Often, I read and hear of finding oneself on and offline by self-help and success teachers but it struck home for me to ask this question and spare a thought on it. I am sure that someone is asking the questions: How do I find myself? What does it really mean to find myself? Let us see if we can answer these questions and unearth more curious thoughts on the subject.
SELF-DISCOVERY
Finding yourself is to discover yourself. It means knowing who you are, deep inside of you. It means knowing your gifts and talents. It means knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It means knowing your emotions, gaining profound perceptions of yourself, your essence, having an understanding of your being, and the workings of your mental faculties.
Finding yourself means knowing your rationalities and irrationalities. It means knowing what makes you irrational and how you manage it. Discovering yourself is the business of being honest with yourself. It means accepting who you are: knowing how you are wired and going ahead to use that to work for you and for those that are around you.
The first step to finding oneself is to have this knowledge of oneself: To know your thought process, your vibrations and how these work with you first and then with others you engage with.
SELF-DEVELOPMENT
Once you become aware of your essence and those intangible dynamics of your inner being, you have a potential. Then you have to get intentional and deliberate about doing something about what you have discovered in order to make potential actual. That is what it means to manifest your being. For that to happen, you have to embark on a drive to develop what you have noticed within you.
For the irrational traits, you want to put them in check and see how you can develop self-control to regulate them not to obstruct or hinder your rational self. You want to get conscious of managing yourself such that you do not get in the way of yourself. Most times we get in our own way by our negative traits and attitudes. We shoot ourselves in the foot. This is the reason we are the foes or friends of ourselves. We make or break us.
Once you have found your gift and talent, then you have to find the specific skill(s) that you will acquire and then hone through practice, in order to effectively use them. This is the true strength and activation of self-awareness.
SELF-AWARENESS
You are said to be self-aware after you have known yourself enough till you now use what you know of yourself to be of impact to others by first building yourself up. You go from dependence to independence. When you have earned something for yourself through independence, then you can play in the area of interdependence. This is where you truly have to watch how your emotions work and how to moderate and regulate your irrationalities so you can play and work in a team. If you must go far, you do need to hone the skill of collaboration.
If you are someone who is quick to anger and easily irritated, you have to know how to mortify or control this as you seek productivity and impact because you cannot be fruitful alone. If you are someone who has a propensity to borrow and not pay back until you are reminded and chased around, you want to completely avoid that or find a way around it. You have to get to that place where you know who you are and know how you use that knowledge to further your great cause that you discovered as your gift and talent.
KNOWING YOUR PURPOSE
There is a connection between what you have received and why you have received it. The reason you have received it is the purpose it would serve or what you are to use it for. This is how what you have becomes who you are. You cannot lose who you are.
With our natural talents and gifts, we can figure out our purpose. We do this by developing skills to align with our gifts. If you found out that you are given to the sciences, you want to build skills to align with that. If you found out that you are gifted with figures, you have to seek skills that relate with that. If you discovered that you have gift for commerce and trade, you have to find a way that you want to go with it and you have to be very sincere with yourself because everything depends on it.
When you have earned the right skills and you are diligently serving others with it, it will be getting clearer each day as you work passionately what you are here to do. You will find the passion to serve.
PASSION AND INTEREST
Your passion for a thing is a strong compelling feeling or emotion you have for that thing. Passion drives one to manifest and sustain a certain thing. Passion is energy. Passion can be positive or negative. When we have a positive passion to pursue an idea, it is important for that idea to achieve the purpose for which it was given, and that may not necessarily be to earn money.
The question of our passion not meeting our needs often comes up. It is possible that you can be passionate about something and that thing does not cater to your needs. Sometimes you may need to review what you refer to as needs and be sure they are not wants. You have to check if your greed is not influenced by the environment. Remember we did mention our irrationalities and negative emotions?
You should know yourself enough to know when your greed and peer pressure are your problems. You must know when your peers are becoming a liability instead of an asset while you are collaborating and seeking to deliver value in your space. Where peers or team members have such negative influence on us, we are no longer collaborating; we are distracted from the course.
It is important for us to find a way to ensure that we passionately develop ourselves to the point that our passion earns us interest by becoming of interest to others. This can only happen when we are proficient in what we do and then the effects of proficiency would be ripple. To sustain, we have to build and grow first. Growth does take time.
Depending on what it is, our passion for a thing should grow to the point where we are able to earn a living from it and support others, too. But, if it is philanthropy-oriented, it may only be more about others and less, or little about ourselves. We have to get to the point where we can extend benefit to others.
Aliko Dangote is not just passionate about building or fixing roads. He has an interest and that is the 10-year tax concession his company got from the Nigerian government. Though the group has come out to deny the story, it does remain that conglomerates do things by which they enjoy concessions from governments. It is where interests play out. Whether this is true or not, Aliko Dangote has achieved much growth by passionately serving mankind. While you may not have to be as big Dangote, it is something you need to think about.
We have to exhibit our passion by showing interest in solving problems. A problem-solving mindset is one huge leadership quality. When we are able to drive self-discovery to this point, then we are said to earn fulfillment and purpose in life. Interest is earned based on return on investment. Without a passion to discover, develop and deliver, we really have no investment.
Find yourself. This is the first step to finding purpose. When we discover our potentials, and develop what we discover, many other things that we seek from our environment depends on that. In our environment and all around are the benefits of life. But we have to exchange them with what we have. Our means of exchange is our skilled gifts and talents. This is what we use to serve others using the right attitude. We must be conscious enough to make our life worthy of its discovered purpose through industry and diligence. You are all you have. But you cannot be an island to yourself. You must know what you have been given and you have to develop it to proficiency levels in order to be of impact. This is what it means to find yourself.
