Hey guys! Another weekend! How was your week? So today I decided not to go into any too heavy, just a checkpoint which we all need from time to time. Figuring out yourself is an intensive journey that everyone needs to embark on, but at the same time, it needs to be a continuous journey. And because we can’t all go through the entire process time and time again, that’s the main reason we need a self-check. It’s a mini self-assessment tool – portable even.
To be more succinct, we live our everyday lives going through a myriad of feelings and emotions, some we can identify and most of the time, we find ourselves hardly paying attention to any of them. This is entirely normal and it’s our default mode really, when things happen, we chuck it up to another good/bad experience or we simply say “oh well!” and move on with life. But the truth is, whether you acknowledge your feelings or not, they play a huge role on your person on a very fundamental level.
Take rain for example, each time it rains, it seems like a simple, singular event. Sometimes it’s a good rain where you sleep in or maybe even choose to dance in the rain and other times it’s a bad storm where you’re scared all through that your roof should not cave in. Now these are two different scenarios, but if you’re from a country where the entire floors aren’t paved or bricked, you can see the effect of both rains overtime in form of erosion on the soil. It doesn’t matter if it’s a heavy rain or not, but from a trickle to a roar, the earth feels the effect either way.
It’s the same thing with your emotions and experiences, everything that happens in your life affects your person no matter how big or small. The only way to control what kind of changes occur to your persona is to continuously examine the effects of these life changing experiences in a very frank manner. Not as a victim but from an objective point of view of – “this and that happened, how has it affected me?” Which brings to mind that popular saying about how every experience in life teaches you a lesson, you only have to pay attention for you discover what that is.
If you are convinced self-awareness is a continuous process at this point, then you should understand that just as any process in science needs some sort of feedback into the system in order to compare previous results and start over again, a self-check is that feedback you need to continue on that journey of self-awareness. In simpler terms, it means that you examining what your previous experiences has changed or taught you is a good place to start learning about yourself. That’s the gist of everything I’ve said so far.
HOW YOU DO A SELF CHECK.
I don’t have a 3 step process as usual, this is honestly up to you and how you want to do this. But it should happen often- daily or weekly, At least once a week. Take out sometime to reflect on your activities during that day or week and try and examine what kind of impact that has had on you so far. A couple of questions you could ask yourself would be:
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How was my day/week?
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How do I feel after my day/week?
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What happened to me during the day/week?
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Does any of the day/week event affect me in anyway? Possible areas to focus on here might include:
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What was my intention behind some of the actions I took this week?
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Has any of these events affected my thought process / has it changed the way I see things?
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Are my values still the same after this day/week?
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Has any of my interests changed so far?
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Has my strength/weakness in a certain area changed?
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Did any of it affect my relationship with other people this week?
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If something very important happened, it could help to talk to other people on how they viewed your reaction to such events.
It’s pretty basic really, but just as important as any step process I might have given you. Be consistent with your self-check and see how much your self-awareness grows. Bottom line is, when you understand yourself and how your experiences affect you, there is more chances of you being able to control how you react to such instances again in future. You know what to avoid and what to embrace and you really do make better choices.
If you have read up to this point and you have questions, leave a comment or send me an email at info@beyoubymujidah.com. Don’t forget to share.