, there was a brief window in childhood where we felt no shame in who we were, although it depends heavily on your home environment and sadly, not everyone grew up in a safe or supportive space.

We entered the world as babies, blissfully unaware that we were even separate beings from our primary caregivers. We saw no separation, and therefore had no concept of self.

However, as we grew, we became aware of two monumental things: 1) We exist apart from the people taking care of us, and 2) They are essential to our survival.

This began a cascade of choices. If we needed to secure and maintain our bond with our primary caregivers, we had to behave in ways that they expected, accepted or approved of. Their judgment of us became more vital for our physical and emotional safety than our judgment of ourselves.

We discovered that in our quest to survive, we could manipulate the truth about ourselves—we learned to lie. We could pretend to be sorry when we hit our sibling, even if we were still mad. We could pretend to feel confident when we were actually scared. We could even pretend to be less intelligent than we really were so the people around us didn’t feel bad. We hid and suppressed the parts of ourselves that we were afraid would compromise our bond with the important people in our lives (parents, caregivers, teachers, friends).

At first, we were just pretending. We were lying to others to achieve a specific goal (acceptance), and we knew it.

However, over many moments and many lies, we started to lose touch with our actual experience. The line between what’s true and false about us began to blur. The way we wanted to be seen by others became the way we needed to see ourselves, and instead of merely telling lies, we started to live them. This was the birth of the false self.

Features of the False Self

The false self is a distortion of who we truly are—an incomplete picture; a story with crucial elements missing.

Designed to ensure our acceptance, it is a pretense that we are more or less than we really are. We are victors or victims; heroes or villains; brilliant or broken. Always one or the other—never a messy combination of both.

We spend our lives trying to maintain this image—looking everywhere for proof that what we believe about ourselves is true, stressing ourselves out and spreading ourselves thin as we work to control how others perceive us.

Deep down, our minds know that this self is a fraud, and sensing its unreality, we attempt to fortify this false self with external supports.

When we are living as our false selves, we tend to define ourselves by the following:

What we have (or don’t have)
What we can do (or can’t do)
What others say about us (good or bad)

While these things may point to things that are true about us, they are never the ultimate truth that defines us. Aligning our identity with our power, possessions, or prestige is building our house on a foundation of sand.

With such an unstable foundation, we live in anxiety, desperately trying to control things beyond our reach.

The lies that helped us survive in childhood become the saboteurs of our continued happiness and well-being.