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.