How can you be yourself, if you don’t know yourself?
Being yourself means you like who you are. Being yourself means you accept who you are. Being yourself means you stay honest to yourself no matter what. Being yourself means that you respect others but won’t change who you are because of peer pressure.
Therefore being yourself is one of the most important foundations that you need to build to stay happy.
We are all taught or encouraged to be ourselves because people understand the importance of “being yourself”.
But how should I start?
You should start by knowing yourself. Only when you have a full understanding of yourself, you can then fully be yourself. Self-understanding allows you to acknowledge and understand your strengths, your weaknesses, your core values and therefore can help you to develop your goals in life.
Knowing yourself requires you to stay honest with yourself. Being honest with yourself can be really painful but highly beneficial. Living an honest life will help you to stop blaming others. It will help you to know what factors in life that you can control and what you can not.
Being honest to yourself is the first step to improve yourself. Acknowledging your strengths and your weaknesses will allow you to focus on improving your developing areas.
How do I practice?
Self-reflection is a good way to start. For me, there are 3 levels of self-reflection that you should go through to master this skill. In this article, I will focus on the first level which is “ The Positive Self-reflection”.
Self-reflection is the exercise in which you take a step back and reflect what you have done for the day, the last whole week, month or year. Positive Self-reflection is the same exercise but you only focus on positive things you have been doing and motivate yourself to do again in the future. This exercise helps you build up your self-confidence as well as get better at things that you are already good at. Remember there are always rooms for improvement. Challenge the status quo.
The reason you should start with this exercise is that it is the easiest and the most important one. It is like you have to do warm-up exercises before a workout. At this level, because we only focus on positive things so it is really easy to do it. No hard feelings involved.
My recommendation here is that you should not do it before you go to bed. Because it may trigger your emotions and you may be too excited to be able to sleep. Timing is always important. Before workout is a good time for me. I always spend 5 minutes before hitting the gym to think about my whole day’s activities.
Remember — “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again but expecting different results.”
