Pay attention to what makes you cry.
I know that sounds like an unusual place to start a conversation about discovering who you are. But stay with me.
Think about the last movie that made you cry. Not just watery eyes. The kind of cry that surprised you, that caught you off guard. Why that movie? What specifically happened on screen?
Think about your five favorite films. What do they have in common? What keeps pulling you back to them?
These aren’t trivial questions. The things that move us to tears are telling us something real about what we value, what we long for, what we believe about the world.
What My Tears Have Told Me #
I’ve noticed a pattern in my own emotional responses to film and story.
I cry when the underdog wins. Secretariat is one of my favorite movies for this reason. Something in me responds viscerally when a creature or a person everyone counted out runs the race of their life.
I cry when someone overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to live out their calling. Anna and the King. The cost of staying true to yourself in a world that wants you to be something smaller.
I cry when someone is truly seenhen . When another person looks past what has happened to them, past what others say about them, and recognizes who they actually are. Return to Me does this for me.
I cry when a twelve-year-old walks onto a stage, opens her mouth, and a voice comes out that shouldn’t be possible. Because something buried and real is finally being expressed.
The pattern, when I look at it honestly, tells me a great deal about what I care about. Potential. Being seen. Living out what’s inside you. The gap between who someone is told they are and who they actually are.
That’s not a coincidence. Those things show up in everything I care about, everything I’ve built, everything I want to say.
What moves you isn’t random. It’s a pattern — and that pattern points directly at what you’re here to do.
Now Pay Attention to What Makes You Furious #
The other signal is anger.
Not just an irritation, but the deeper kind. The things that set you on fire inside. That make your blood boil when you encounter them. That you can’t stop thinking about or talking about.
Maybe it’s a particular injustice. Domestic violence. People in positions of power running over those around them. Ideas being spread that keep people small and stuck. Children being overlooked or mistreated.
Whatever it is, don’t dismiss it as just a strong reaction. That anger is information.
The person who gets furious when children are mistreated becomes an outstanding foster parent. The one whose blood boils at every domestic violence headline opens a safe house for women. The one who can’t stand watching capable people be held back by systems or expectations finds a way to help people break free of them.
This is, honestly, part of what drove me into coaching and teaching. It made me angry to see another capable person being held back by their circumstances, their surroundings, or the stories others had told them about themselves. That anger had somewhere to go.
Two Different Signals, One Direction #
Tears and anger look like opposites. One is soft, one is sharp. One pulls you inward, one pushes outward.
But they’re pointing at the same thing: what you care about enough to feel.
In a world that rewards staying measured and professional, we’ve gotten very good at managing these responses. Feeling them privately and then getting back to whatever was on the agenda. Not naming them. Not following them.
That’s a loss. Because these emotions are among the most direct signals we have about who we are and what we’re here to contribute.
They’re not random. They repeat. They show up across different stories, different situations, different decades. The things that moved you to tears at twenty still move you at fifty. The injustices that made you furious early in your career still make you furious now.
That consistency is the signal. It’s not noise. It’s you being yourself, clearly, without the usual filters.
The Questions Worth Sitting With #
What was the last thing that made you cry, and why that specific thing? What makes you genuinely angry — not annoyed, but lit up with something that feels like it matters? If you look at those two answers together, what do they tell you about what you care about?
You don’t have to translate this into a career plan today. But you do need to take it seriously. These emotions are not getting in the way of knowing yourself. They are the way.
Let them tell you something.
If you want to go deeper on what your values and strongest instincts are pointing toward, Your Values, Your Season is a good place to start.