14 Sep 20
KNOW YOURSELF
I considered writing my first blog article about procrastination but decided to wait until later for that subject. ‘Quitting’ was another topic with resonance, but I abandoned it in favour of a subject that I believe is invaluable, and inseparable to personal development: Know yourself.
Henry Thoreau said that “we are constantly being invited to be who we are”. But how can we be that if we don’t truly know who that is. If you think you know the answer, and you might, I invite you to consider: is your answer who you were told you were when you were younger? Is it a label you carry from someone else’s interpretation of you? Are you now, with so much more experience, still that? As you have grown up have you developed a different knowing of who you are and who you might become?
Getting to know yourself isn’t necessarily as simple as it sounds – and not quite as ‘open-book’ as the subject might first appear. It is also made harder because it is constantly evolving, we are always becoming.
One could be forgiven for thinking you’ve lived with yourself for so long now, that you have all the answers. The trick is that you might not have been asking yourself the right questions. Author Jerry Colona (Reboot – leadership and the art of growing up. 2019) describes the process of getting to know yourself as a “radical self-inquiry”. The questions he poses require you to examine long held beliefs, behaviors, and choices you have made with no conscious thought.
Here are some questions you might enjoy thinking about (adapted from various sources):
What do I believe is success – how did I develop this belief?
What activity did I love to do as a child that I no longer do?
What is my relationship to money?
What has been my most significant experience of loss – and how has that shaped me?
The intention of this self-inquiry is not for you to change. It is also not calling on you to make a judgement on your answers or yourself. It is simply getting to the root of what it is that informs your behaviors and beliefs. Once you know yourself, you can act with intention and purpose from a place that has meaning for you.
It’s easy to get lost in the regrets of who we think we are, or the fantasy of who we wish we could be and miss the magic of who we really are now. My hope is that through this inquiry you see the magic.
Lana xox