Share!
Dr. Damita J. Zweiback is the founder of Coaches Corner and a certified life coach. She is currently on leave from her position with the Michigan Dept. of Health and Human Services. Zweiback is in the United States Navy Reserve and is currently serving on active duty in Washington D.C.
In today fast paced life, the days and nights merge into one and we rarely ever look at our whole life and ponder the question of our existence. Being alive and living a happy life is one thing but what is the reason we are on this earth? There have been many people in the past who have achieved so much in life and helped so many around them. Why were other human beings just like us able to achieve so much more than us and we are merely living our lives without any thought of the reason or the purpose for being alive? To live a life of substance and value we must Master self-discovery and journey to find our purpose only then can we truly experience life and its great pleasures. Many great life-coaching experts can help guide you along your journey.
The Importance of Self-Discovery
Discovering yourself is the first step you must take before you start working on finding your purpose. The world around us is moving at a very fast pace and with that life as well is passing us by quickly. In order for us to take hold of the situation we must understand who we are by embarking on a journey of self-discovery. Self-discovery is crucial because once you discover yourself and truly understand your authentic self, you will be able to acknowledge and keep yourself on the path that will help guide you on the path of finding your purpose in life.
1. Reflecting on Personal Values
Most people never look deep within them to consider or evaluate what makes them unique. Being unique is not as if you are somewhat better than the others rather, it’s things like what are you passionate about? It could be as simple as helping others or feeding the poor. Do you have compassion for those who are suffering, do you feel the need to improve the lives of those around you? Or are you a creative being and want to channel that towards something good. Life-coaching experts always talk about understanding your values is like defining a guideline for your life. It’s similar to how companies have a vision and mission statement, these statements are what makes every company unique in its ethics and moral values. The same applies to human beings. You need to have a set of values that you consider sacred and would like to strictly follow.
2. Unveiling Strengths and Weaknesses
This is the tricky part of the self-discovery journey because you have to open yourself up and look deep within to find weaknesses and strengths. Strengths are great as they can be used to move forward quickly, they can even enhance you in the journey of improving upon your weaknesses. However, finding your weaknesses and accepting them is a whole different matter. You have to accept them and be open to making improvements in those areas. Being aware of what your weaknesses are will put you ahead of many and you will be able to accomplish a lot more quickly if just work on your weaknesses and leverage your strengths.
3. Exploring Passions and Interests
Passions are often considered to be superficial. Lately, there has been a lot of emphasis on finding your passion. Many life-coaching experts talk about how passion is the thing that helps you work on your core values. If you are passionate about something you are more likely to work hard on that thing and give it your best to make sure that you are not only fulfilling your passion but also keeping it in line with the core values as well. You work hard to ensure that your core values align with your passion and you deliver the best outcome. Your passion is what will help you achieve finding your purpose in life. Passion in life can be considered as something that may make you lose track of time or you can even submerge in that activity to such a length that you may not remember to fulfill your basic needs. Passions don’t necessarily have to get you super excited rather they are something that can make you feel calm and excited in general to go back to that activity and while you are doing that activity, any hobby that you are passionate about you may feel calm and relaxed.
As you can see all three of these components of your personality come together to make you who you are. Once you have discovered them all you will be able to embark on the journey of mastering self-discovery.
The Journey Within
Mastering self-discovery requires understanding ourselves and by far we have understood some of the key aspects we need to learn about ourselves before we jump into the journey of finding ourselves.
1. Mindfulness and Meditation
Meditation is something we have all heard of by now. Many life-coaching experts talk about meditation and its benefits, we hear them but we never implement them. In this article, we urge you to consider using these techniques. Everyone knows its benefits but very few practice it. Despite its many benefits, not many people meditate. The act of meditation itself is to silence your mind and be one with yourself. Sit quietly in the moment, let your thoughts simmer away, and learn to accept what comes through. Meditation is meant to remove all the external chaos from your mind and let you sit with yourself without any external or internal interference. Practicing this activity will regulate your mind and make you connect with yourself. It helps calm your mind and deal with negative emotions in the moment. Thus, the more frequently you practice meditation the more it helps you rid yourself of negative thoughts, giving you more control over your mental health.
2. Journaling as a Self-Discovery Tool
In older days journaling was a “my diary” thing. Now it’s more of a psychological way of keeping in touch with your emotions. Understanding all the emotions and feelings that you experience. Not only the experiences you have but also the experiences you would like to have. From moments of pure sadness to pure joy can both be journaled about. This allows you to look back at your journals on a weekly or monthly basis and see what kind of patterns are there. You can see what kind of fears you have and what kind of aspirations you have and work towards. Joyous and sad memories can help you understand what hurts and what doesn’t and what can be included in your life more powerful impact on your life. These patterns help us understand who we truly are and connect us to our true selves.
3. Seek Feedback and Self-Reflection
Before you go around asking people to give their feedback on you and your personality you need to know the intentions of the people you are talking to. Make sure you surround yourself with people who are authentic and care for you. Only the people who care for you will give you the feedback that you need. Use the constructive feedback you get from people and move forward with it. Reflecting upon what is said by these people about you, you can make some incredible changes in yourself. You don’t have to change yourself to adapt to the mold of the people, however taking in the feedback and noticing how they see you can help you accentuate those features more and be more of an impactful person. Beware of negative feedback though and keep a watchful eye for that.
4. Embrace Change and Adaptability
Change is inevitable. Everything in life is going to change sooner or later. So be aware of the fact that there will be changes in your and others’ lives. These changes can impact you in a way to learn more things about yourself. Sometimes change can open your eyes to a side of you that you never knew you had. You can learn and accept the power that you have now garnered or learned from and make a greater change in your life. So being open to changes helps us be more vulnerable to the challenges and the difficulties that life throws at us along with the possibility of you learning something completely new about yourself and embracing that power.
By now you have learned your core values, passions that drive you, and your ability to adapt. This leads us to understand, how to live with purpose. A purpose that keeps us moving forward every day for many years to come without causing us boredom or burnout.
Purposeful Living
Purposeful life, ah what a dreamy phrase. But that’s what it is a dreamy phrase. It isn’t and it wouldn’t be as if you suddenly have an awakening within you and you realize “Ah, that is it”. There are no aha moments there is always going to be a slow and steady recognition of understanding yourself, understanding who you are and what are your passions. And as a culmination of those things, you will come to find your true purpose in life. Tony Robbins is great with such kind of advice and is a great life coaching maestro. Let’s explore how you can translate self-discovery into a purposeful life.
Life Coaching Tip Reminder:
One thing to always remember is that your purpose is always beyond yourself. It rarely has anything to do with you. Your purpose in life why you were sent on this earth is always greater than the self. Even if you help a small community, you will learn to find joy in helping that community. Maybe that was your purpose, maybe the people who gained something from being helped by you were destined to be helped by you and that’s why you were sent on this earth.
1. Align Actions with Value
Our actions are what make us who we are, externally. Internally, we are ruled by our core values. As spoken before core values of each person will help dictate their external actions. So, now the task of ensuring that your actions are aligned with your values falls on you. For this, you need to massively deep dive inside yourself and commit to your core values. In turn, your actions will begin to resonate with your core values. Humans are made that way, when you believe in something strongly enough that you live and breathe those values, they will start intermingling with your actions. Before you even realize your actions will be a direct representation of what your core values are.
2. Set Meaningful Goals
Setting goals in the earliest stages is difficult and what most people are prone to do is set goals larger than life. This doesn’t help and may create more resistance in your ability to achieve those said goals. So, to achieve goals, make sure you start small. Make small achievable goals and start with them. Crossing off the checklist will help you establish the security that you can achieve these goals and go further. As you move further along your journey, you can start including goals that resonate with your core values and your purpose.
3. Cultivate Gratitude
Most Life Coaching experts will talk about gratitude and how it can change our lives, but does it change our lives? Only one way to find out. Start practicing gratitude. Everyone is sick and tired of hearing about the term gratitude by now but what about the impact it creates since we never really practice it, we cannot for certain know the impact it has on our lives. We look over the tinniest things and take everything for granted. Such as having a good night’s sleep, a warm breakfast, a warm bed, and a hot cup of coffee, and that’s just the morning, what about the rest of it? Stop taking things for granted and give it a shot. Make a list and then and only then can you realize how many things you have been taking for granted. Gratitude cultivates positivity and calmness in your environment and your surroundings and eradicates negativity.
4. Serve Others and Make a Difference
As discussed, purpose is beyond one’s self. It’s about others and how can you play your part in helping those who need it the most. Life’s purpose is something that aligns with the core values and the passions that you have. One thing you can do is find a way to merge all these and make a difference in society. It can be as simple as feeding the homeless or doing a charity drive, but once you feel the joy of helping others you will be unstoppable. Because if there is one thing that truly brings joy to people’s lives is to help others. So find a way to combine your passion with your core values and then collectively make a better impact around you.
Overcoming Challenges in the Journey
Self-discovery is a hard journey to embrace let alone the challenges you will embark on it. To be honest, that’s the real fun of it, because without challenge life is incomplete. To live your life to the fullest potential you must challenge yourself to face some of the hardships that come along the way. These challenges will only make you stronger and make you more resilient so be open to them accepting of what’s yet to come.
1. Embrace Failure to evaluate yourself
Again, yes failure is inevitable. But the good part of this aspect of life is that it helps you learn, it allows you to evaluate where you went wrong. Learning from your mistakes is something similar to evaluating your mistakes. Because in both of them, you’re allowing your mind to objectively find mistakes and correct them. Embrace failure with the awareness and the essence that you are going to learn from it. Evaluate yourself and consider what went wrong and where did you go wrong and then amend those mistakes.
2. Start small and Then Go Big
Setting goals that are easy to achieve is the way to go when you are starting your journey. You don’t want to go too big in the initial stages. However, once you are aware of all the contributing factors you can aim higher. Setting goals that you can achieve helps you understand that you can meet your goals no matter what. In those initial stages, you will also learn a lot about life and what kind of challenges you might have to face. This way when you move on to bigger goals you will already have the knowledge required to withstand the hurdles that may come your way.
Mastering Self-discovery: a journey to your life’s purpose:
Mastering self-discovery is a topic covered by many life coaching experts, they tell you what to do and what not to do. But at the end of the day, it’s up to you. You and only You can make that journey. You are the only one who has to go through the steps to make this decision and accept the challenge to think beyond yourself.
Remember the self-discovery journey is for you to see what your values are, where you draw the line, and where you are willing to go above and beyond. On the other hand, your life’s purpose is about something other than yourself. It’s not about you anymore it’s about how you can play a part in improving the world as we see it. Even offering an umbrella to a woman or a man standing in the rain is an act of kindness and an act of selflessness. Your life’s purpose is beyond you and yes this article is small and it doesn’t probably cover everything but we hope you understand the gist of it. Go on now and discover yourself and then find your purpose.
References
https://destinysodyssey.com/personal-development/self-discovery/
https://www.jordantarver.com/self-discovery
