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Today we have more opportunities to live as our desires dictate to us. We more easily give up beliefs that limit us, change our profession and social environment, we can choose religion and political views. But the abundance of opportunities for self-realization adds doubts. What is really mine in me? What is this – my true “I”?
Review your history
In order to pronounce “I” with full right, you need to understand and accept the past of your family, consciously take your place in it. The situations in life that we accept or reject become the building blocks that make up who we are. And in order to become ourselves, we need to consciously choose what we feel good in ourselves, and get rid of what torments us.
We may think of ourselves mostly as a professional or, say, a mother of a family, as if locking ourselves into a single image. But during the day, a person can be a worker and a friend, a parent and a spouse, be sad and angry, love and remain indifferent.
These states have to be constantly coordinated with each other. Those who think: “I have become myself and now I will remain so forever” are mistaken.
Keep evolving
“I am like that and I can’t help myself”, “I have such a character” – which of us has not heard such phrases? Sometimes we begin to believe that we have finally formed, that all the properties of our personality and character traits are unchanged.
But having taken such a position, a person limits himself, he does not allow himself to move forward, develop, and therefore fences himself off from himself. The path to yourself is constant development and change.
Be authentic in communication
Some people think that being yourself means telling everything about yourself and being honest with others about what you think of them. In fact, our task is to find a correspondence between our own thoughts, feelings and what we express to another person.
If, when communicating, I understand what is important to me, I assume what is important to the interlocutor, I take into account the place and time of communication, I will be able to express my thoughts and feelings without violating the boundaries of the other.
Acknowledge negative feelings
Repressed memories, emotional trauma, unaccountable desires interfere with being sincere. We do not admit them to ourselves because we are unconsciously afraid of their destructive power. But if we work with them, studying ourselves, then we begin to communicate with others in a different way.
This enriches and simplifies our lives: it makes it possible to experience feelings more vividly, to speak more freely about ourselves and our desires, and at the same time removes the heavy need to pretend or embellish ourselves.
Define your limits
Realizing that we don’t know how, don’t want to or don’t have time to do something, we experience strong and not always pleasant emotions, but as a result we begin to understand ourselves much better.
Look at yourself from the side
It is important to distinguish between an inner feeling that accurately makes it clear: we are now playing a role or living our own life. In each of us there is an “other-in-us” that helps to notice and correlate our feelings, thoughts and actions with each other.
This other is not an overseer or a judgmental intellectual. Rather, it can be compared with a kind of angel who carefully turns us to ourselves.