How To Find/Create Your Self-Image
Tips on how to know your true self? Is this even possible? These are 8 simplified and practical ways to know who your true self is.
Intro to Tips On How To Know Your True Self
Knowing your true self is the understanding or determination of one’s own nature given his thought process, attitude, and emotional behavior.
In other words, a person understands and defines him/her/themselves as an accumulation of genuine thoughts, desires choices, as well as emotions, and actions.
Given this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of defining yourself based on the mistakes you’re seemingly making and lace a lot of negative judgments into identifying yourself.
Tips on How to know your true self
Indeed there is nothing hidden under the sun. You can find your true self when you look inwards. Here are a few tips on how to know your true self
You. Are. Human.
You’re not an immortal being. while you might believe in reincarnation and spiritual transformations of mortal to divinity, it is important to note that while you’re here on earth, you’re in human skin.
You are very much human and guess what humans do? Evolve and they do so through multiple trial and error.
Remember to temper justice with mercy when judging your character. Refuse to spin into a spiral of condemnations when you don’t like something about yourself. There is room for growth after mistakes are made.
Related: what affects the way you talk to yourself
A nonjudgemental perspective of yourself helps you grow and develop yourself in a positive and healthy way.
Getting to know your true self; the positives and the negatives.
Basically, you can find your true self by determining your character.
Being mindful of your patterns in your thinking process, the way your mind unravels thoughts, your disposition toward various situations, and your emotions in different circumstances.
Over the years on my journey of self-love and personal development, I went through a period where I observed my character in the third person. Instead of participating, I was like an observer of my decisions, my feelings, and my honest mindset in situations.
what is Emotional negligence?
Finally, I realized one irritating truth, I was a people pleaser. Simply put, most things were to please people even at my own expense. I thought I was being a kind, nice generous person but in reality, I was being used by people who realized my weakness.
Embarrassment and annoyance filled me when the realization hit. Maybe the worst part of feeling stupid is how long you’ve been looking like a fool to everyone else. Self gas-lighting may look like this
The journey to find my true self also made me realize that I had a very clear inability to communicate my feelings. I accumulated emotions. Despite how much I pretended to be a wonderful ray of sunshine. I could be vengeful, unforgiving, and a very great over-thinker. These double standards are Unrealistic expectations.
On the positive side, I realized being a people pleaser was my generosity going overboard. I may be generous but it’s bad when done at your own expense. Set boundaries, and limits to goodness.
Overthinking has a bright side which is the fact that you hardly miss anything. Especially in business. Overthinking has helped me cover long ranges of plans and visualize weaknesses and threats before they come.
The choice to find your true self is the beginning of self-development. We change every day as we face new circumstances. There is always a challenge to test your character. It helps when you are aware of yourself so personal changes don’t catch you by surprise. Be patient with life.
Identify your core values:
Agents of socialization are factors that influence our lifestyles and choices, philosophies on phenomena like religion, politics, life, healthcare, and finances.
My father is a very hard-working man, humble to the public eye. He was very preachy, and very much a religious fanatic and I hated that. When I was younger, we hardly visited the hospitals when we fell sick, we just prayed, I could tell we were broke but even with that, there was no financial structure of the income my parents jointly made.
My parents were friends with people who constantly did very shady things to them. Those were the basis for my core values in life: hypocrisy, self-righteousness, no boundaries, no financial prudence, no care for medical attention, etc.
As a child, you’re an empty canvas and everything you experience is new paint on the board. Subconsciously you absorb the qualities of your immediate environment. Although my father was very preachy about “don’t make the mistakes your father and mother make” it was easier said than done, after all, charity begins at home.
I made the exact same mistakes, their core values in life were my core values in life. I would refuse to go to the hospital when my body began giving subtle signals of trouble, and this almost cost my life on two different occasions.
After learning my hard-core lesson, I decided to prioritize my health over everything else. I began to educate myself on healthier financial practices like budgeting. Also, I learned to create relationship boundaries, etc
I realized on my journey of growth and development that I should be accountable for myself, or else I’d live a life filled with judgment towards myself and blame towards my parents and actually not doing better than they did.
My core values are mine and I’ve worked to curate them in a way that makes me feel comfortable. Core values are the base and reflection of your judgment and help you navigate. One of the helpful tips on how to know your true self is to identify your core values.
It affects and is affected by your thought process, your emotions toward a concept, and your disposition toward it.
Your core values are your guiding light through the world.
In social debates like human rights, and economic systems like capitalism vs communism, especially social and mass media. People’s core values are reflected in such issues through the reactions and comments they make.
The comments are mostly honest reflections of the way they feel. Although others are just jumping on bandwagons.
Journal your progress and deductions:
Another one of the tips on how to know your true selfJournaling is a great form of therapy for many people.
On the journey of self-definition, you might not be able to store all the data of yourself in your head because the mind can get a little too crowded and you might forget the information stored in it. It’s preferable to write down most of your thoughts.
You can find your true self, by writing down most of the things you’ve discovered about yourself. Write down your train of thought as they come, toward problems, situations, and people. Write down honest inputs, not falsified make-believe, you’re trying to know yourself not an imposter.
Identify each trait or character, negative and positive, concisely.
For instance; Rose got into a fight with her significant other. She is not great at communication. Had been on a journey of self-love and personal development, Understands that she has difficulty with communication. She practices positive personal communication which would help her communicate better with others.
Also, she practices the art of spending quality time with herself to come up with a solution to her ongoing problem. Journaling is a form of spending alone time with yourself, getting the candid flow of thought, emotions, and decisions on a piece of book privy to your use only.
Rose writes down her feelings toward the fight, and her thinking process prior to the fight. Her dispositions towards the problem. The choices she made by words or actions may have or haven’t contributed to the problem. Basically Her earnest unbiased view.
Her feelings should not be invalidated because of the fight. After writing it down, she begins to read the journal and make what she can of herself from the situation. This assessment of self, based on situations is a good way to find one’s true self and character. Various situation brings out different chains of actions.
Writing in a journal, your honest emotions, choices, and attitudes of situations, good and bad, make your self-definition and personal growth easier and less congested. From time to time, access your progress and re-evaluate yourself. Maybe do this monthly or quarterly or yearly.
Access your accumulated actions, reactions, thoughts, and feelings over the given period of time. This is what shapes your ever-changing and ever-learning cycle of self-definition.
Practice honesty to Find your true self:
The worst thing you can do for yourself is dishonesty. It’s the biggest kind of setup for failure. You can not define your true self when you spend your time living in lies you created to avoid confronting your truth. You can not define yourself truly when you live in denial of who you are.
Accepting yourself and being honest with yourself helps you shape a better version of yourself. You know the weaknesses and strengths of your person. This info changes how you use your strengths to better yourself and improve on your weaknesses.
Importantly, you buffer yourself against vulnerabilities that your weaknesses pose to you. Honesty with yourself means you’re stepping closer to being the ideal version of yourself.
You identify and solve problems faster when you’re honest with yourself, you can even avoid said problems because honesty helps identify triggers, and over time, you can spot them from miles away before they blow up. Self-identity is about Openness and honesty.
Be aware of yourself and live in the moment: allow life to happen, allow things to play out, and do your part. If you don’t learn lessons you may never grow. Sometimes experience is the best teacher.
New Experiences give you more knowledge of yourself. Allow yourself to feel things, allow yourself to do things, and be aware of all you do so you don’t miss a moment of yourself.
Don’t be passive in your life, be active.
Being passive in your life is very possible and happens when you let yourself be influenced by other people, events, or situations. Be an active member of your life and make decisions for yourself in awareness of who you are and what you want.
You can find your true self. Listen to your inner voice and your intuition, and always trust it. When your mind constantly disapproves of something then you shouldn’t be doing it without a doubt.
The more decisions you make for yourself, the more you have the knowledge to identify yourself with. Be aware of everything that goes on in your personal life. Make decisions with full personal convictions not out of persuasions from external factors.
To find your true self, Allow yourself to learn:
Allow life lessons to get through to you. You are a human. When life portrays lessons, learn them. This way you are always evolving your self-image and self-perception. Learn new things, learn new ways to adapt to discomfort, new ways to approach problems, to address people.
Finding out I was a people pleaser hurt. I felt like a loser for a long time. I completely avoided people because I didn’t trust myself to not overindulge. Putting myself in a box was not helping. Because instead of solving the problems, I was just avoiding them together.
I remember doing my project for my final year and I had to work with my coursemates, I found myself doing the people-pleasing thing I was so desperately running away from. I was quite frustrated with myself and started finding out ways to curb my need to be generous with resources, emotions, time, and self.
Sometimes I felt guilty to say no. I had to explain to myself the importance to look out for you at all times. Only do what you can and know when you’re at your limit.
I learned to consciously hold a break every time. Most times, I slipped up and made some level of damage but I was able to do damage control. More importantly, I learned to never let being good to others make me bad to myself. When I slip up, I’ll forgive myself and make effort to do better next time.
Accept changes in life and constantly apply patience to yourself.
My last of tips on how to know your true self. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself else you’d break down. Patience, when you’re finding your true self, is very necessary.
You can’t expect so much from yourself. You can only do so much. Take every aspect of your life one step at a time. It’s your life, and this self-definition phenomenon is a lifelong journey because people change every day. You change every day.
Change is constant. The world around you will change. The people around you will change. Accept change, don’t fight it, fighting change would be like wearing winter clothes during the summer. Not everyone can pull that off, you’re not Ye.
The natural way of life is growth. You keep growing every day physically because it’s out of your control and natural. You can grow mentally too. Those you once looked up to can change from good to worse. That doesn’t mean you should follow the same path.
When the lifestyle you’re leading isn’t aligning with the life you want to live, you can change. Battling with anger management has been an eye-opener for me.
For a while, I lived with anger towards myself for my lack of control over my anger. I knew well enough that my lifestyle was robbing me of happiness and peace.
Subsequently, began working actively towards achieving some semblance of balance, control, and a grey scale. The change was hard, I had to change things I didn’t even know about myself. Change is challenging, and pushes you to new boundaries.
The economics of the world has had several impacts on everyone across different tax brackets. The inflation, recession, the worldwide economic strain, have affected everyone financially. Finance is a very critical aspect of humans, you need money for literally everything.
Indeed, a drastic change like this would affect you. It will affect your life and decisions, and your way of thinking will change towards money. Your emotions towards money change too.
So at every point, even when you’re not able to decipher your actions, remember to apply patience to yourself. Always practice self-love, and be patient, we don’t always get it right every time.