Finding Yourself Begins With 4 Steps

Getting to know yourself and being aware of who you want to be is crucial for your well-being. However, connecting with your true selves and exploring your needs may require digging into a difficult past. For some, it's easier to let things happen to them rather than go through the pain of facing past challenges. Unfortunately, not taking on the responsibility of being in charge of your life often results in increasing dissatisfaction. If you are trapped in a life that seems not to belong to you, there are some vital questions to ask yourself, "Who am I?" "What would make me happy?" "Who would I like to be?"

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

Aristotle

Identifying your needs and priorities enables you to become aware of who you are, what is essential for you and what you can offer to others.

This journey involves breaking down and building up a different image of yourself, working on your potential, being open to rewriting your past experience and allowing yourself to become vulnerable. All this may sound challenging, but this journey will enable you to reconnect to your true essence.

As a child, you had to adapt to your environment and others needs. At times, there may have been situations when you felt ashamed about wishes or thoughts you were experiencing. You may have felt guilt when scolded for behaviours that did not meet others expectations. You had to suppress and hide sides of yourself, allowing to surface only what you learned to be perceived as acceptable. All this led to the current feeling of being trapped and dissatisfied with your life. While you try to make everyone happy, you keep sinking within your own unhappiness. It is time to take a break, reflect on the situation, seek out which of your needs you are not considering, and allow them to surface. The task is challenging, but if you commit to it, it is doable.

“What you fear is inside yourself...

The power to do great or terrible things.”

Liam Neeson, Batman Begins

The following four steps will help you get closer to your authentic self.

1. Understanding your past

Exploring where you are coming from helps create a narrative of how you became who you are and understand your journey. However, it takes some courage to face the challenges you had to overcome and have buried a long time ago. To cope better with difficult situations, the tendency to normalise or ignore traumatic experiences and accept them without taking the time to acknowledge the pain they caused. Impulsive reactions in the present are often responses to those experiences. To understand those reactions, we need to go back and dig where these showed up initially. There is no blame to take or assign; it is simply about acknowledging past events' impact and letting unhelpful coping methods go.