Personal Discovery: Defining the Relationship with Self Part 2

Now that we have the basic picture of ourselves, we need to fit it into our own unique history. The interesting thing about history is that it consists of multitudes of causes and effects. Every event can be traced back to many causes and every event has many effects on future events. An event that happened when we were children can change the way we react to situations when we are much older. Major decisions we make in the present may only have been possible based on a series of similar decisions we made in the past. Our future choices may, in turn, be limited by the choices we make today. To realize this interconnection of past and future is not to prevent us from making these decisions nor to paralyze us with the consequences of our choices. It is to allow us to realize the origins of these decisions that stem from choices from our past and help us understand how we will be affecting our future. Otherwise, to blindly react or take action without understanding may lead to effects that could have been prevented or to prevent us from reaching effects that we desire.

Our personal history is as one-of-a-kind as we are. No one else will experience the same exact events. Not even twins born at the same time and raised by the same parents will experience the same series of life events. They will have different friends, make different choices, or even just walk out the door at different times. Each of these decisions and actions will spawn completely different chains of events.

Our past will always be an integral part of us. They form the patterns by which we live our lives, the templates that guide us and teach us. We learn what makes us happy and satisfied and we learn to reach for it and strive for it and treasure it. We learn what makes us upset and we learn to regret it and condemn it. The things I strive for may be completely different from what satisfies you and that is because my past has taught me to treasure something different. Please note that it is not stated that things we strive for are good per se or the things we regret are bad. These patterns are wholly subjective. What is important is to understands what really satisfies and gives us happiness over the long term. Some pretend to do these things, but they are short-lived and ultimately harmful. We must note the difference and to strive for the long-term over the short-term. To do this, we look towards the past because the answers we ultimately require will always come from the past. The future has not come and the present moment is fleeting. By the time we recognize the present, it is already in our past.

Activity:

Put together a memory book. This can be as simple as just scrawling in a notebook or it can be as elaborate as an intricate scrapbook. Just start noting down memories that come to mind. These memories don’t just have to be significant events in your life. One of my favorite memories was a peaceful day when I lay out in the sun in the middle of the park under a tree with purple flowers with the love of my life. The important thing is that these memories have to have some emotional significance to them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good emotion or bad emotion. This is an ongoing project, as we will be making many more memories during our lifetime. Every so often, read through it, noting which memories you deemed emotionally significant enough to take the time to note down. When you read through it, think to yourself:

• Do you sense any trends?

• What makes you happy? What makes you upset? What causes these emotions?

• What should I focus on, in my life, that will make me have more happy emotions and less unhappy emotions?

• What is important to me? How should I change my life to focus more on the things that are important to me?

Even though our past history is integral in our lives, we must be careful not to be bound by it. We need to know what in the past is guiding our actions but we need not blindly allow our past to control our every action. Understanding does not imply inevitability. It is our awareness that allows us to be able to make choices in our life. You can choose to say, “I can do this because I was raised in this way.” or you can choose to say, “I can do this despite being raised in this way.” It is your own decision and there is no one who makes the decision but you, not your past, not your upbringing, not anyone but you.

Personal Discovery: Defining the Relationship with Self Part 1

Before we can examine our relationships with others, we must understand our relationship with ourselves. Every relationship we have consists of ourselves and another person. As we are the ones that have spent the most time with ourselves throughout our lifetime, it is fair to say that in every relationship, we should be able to understand ourselves more than the other person. But, sometimes, that’s not true. We spend so much time trying to figure out how another person ticks that we neglect to find out how we ourselves work.

“The sky has never been the limit. We are our own limits. It’s then about breaking our personal limits and outgrowing ourselves to live our best lives.” – Author Unknown.

When we are asked to define ourselves to others, we often come up with the labels that we most associate with ourselves. We use these labels as a way to explain the person we are to others in a way that others automatically understand, using them to evaluate each other quickly, to fit each other into specific patterns of action and reaction in face-to-face interactions. With each label comes a sort of mutual understanding of what each label means in the context of the social situation with all the accompanying connotations and references inherent in them. Even from a very young age, we are often judged using these labels. As a result, we also begin to judge ourselves by these labels. Think back to your early schooling. How many times were we told to line up according to height? Or are split up into boys or girls group and told to play separately? These labels are reinforced over and over in our daily lives and we get so used to ourselves as defined by them that we actually change the way we think and treat ourselves.

There was a study on college-aged women who were asked to take a standardized mathematics examination. They were randomly split into two groups. Half were led to believe that the test showed gender differences, implying the stereotype that women did more poorly than men. Those led to believe this did poorly on it compared to the men taking the exam. The other half, who was told nothing except that it was a math exam, did equal to the men taking the exam. Why? Because they had this pre-existing notion inside of them that said women did not do as well at mathematics as men. This is simply not true and yet, they felt this to be true and so in turn, affected their own reality to match their feelings. They handicapped themselves subconsciously.

How do we define ourselves automatically? How are we affecting our own lives, our own thoughts, and our own actions subconsciously? In order to determine this we need to determine not only the labels we associate with ourselves but also which are important to our particular mindset.

Activity:

Pretend you are a private detective hired to find out information about yourself. Compile a dossier of facts that is public information or part of public record: height, weight, ethnicity, hair color, eye color, number of siblings, address, marital status, hometown, occupation, etc. Just list them all out. Then go through each one and think through them carefully:

• What does this fact mean to you?

• How does this fact affect the way other people look at you?

• How does this affect the way you look at yourself?

• If this fact were to change, would you change the way you react to situations? Would you change the way you perceive yourself? Would you have more or less confidence in yourself? Why?

Don’t worry, sometimes, a fact does not affect us at all. In that case, move on to the next one. Not everything will be important to us. The key is to find the ones that are. }

Labels have associations and connotations related to them and when applied to an entire group of people, they become stereotypes. We can become so focused on how others stereotype us; we don’t realize that we can stereotype ourselves just as much. It can be easier to act out the stereotypes especially when we are uncertain about whom we are ourselves. They become the patterns of our own behavior, no matter whether it is functional or dysfunctional. The important thing is to be mindful of them, to be aware that we are following these patterns and to be aware whether this is beneficial to us.

What deserves even more focus are false labels we put on ourselves. These are labels that we identify with but are not really who we are. An extreme example of this are people who have anorexia who believe that they are too fat and act accordingly by extreme dieting even though they are in reality, causing themselves to become too skinny.  One way of identifying false labels is to talk to a trusted close friend who will tell you the truth, no matter what, and have a conversation with them about what qualities you have as a person.  This can be an enlightening albeit uncomfortable experience.  Another way is to delve into your self-reflections and use the process to find what qualities you truly believe yourself to have and using objective qualifications to truly identify whether these qualities are correct.  For example, if you believe yourself to be unintelligent, find what you determine to be an objective way to measure intelligence and then test yourself according to that.  The danger of using false labels is they still affect us in a very real way. They can still change the way we perceive ourselves or affect our patterns of behavior to something that may be untrue in reality but true to our own minds, an illusion. No matter the false label, we need to discover what is the important motivation behind it. This allows us to see what we are hiding behind our false labels for. The motivations, themselves, are true to us so we need to figure out ways to refocus these motivations into other avenues of expressing themselves that ring truer to our real self.

Personal Discovery: Who Am I? Part 2

One of the things I find most helpful in jumpstarting this conversation is to take a free day off just to spend with yourself and yourself ONLY. No one else should be able to intrude on this day, not family, not friends, not even strangers talking near you. If there’s just no other way, get a cheap local motel room. Lock yourself in with no other distractions except a notebook and writing utensils (make sure to bring spares) and a couple of sandwiches and drinks. Use this day as a quiet time of reflection, a time just for you and the conversation you have with yourself. With nothing and no one around, you can truly and fully be the person you are without any outside influences, no censoring, no second-guessing, and no interruptions.

Now, sit down and start writing whatever is in your mind. It doesn’t matter what it is, or even if it makes sense, just write it down. If you can’t get started and find yourself just staring at a blank piece of paper, here are some questions to get started: Who am I? Why am I doing this? What do I want? Where am I going? When this day is done, what am I going to do?

Start with these deliberately vague questions but as other thoughts come into your mind, start writing them down and segue into stream-of-consciousness writing. It may begin slowly but hopefully, as you allow yourself to completely step into that mode, it will get easier and faster. It doesn’t have to make sense, have any order to it, or be grammatically correct. It doesn’t even have to be real words or any words at all. Don’t censor yourself or try to write what you think you should write. Don’t analyze or make any decisions. Just let the words in your mind flow out naturally. Do this for as long as you can. Then rest, spend time thinking, reflecting, daydreaming, or just woolgathering. Then go back and write some more.

If you’re having difficulties loosening up, then make a solemn agreement with yourself to destroy it after you’re done with it. Rip it up, throw it away, or dunk it in a bucket of paint. That way, no one, not even yourself, will ever have the exact words you wrote. But please make sure to destroy it after we’re completely done with it.

Now, take some time at the end to read over what you wrote. Keep an open mind and try to remain objective. Do you notice any recurring themes? Recurring images? Recurring thoughts? Patterns? Any revelations that are particularly important? Take a blank sheet of paper out of the notebook. Note these down. What do these mean to me? Do they have any connections with each other? Where do they come from? What emotional attachment do I have to them? Also, write down your reflections on the general process and any concluding thoughts you may have.

This is a more formal process of starting up a conversation with yourself. Sometimes, it is better to do it this way, even if you are in the habit of self-reflection, because this is a more structured and isolated way to take time for yourself when so much of the world tends to intrude on even our innermost thought processes.

The informal process is to do the same thing inside your mind, as a constant background hum. Keep note of your thoughts and reactions. Are there recurring themes? What does this mean? If you’ve never actively done this before, try to do it consciously for limited times throughout the day, every day. Soon, as you get used to doing it daily, it will start happening automatically and you will find yourself noticing more and more things about yourself and your own thought processes. This is the ongoing conversation we want. As we ponder the subjects we will talk about later, we want to keep up this constant self-reflection and cycle of feedback.

Personal Discovery: Who Am I? Part 1

Everything in this world is made up of different atoms. They are the building blocks of our universe. Every atom is made up of three basic atomic elements: protons, neutrons, and electrons. These atomic particles are made up of six different quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. According to quantum string theory, every quark is in fact just a tiny 1-dimensional string vibrating at different rates. It is these different rates that create the incredible diversity in this universe. In the same way, we are all human but what makes us different from each other is not only just the minor variations in our genes, but our underlying personality, our thoughts, our me-ness that vibrates differently from everyone else.

One of the most important steps in the process of understanding yourself is to actually start getting in the habit of conversing with yourself. I’m not talking about walking around muttering inane things like some crazy person. I’m talking about discovering your own stream of consciousness and in the process, begin to understand how your own mind works, how it processes thoughts, and what patterns of thoughts you have. This becomes a way to evaluate what is happening in the rest of our lives.

The biggest source of information that tells us about ourselves comes from ourselves. However, many of us have gotten out of the habit of listening to ourselves. Our bodies are made to give us warning signs and signals. If there is danger, we feel fear or pain. If we need food, we become hungry. We merely have to listen to the natural impulses of our bodies to maintain the optimum balance we need. As we grow older, we have often learned to ignore, twist, or misattribute these natural impulses. We override them with what we think they should be or what we or the world wants them to be. In doing so, our habits have fallen out of sync with what our body needs to maintain the optimum balance. Instead of listening to the true needs of our bodies, we follow self-imposed habits, habits that become so fully incorporated into ourselves that we begin to believe that they were how it was all along.

We have similarly changed our relationship with our minds, hearts, and personalities. We have fallen out of sync with the person we naturally are. But how do we get it back? We need to figure out who we are currently, who we are naturally, and who we truly want to be. We do this by slowly learning to listen to ourselves again and to respond in a natural give-and-take conversation. This can be difficult to do when we’re out of practice. We may need to be jumpstarted first but, eventually, it should happen naturally.

Personal Discovery: Introduction

It’s frustrating, doing what you don’t want to do and not doing what you truly want to. You ask yourself why that is and why you keep doing it over and over again. You want to make a change.

Change is hard. Changing yourself is harder and changing someone else is impossible unless they want to change themselves. Not only that, change for the better is hard. It takes a lot more work to build a brick wall than to destroy it. But change for the better is worth it in the long run. Before you change anything in your life by putting in parts that you wish you had and yanking out parts of your life you don’t like, you need to understand how everything fits together first.

“There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” – Winston Churchill

Why go to all that trouble to figure yourself out? Isn’t it easier just to jump in , make some major changes in my life, and see what happens?

Your car battery goes out and you have to jumpstart it just to make it to the auto shop. You buy a new battery, install it in your car, and drive off. A week later, your battery is dead again. The real reason isn’t a bad battery but the alternator draining the battery and you really needed to replace the alternator instead. If you never figure this out, you’d probably just keep having the same problem, buying a lot of batteries, and throwing out a lot of perfectly good batteries. 

Or what about this story:

A factory worker was working in an auto factory. His job was to staple the carpet to the floor of the car. Two staples, here and here, and move onto the next car. He scrutinized his work. It looked very flimsy, like the carpet could come loose pretty easily. So, without telling anyone, he decided to do a better job, adding a couple staples to attach the carpet more securely. Soon after, cars were being recalled left and right for fuel explosions. When they examined the defective cars, they discovered that the extra staples the worker had thoughtfully decided to put in had actually punctured the fuel tank. The worker didn’t know how the whole car was put together and didn’t know how dangerous his good deed really was.

It’s the same with your own life. You may want to take out something you don’t like about your life, but it’s not the real problem so instead you just keep encountering that problem over and over again. Or you may want to add something to your life, but it just doesn’t fit with the person you are and may actually ruin something else that is going great for you. So, before changes are actually made, it’s better to first understand yourself, your relationships, your world, and what you truly want before you go ahead.

The figuring out part shouldn’t be the difficult part. You’ve lived with yourself 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for your whole entire life. Out of everyone in this world, you are best equipped to understand yourself.

The difficult part, instead, is facing yourself. Sometimes, in the process of figuring out who you truly are, you come up against some not-so-pretty truths, maybe even very ugly truths that you don’t want to face. In order to fully understand what’s going on with yourself, however, you need to face both the good and bad honestly with no excuses or twisting of the truth. You have to be ready to make hard decisions and then be ready to face the consequences of those decisions.

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” – Albert Ellis

If you’re not willing to do that at this point in time, any major change in your life will probably not work out in the long run. It’s perfectly fine. Sometimes, it just isn’t the right time in your life. When it is, you’ll know.

Ok, so you’re ready to truly face yourself and make some long-lasting changes.  What do I have to do? What’s the first step? Everyone is different so things that may work for one person may not work for another, things that may need to be changed for one person may not need to be changed for another. This is why this isn’t a guide to tell you what you have to do to become a better person. This is a guide to help you figure out for yourself what you need and to decide your own actions. The words written here are thoughts to reflect on and the activities are suggestions on how to focus in on various aspects of our lives. It doesn’t matter whether you do all of them or none. The key is to just start that self-reflective thinking process.

One last thing, don’t be rushed. This process can and will take a lifetime. There are different seasons in every person’s life. Sometimes, things will happen quickly. Sometimes it will take years or even decades. Sometimes, negative things have to happen before the positive things appear and sometimes, nothing happens at all. That’s fine. Keep pushing towards what you believe you need to do and what you believe is right. That’s all anyone can ask of ourselves.

You don’t need to go anywhere to find yourself. You’re already there.