Personal Excellence » self-discovery

Finding Your Inner Self

Celes — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:00:42 +0000

Have you ever thought about who you are? What you stand for?

I’m not talking about your roles or social identities. You can be a friend, brother/sister, employee, boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife, partner, father/mother, son/daughter, all at the same time, but these are just an aspect of you. They don’t represent who you fundamentally are inside. Your inner self is who you really are on the inside.

To know your inner self is to know your purpose, your values, your visions, your motivations, your goals and your beliefs. Not as what you have been told by others, but what you have discovered for yourself. Knowing your inner self requires a high level of introspection and self-awareness. If you have clarity to at least half of what is listed above, you probably hold quite a high level of self-awareness. At the same time, the process of discovery never ends – it’s a life-long journey.

You Are More Than Your Identities

Trying to uncover your inner self can be a tricky process. For one, you hold multiple identities in your life, each with their own sets of socially defined values, visions, expectations, etc. These may not directly conform with what you represent.

For example, let’s say you are an employee of an automobile company. As an employee, your mission should be congruent with whatever your company’s mission is, say to improve quality of people’s lives through automobile manufacturing. Your goals should also be in line with the company’s, say to increase company’s sales by 20% in 1 year and expand its regional presence.

However, you as a person have other dreams and goals outside which differ from your company’s. Perhaps you really love volleyball with a passion. Your ideal vision is to be an internationally accomplished volleyball player and become a highly sought-after volleyball coach, training national-level teams. That’s definitely different from the visions you are expected to have as an employee. Likewise, this applies to all your other identities too. For every identity, you have a set of purpose/values/visions/motivations/goals/beliefs which are not entirely the same as your inner self’s.

Because everyone is unique, your real self can’t be boxed in by any single identity or label. I’m a personal coach to my coachees, a daughter to my parents, a sister to my brother, a friend to my friends, a blogger to my readers, but I’m more than just that. These are just roles and titles. None of the roles by themselves accurately surmise who I am. The inner me is someone who cannot simply be defined or labeled by any one label.

A good analogy to use would be the sunflower. Your inner self is like the bulb of the sunflower (the center part where petals are attached to). Your identities are like the petals around your inner self. While the petals are extensions of the head, they are not the head. Similarly, your identities are extensions of yourself, but they do not represent who you are wholly.

Importance of Finding Your Inner Self

If you have never given much thought about your inner self, it is likely you have become defined a lot by your identities. It is common for people to see themselves as a certain role, such as a friend, partner, employee, son/daughter, and so on. Some spend their whole lives building themselves around such identities. Take those identities away, and they get totally lost, because they have a low awareness of who they are on the inside. These people are not be able to articulate his/her own visions, goals and dreams beyond what have been imposed by his/her identities.

For example, someone who is entrenched in his identity as a son will see his entire existence as a son. He will act in accordance with what’s best for his parents. He will spend a lot of time with his parents, do things for his parents, forsake other things in his life if it’s needed to make them happy. When it comes to making important decisions, such as career or life partner, he makes sure his parents are in approval before he takes any action. His parents are the central focus of his life.

However, his real self is more than just being a son to his parents. If his parents are to ever exit from his life, he will be in a state of total loss. His life will start spiraling out of control since the anchor he has been building his life on so far is gone. It’s like when the bulb of the sunflower disappears, all the petals will scatter away randomly since there is nothing to hold them together. When you become overly attached to any one of your identities, you run into the risk of an identity crisis when that particular identity is removed.

That’s why it’s important to find your inner self. You are the owner of your own life and you live your life for yourself. This life is one that’s defined by you, not what is defined by your roles or identities. If you are not connected with who you really are, you are probably just living your life for others. Pursuing others’ goals, living up to others’ expectations and projections of you, rather than what you really want. To know your inner self is the first step of living a conscious life of your making.

Knowing Your Inner Self Comes From Self-Awareness

As mentioned in the beginning of the article, knowing your inner self comes from being self-awareness. Even if you do not have full clarity on who your inner self is, it is likely that certain aspects of inner self are already exhibited on a day-to-day basis through how you assume your identities. For example, if you find yourself often extolling on being responsible to your parents, responsibility is likely one of your inner values. If you feel a compelling need to always be there for your friends, reliability is probability an important value to you.

It is perfectly okay if you don’t know your inner self. Discovering and unraveling it is a life long process. If I use myself as an example, the 10-year old Celes definitely wasn’t as self-aware as the 25-year old Celes today. When I was in primary and secondary school, I didn’t really know who I was or what I stood for. I don’t think anybody at that age did actually. Everyone was just focused on doing what they were told. There wasn’t much introspection or self-awareness going on. We never really made to think about who we were, what we thought or who we wanted to be. While we had our own personalities, they were probably hazy at best.

Come think of it, I think the reason why self-awareness was low was because conformance was highly valued in schools (or Asian societies, for that matter). To have an opinion was seen as being defiant. Our tasks were generally to process and execute instructions, not to troubleshoot or question. If you have some different thoughts, you would generally be frowned upon or shut down. That’s why we never so much as thought about what we wanted. We were more like robots just doing our things, or sleepwalkers as I commonly refer to here.

When I went into Junior College and subsequently University, I grew more self-aware. A lot of it came about from increased liberty, for example from choosing courses or classes. More onus in decision making triggered me to do more thinking – about what I wanted to do and what I wanted for the future. Of course, a lot of activities I was doing on the side was also growing me in different ways – e.g., one of my hobbies was web design so I was the webmistress of my large network of sites. I was also taking part in various extra-curricular activities, and the like.

In the recent few years as I worked in my ex-company and subsequently proceeded to embrace my passion, I grew to learn myself even more. Every day is a learning journey in discovering who I am and what I stand for. The more I uncovered about myself, the more I am able to live in a conscious manner.

What’s Beneath Your Identities?

Let’s try an exercise to discover your inner self. Start off by mentally removing all those different identities that you have been layered with for a moment. This means stop thinking yourself as a brother, a colleague, a friend, or whatever identity you commonly associate yourself with. Think as just yourself.

With a pen and paper, start writing whatever comes to mind as you read the questions below.

What is your life purpose? What is the purpose you see your life to have? (If you don’t know your purpose, check out my 7-part series on Discovering Your Real Purpose)
What are your visions for yourself, independent of anyone else? What goals and dreams do you have for yourself in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years or even 10 years?
What are YOUR motivations in life? What gets you going, day after day? What will you fight for? What do you feel passionately about?
What are your values? What are the qualities important to you?
What are your beliefs of the world? What are your world views?

If this is the first time you are ever doing such an exercise, you will probably fall into a bit of a jam. Some of the answers you write out be from one of your social identities. If you are very family-centric, you might find your answers wholly centered on taking care of your family. It’s totally fine to have such an answer but that should not be the only answer you are conjuring up. Start thinking beyond your family. What are your visions for yourself, outside of family? What are your personal motivations in life?

Don’t worry if you have difficulty getting things down. Even if it may seem that you are drawing up a blank, there is a real you that lies beneath all those social identities, waiting to be uncovered.

Here are some steps which I found to be useful in uncovering my inner self:

Continuously learning and growing
Putting myself in unknown contexts to spike my learning curve
Constant introspection
Looking beyond what I’m told to discover what I want for myself
Listening to my gut feeling when it arises

By doing this exercise, you have already triggered the search process. No matter how deeply embedded your inner self is at the moment, this request will ripple out, slowly but surely, and stir the depth of your soul. You will start becoming more aware of your thoughts and actions. Soon, you will be to carve out an impression of who you really are on the inside. Eventually, you will reach a stage where you have strong clarity of who you are as a person.

Aligning with Your Inner Self

As you uncover more of your inner self, you will probably find your identities do not match to your inner self. There’s a conflict between who you really are and who you are expected to be. If that’s the case, it’s fine. It’s a first step to have already discovered who you are. The next step is to live in alignment with your inner self, as best as you can, within the situation. At the same time, start making long term plans towards ultimately living in full alignment with your inner self.

For example, when I was working in my ex-company, my inner self was passionate about helping others to grow via conscious living. However, my identity as an employee required me to maximize the business of skincare brands I was handling. That meant crafting excellent business and marketing strategies to trigger purchase of consumers. In my opinion a lot of the frameworks the beauty industry operate in are of pretty low consciousness (levels of desire, fear), so it wasn’t something that was in line with my inner self. There was a conflict between my identity as an employee and my inner self.

What I did then was to live in alignment with my inner self as best as I could while working in my capacity as the employee, while kicking off plans to pursue my passion in the long term. Since I couldn’t do anything to change the nature of the work I was doing, I focused on I could effect – establishing strong relationships with the colleagues I came into contact with and raising their consciousness through every interaction and meeting we had. Eventually, the opening came for me to make the leap in 2008. This marked the biggest step where I closed in the gap with my inner self. The rest, as they say, is history.

Every action you take should move you towards your inner self. If there are identities which do not fit who your inner self represents, there will be two possible options you can take. First, try to find the common ground between those identities and your inner self. This may involve shaping the identities to fit who you are. If that doesn’t work at all, the other (more drastic) option will be to remove or change the identity altogether – i.e., when I left my previous company to remove my identity as the employee , or when I shed limiting friends or energy vampires away from my life.

This has resulted in me becoming more and more congruent as a person. Today, I’m at a place where my identities are well matched with who I am on the inside. While there’s definitely still room for further alignment, they are quite congruent with one another. And all these didn’t happen by chance. They came about as a result of conscious effort.

Focus on finding your inner self, then start living in alignment with it. That’s when you start to live a conscious life.

Blind Spots In Personal Growth

Celes — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:27:43 +0000

A few months ago, I wrote an article on Creating Your Life Handbook. In the article, I mentioned several things to list in your handbook, such as your strengths and weaknesses, your core values, and in particular, your blind spots. One of the readers, Darren, asked me what blind spots are and requested an article on it. That inspired me to write this article.

Blind Spots

Every time we open our eyes, light enters our pupils and shines onto our retina. Inside our retina are photoreceptors – nerve cells that interpret light, transmits the information to the brain. That’s actually how we see things.

It’s pretty straight forward, except there is a small area on our retina is where there are no photoreceptors. This is known as our blind spot.

Refer to cross-sectional diagram below, circled in red. Since there are no photoreceptors here, we’re not able to interpret any light shone in the section, hence referred to as “blind” spot.

By right, our blind spot areas should appear as black areas in our field of vision. But they are obviously not – we’re able to see our surroundings, read all the words in a book, see everything on our laptop screen, etc just fine. Why is that the case?

That’s because our brain is able to assess our surroundings, estimate the missing spot and project it in place of the blank space. Thanks to that, we get a complete field vision of what’s before us like we do now.

The past few paragraphs may sound like mambo-jumbo if you’re a visual learner, so I’m going to show you an example. For the next few minutes, try the free Blind Spot exercise at this link. It shows you how our brain is able to project the background and fill up the empty space in the blind spot. The same applies regardless of how complicated the background is. It just takes 2 minutes max, so return when you are done. I’ll be here waiting

What Does The Exercise Show?

How was the exercise for you? What does it show?

This exercise shows that the mental projection by our brain isn’t an accurate reflection of the reality, even though it may look right and be right most of the time. While we may think we can see everything, what we see before us may not be what’s really there.

This ties in precisely with the concept of blind spots in personal development.

Blind Spots in Personal Development

Blind spots (defined in the context of personal development) refer to the aspects of ourselves we aren’t fully conscious of. This can refer to a broad spectrum of different things – our traits, values, actions, idiosyncrasies, habits, feelings, thoughts, idiosyncrasies, etc.

For example, let’s say you dislike people who are arrogant. Why so? Your immediate response may be that they make you feel uncomfortable or they are overbearing. But these are just surface level reasons. What is the deeper reason why arrogant people affect you?

This reason is usually beyond our immediate observation – we can only identify them when we probe deeper. Blind spots aren’t as immediately observable to us compared to people around us, such as friends who have known us for a while or someone who is trained to identify them, like a life coach.

Blind spots also includes our physiological behaviors. For example, I have always talked really fast since I was young. Everyone I have met before kept pointing this out, especially during my secondary school years, junior college years and university years. It was typical to have people comment my rate of speech with “a bullet train”. Some often asked if I was in the debating team. One of my friends in particular suggested that I become a rap leader, which I thought was hilarious! Even then, while I have heard their comments and acknowledged their opinions, I never fully registered it as true. Because in my head, my rate of speech didn’t seem fast at all.

That was, until I saw videos of my presentations and audios of my voice. I still remember the first time I played back an audio recording of my voice a few years ago. My immediate reaction was – Why on earth was this person talking so fast for? It was quite hilarious because that thought popped into my mind the instant I heard my voice. Despite knowing I should be listening to my voice, I couldn’t identify with it. The rate of speech was beyond what I had heard before!

Even after this incident, I continued to be unconscious of my rate of speech for a large majority of the time, until people (usually new acquaintances) commented. Today, it still happens, though I’m much more aware of it than in the past. It’s something I’ve become more conscious of since I speak at events and conferences. I try to slow down during my presentations and speeches, but beyond that I stick to my original talking speed when with friends.

Why Uncover Blind Spots?

Why is it important to know your blind spots? Because it is a necessary part of your personal growth. Blind spots are things you are unaware of. Identifying our blind spots and understanding them heightens our level of self-awareness. When we develop a greater self-awareness, it puts us in greater alignment with our higher selves and who we are meant to be. The net result is a speedier progression towards achieving your own level of greatness Getting a personal coach is an excellent way to uncover your own blind spots so that you can become better.

Blind spots aren’t necessarily negative traits or weaknesses, though they usually are. When you are oblivious to something, there is a high likelihood that (1) you have never worked on it before, which leaves an opportunity for improvement (2) it is acting as an invisible boundary that limits your experience in your life. When you uncover your blind spots and actively work on them, you start becoming more conscious as an individual, of your strengths and opportunity areas, the boundaries you operate within. If you don’t uncover these blind spots, you will never be able to work on them, simply because you aren’t aware of their existence.

In my pursuit towards my highest level of personal growth, uncovering my blind spots is a constant interest of mine. I’m always on the lookout of situations when I feel resistance or when my consciousness is lowered. On my blog, I open myself to all feedback I receive from readers, whether positive or negative (if any). During my 1-1 coaching in the past, I would encourage my coachees to provide feedback to help improve the experience of the coaching sessions and enable me be a better coach to them. Even by myself, I frequently apply my own techniques to myself so I can become a better person.

Whenever I discover a blind spot (it can be as frequent as a few times a day when I’m consciously looking out for them or once every few days) and actively address on them, it evolves me into a better person. Over the years, I’ve constantly sought to uncover and iron out blind spots within me. The person I’ve become today and the person I was in the past are quite different, and it wasn’t through luck or accident. It was through conscious desire and work. For example, in the past, my neurotic perfectionism often resulted in myopia and ineffectiveness, which hindered me from achieving greater results. It also led me to become an aggressive person who was domineering and bossy. My emotional stinginess also made me an unpleasant and selfish person. All these blocked me from being the person I saw myself to be. It was through conscious work on these blind spots that made me a better person today.

Just like growth is a life long journey, the process of uncovering blind spots never ends too. With every blind spot we identify and tackle, there is always a next blind spot to uncover. Due to the infinite vastness of our mind, it is impossible to identify every single blind spot within us at this current moment. The only day that can happen is when we fully unlock our subconsciousness and operate at full 100% of our brain – this is likely to be a while in the future since most people are still operating at under <1% of the full potential of our brains.