Finding your edge and letting go
Quite some time ago, I decided to change my surname. I have always felt that my surname was not somehow right and did not match my character. It is a strange thing to feel as I have always believed a name is only a label, but never the less, it has always slightly bugged me. I think it might come from a comment from a girl who I fancied at school when I was about 8 or 9, who didn’t like my name.
My surname was Clark, but I have now changed it to Powers. This fits much more with my personality and to me conjures up a successful powerful person.
My parents were not too happy about the idea and it has been very difficult to discuss it with them. I had wanted to change my name after our wedding, but unfortunately discussing the name change upset my parents so much they felt strange at our wedding and wanted us to talk about it to them straight after so my wife and I went up to their house the weekend after the wedding.
They felt that it would somehow change the relationship we had and reduce the bond between us. I agreed to postpone the name change for six months, if we could pretend that I had changed it and see if it psychologically changed anything. If it adversely affected our relationship we would not change our names.
It is now over one year later and of course there has been no detriment to the relationship, so we changed our name by deed poll. It is a very simple process and you can do it all online.
It is important to stand up for the things that matter to you and to take other people’s feelings into consideration. In the end it is my decision and my life and journey. Sometimes the balance between these two things can be difficult to find. However I have found that if I always make decisions from the most positive and truthful perspective that I can and try to make the best possible ‘guess’ at what would be the greatest overall energy gain for all the people involved, then generally I tend to make the right decisions and can look back and know I did the best thing at the time with the information I had.
This attitude of always following this formula is exactly the same as a trader’s edge. Not every time can you expect it to work, but overall I have found it is the best policy.
After realising that our name change would upset my parents, I did some research to try to learn more about names in general to make sure I was not being selfish and to put changing my name into a bigger picture.
I also wanted to see whether there was something more than blind tradition in the father passing the name on the son idea. Most people have this idea so locked into their heads as being important, they can attach more value in the name than the actual relationship between the people.
I researched the idea and concept of a family name and found it was in the 14th century that people in England adopted surnames at all. In Wales and Scotland it is was as late as the 17th century. This was mainly due to population increase and the subsequent need to identify individuals with the same first name. Aristocrats had also had surnames for some time (about 100 years before the general population) and so the general population had something to aspire to and wanted “sir” names themselves.
Quite often names were not by family but by trade. So a potter would become Simon the potter, or a smithy with become John the smith. The ‘the’ part was later dropped and hence you get a lot of surnames that are like trades. As most trades were passed down from father to son, so the name was also passed down. In fact, according to Wikipedia surnames generally followed seven category types. None of which were a copy of your father’s name.
In other cultures different rules apply, some cultures have the surname part first instead of last like in England. In some parts of Spain, a person takes both their Mother and Father’s name, and the names are not swapped between partners. This in effect means every member of the immediate family group has a different surname.
In the US it is becoming more popular for couples to create an entirely new name at marriage as we have done. In Canada, some aboriginal groups take the woman’s family name and not the mans.
All of this research has showed me names are very culturally specific and are arbitrary in terms of any intrinsic value other than what individuals put on its importance and about what circumstances may have affected their ancestors many centuries ago. Names now give a common bond amongst family members and promote a feeling of belonging to the family group. They also give a person their identity and help define who a person is.
Many professional people, actors and show biz people change their names and in some cases this is all it took for them to transition to success. This was probably a mind set that helped them to identify with themselves by changing the label to be more in line with what they felt there identity was or what they wanted it to be.
As we have seen from other posts and some of the books that have been reviewed, one of the most important ingredients for success is state of mind. I think that changing my name has helped me to create the state of mind much more conducive creating the right internal environment for success.
This has been a key part on my journey to financial freedom and philanthropy.
