Become Who You Are...But Who Are You?

Why ask questions when you could just be provided with answers. The answer is that we are all different people with different problems even if fundamentally we are all similar. The purpose of this blog is for you to change your life. It is interactive, so therefore you have to put in some work. There is no other way around it. The idea is to enact a holistic change rather than a superficial one. The questions that are asked are related to fundamental self-analysis. You must know thyself to better thyself, and you cannot see your strengths and flaws effectively if you do not look in the mirror.

How can you change, if you don’t know who you are? How can you go somewhere, if you don’t know where you are? How can you pick a goal if you don’t know why you want to achieve it? The questions in this chapter relate to who you are and why you are here. Let’s get started.

Who Are You? The tendency in answering this question is to focus on your more obvious attributes in life. An example of a typical definition of self is something you would probably say in a job interview when someone asks you to tell them about yourself. “I grew up in such-and-such town. I was a great student and hard worker. I went to such-and-such college. Now I work as a manager in something. I am a father and a husband. I like to read and write, and I am into fitness.” When you check off the boxes in a job application, you define yourself by race and gender. You may have a certain style of dress and feel that it defines you. You may call yourself an outgoing individual or maybe a homebody. You may consider yourself a lover, or a fighter, a mentalist, or an actor. You may feel that your age defines you and limits you. “I’m too old so no one will want to hire me.” “I’m young, so of course I make mistakes.” You get the picture.

All those previous definitions relate to your persona, which is the archetype that you have created for yourself. The persona is tied to your ego and your ego is only part of who you really are. The other deeper part of you is your spirit nature. Your soul is derived from your spirit, and this is what you must seek to understand if you are to know who you are. You see, your soul cannot experience life without a body, however in order to live in the body, the soul has to make some compromises. The first is that it must learn how to become an individual in the body. In order to do that, it must learn to take on certain traits that are aligned with it. Although these traits do not define who you are at a soul level, they do build up your exterior definitions (what people see). Your body is the car that you drive. Your soul is the driver. They are two separate things, but equally important. Let me explain.

Your body is what everyone else sees on a daily basis. But no one can see your soul, at least not directly. You can certainly feel it if you are aligned with it. It’s the energy that flows through you. You can connect with people by having a soul connection, which is that feeling when you’ve touched something deeper in that other individual. It is important to note that the soul can do nothing without a body. The body is lifeless without a soul. The soul is the battery that powers the body.

The purpose of this question of “Who Are You?” is for you to define who you are at all levels, rather than just the persona level. In order to understand who, you are, you must first understand your soul and spirit nature. There are at least six main attributes of your soul, and these attributes consist of:

• Spirituality

• Unity

• Love

• Intuition

• Will

• Integrity

Let’s take at these aspects a little more closely.

Spirituality: What is your relationship with God? It is important to be mindful of this component of yourself. By addressing this question, you will develop a keener intuitive understanding of your spirit nature, and this will cross over into your physical life. Without understanding and fulfillment in this area, you are apt to have a feeling of emptiness and a loss of life-force to the point where life loses meaning. By connecting to this God presence often, you will exude more energy on a daily basis. People will see this and gravitate towards you, due to your expanded aura. You will feel energized beyond what carbs, sugar, and caffeine could ever provide you. In addition, you will start to seek connection to others in astounding ways. Expanding your network with genuine intentions rather than opportuning will get you further in life because it builds trust and openness in others. This unity factor is what I will discuss next.

Unity: As you start to become more aware of your spirit nature, you begin to realize that we are all connected. This is because spirit is infused in everything you see around you as well as everything you do not see. If God is omnipresent, then spirit is God or at least an emanation of it. And God is one. This dichotomy might produce a feeling of cognitive dissonance within you. How could we be part of a unified one-ness (or unity), and still be individuals? When you are looking to make a connection with someone, you don’t just love the physical part of them, but rather you them from within. This attraction and this need that we possess to connect with others in life allows us to fulfill our soul nature of unification. This connection might not always be with people, it could be with animals (pets), nature, or the cosmos. To deny your need for unity is to deny that you have a soul.

Love: Love is the glue that binds us all together. Love is powerful. If we all tapped into this “love” aspect of ourselves, there would be peace rather than war. We would understand that at a base level, we are all the same and we all come from the same source. We are all a manifestation of God, and God is love. True love would make a father sacrifice his own heart if his son needed it in order to live. True love would have a mother birth a child even if she knew she wouldn’t survive the process. True love is complete absence of Ego. It is selflessness in every sense of the word. It is the driving force of unity of everything. With love, anything is possible. And if you can tap into this force as you find your purpose in life, you will be pulled more strongly than any self-motivation could ever drive you.

Intuition: Your intuition may be that sick feeling in your gut when you know something is about to go wrong. Intuition is when you can sync up five seemingly unrelated events and map it together in your mind to identify the connection before the future event occurs. Your intuition relates to your soul’s mind, not just the mind you associate with your brain, if that makes sense. In order to listen to your intuition, it helps to clear your mind of all the chatter that you typically would deal with on a daily basis. You can do this through daily meditation. Once you are more in tuned to your spiritual mind or intuition, you will be able to foresee future realities. This is key. With the ability to see ahead, you can make better decisions each day. You can choose the future that you want, and you will be able to map the course to get there.

Will: This is one of the most important aspects of your soul that you should focus on if you want to understand who you are and ultimately pull yourself out of your rut. Your "will" represents your internal strength of being able to apply yourself in anything that you intend on doing in life. Will is a component of the spirit that without the body, has no way of carrying itself out. You have to know whether you are weak-willed or strong-willed and you have to be honest with yourself. The only way to do this is to put yourself through some tests. You obviously want to possess a strong will in order to go after what you want in life. Therefore, training is extremely important. I find that performing strenuous physical activity tends to be a great way of increasing the strength of your will. When you have a goal, you must meta-program your will to be directly tied into that goal. The goal has to be like a spiritual experience. It has to be of extreme importance in order for your underlying will to be enlivened. We will go deeper into the power of will and self-motivation in later sections.

Integrity: Integrity represents your conscience. It is the ethics that is innate with you. Integrity is not to be confused with society’s laws and morals. Those aspects are external, rather than internal. For example, my integrity tells me that if I pass by a homeless person on the street who looks genuinely depressed and hungry, I have to do something for that person in order to brighten their day. There is no societal law telling me to do that. It just feels like the right thing to do. On the other hand, there are laws in some places where if you feed the homeless en-masse, you could be fined. These man-made laws go against the conscience of individuals in favor of the those with purely capitalist interests who look at homelessness as a nuisance rather than something they can change through philanthropic efforts. Your integrity relates to how honest you are, both to others and to yourself. Integrity relates to how genuine you are in your communications. Are you an opportunist or do you really care? And if you are an opportunist, are you honest about your intentions.

Knowing your soul is paramount to knowing yourself. It is not an expectation that you be a saintly individual with respect to these aspects of the soul. However, it is an expectation that you be honest with yourself and tap into these deeper components of who you are.

If you can understand your soul, you will have a greater ability to change or mold your archetype. You could even create multiple archetypes to seamlessly weave in and out of societal situations. Your persona can be limiting, so if you focus on growth at a soul level, you won’t be held down by your ego’s inclination to attach itself to old beliefs and actions. This will allow you to grow holistically. Your soul is your foundation, and everything builds from this base.

Now, your material self (mind and body) consists of at least 9 main components, where if you are honest with yourself and gain a thorough understanding of these characteristics within you, you will be able to start to gain momentum towards taking your life to the next level. These components consist of the following:

• Personality

• Preferences and Prejudices

• Values, standards, beliefs

• Station

• Strengths and Weaknesses

• Physical Make-up and Appearance

• Dreams and Aspirations

• Charisma and star power

• Fears and Insecurities

The following is a broad overview of these characteristics and why they are important to you in understanding who you are.

Personality: To understand your personality is to understand how you interact with others and your environment. It also will help you understand how you process emotion, how you think, how you live, and how you make decisions. One of the most useful examinations that will allow you to assess your personality is the Meyers Briggs personality test. This model was created by the famous psychologist, Carl Jung. The MBTI (Meyers Briggs Type Indicator) test allows you to assess whether you are introverted or extroverted, intuitive or sensing, feeling or thinking, and perceiving or judging. I suggest you google Meyers Briggs and take a free assessment online now before reading any further.

The value of understanding your personality cannot be overstated. Once you understand your personality, you will also be able to see which personality types (there are 16 in total) you mesh best with, and which types you are most likely to have conflict. In addition, you will be able to see which career paths best match your temperament.

The following is an example of how the MBTI test was helpful to me. Nearly a decade ago, when I worked as an auditor at a Big 4 accounting firm, I couldn’t understand why the work was not interesting to me. I thought there was something wrong with me or that I was just lazy. It wasn’t until after I took the MBTI test that I realized that auditing was not a good match for my temperament. My personality type is INTJ (Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging). The best personality type for the audit field is ISTJ (Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging). Essentially, I was bored with the rigid audit rules, and documentation templates which essentially did not allow for creativity or dynamic thinking. A more fitting field for my temperament was that of a Financial Analyst. An Analyst can use his intuitional faculties to create future scenarios based upon multiple inter-related factors to allow for business strategy to take place. Needless to say, once I switch careers to become an analyst, my motivation towards work skyrocketed, and I felt like I had a much better career match.

It is important for your goals to be closely aligned with your temperament in order to give yourself the best opportunity for success. Therefore, take the test and afterwards assess your aspirations. You may need to make some adjustments.

Preferences & Prejudices: This is just a fancy way of saying likes and dislikes. We may all like to think that we show no favoritism towards but that’s a lie. With regard to the opposite sex, you may seek certain attributes. You may like chocolate cake and hate Brussel sprouts. You may be a morning person or a night owl. You get the picture. Stop what you are doing right now and write down all the preferences and prejudices that you can possibly think of with relation to yourself.

The point here is that you need to respect your likes and dislikes and work them into your overall plans. By ignoring them, you will inadvertently sabotage your progress towards achieving your goals.

Values, Standards, & Beliefs: When you are stuck in a rut, it could be that your standards for yourself are too low or that your beliefs are not aligned with the standards you have set for yourself. Take a moment now and write down your standards that you currently possess (assuming you have some) and standards that you want to strive towards. After you have created this list, you should then write down your beliefs which align with these standards. If you can’t get the standards and beliefs to match up, then you likely need to change your belief system. A lot of times, we are slaves to our own dogmas and traditions. Dogmas are rigid beliefs that people typically do not change even if logic tells them to do so. It takes quite a bit of de-programming in order to change these hard-lined beliefs.

Once you have your full list of standards and beliefs, you should put this list on a vision board so that you can remind yourself of them daily. Also, you need to put these standards and beliefs into action by instilling daily ritual that is aligned with them. For example, my standard is that I will meditate daily. My belief is that daily meditation is vital to my happiness and well-being. My ritual is that each morning when I wake up, I make it a point to meditate for at least 5-10 minutes.

In addition to standards and beliefs, you also have your value system. Assess what you value in life the most, as this will help you put your actions or potential actions into perspective. It will help you prioritize based on what is truly important to you.

Station: Your station is your career, your status, and your roles that you play in life. When someone ask you who you are, describing your station is the easiest and most shallow response. “I am an accounting manager in a mid-sized public company. I live in a 3-story house with my wife and 2 children.” It is important to know your station, but not be defined or limited by it. You may be an accounting manager now, but if you aspire to be a CFO, you have to think bigger than your current role.

Strengths and Weaknesses: A keen understanding of your strengths and weaknesses will allow you to better gauge what your leverage points are and what areas you need to improve upon. If you want to be successful, it’s probably a good idea to leverage as many strengths as possible that you already possess in order to get there.

Using myself as an example, I had a goal of attaining mastery in a given field of my choosing. I chose finance as the field since I already had a strong base knowledge. This was due to the fact that I had a bachelor’s degree in accounting as well as 5 years of accounting/finance work experience. I could have picked a totally unrelated field and started from scratch, however if I did this, I would have had to sacrifice a lot of time in order to start over. I wanted to reach a salary of $100K before I turned 35 years old, and by leveraging my knowledge and experiential strengths, I was able to successfully do that. I’m not saying that success can’t happen if you start from scratch in a new field, however it may just take longer.

Therefore, write down all your strengths and weaknesses. Afterwards, assess how these relate to your goals and aspirations. If your goals do not utilize your strengths, you may be fighting an uphill battle. You are more likely to be successful by leveraging your strengths, rather than by bringing up all your weaknesses. You should be cognizant of your weaknesses and bring the relevant ones up only to the point that they are not limiting factors. You should also think of how you can leverage other peers or aides to augment your weaknesses.

Physical Make-up and Appearance: They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; however, most people don’t read. What I mean by this is that your physical appearance is important, particularly when making first impressions. Your physical appearance is the first thing observed when people meet you, so it is important that you present the archetype or persona that best suits the situation while remaining as genuine as possible so as not to come off as being an inauthentic person. What you look like says a lot about you, particularly when it comes to your standards. If you have high standards for yourself regarding physical appearance and vitality, you will likely dress well, eat well, and work out often. These physical factors are important to be mindful of when you seek success.

Dreams and Aspirations: Your dreams and aspirations are (if you have them), are your carrots in life that give you a sense of purpose. You become your dreams and your goals as you work for them, so in a sense they are part of the definition of you.

Charisma: Your charisma is essentially your spirit energy that emanates from your body. People feel your aura and if you have a large one, you can light up a room as soon as you step into it. If you are confident in yourself, you will come off as more charismatic. Likewise, if your energy is low and you are constantly unsure of yourself, your energy will shrink, and people will tend to not even notice that you exist. You should assess how much charisma you believe you have. If you work on developing your spirit energy and self-confidence, your charisma will improve in-kind, and you will have more influence over people and events than you had before.

Fears and Insecurities: These are the components of your psyche that will hold you back the most from achieving your goals. Fear is a mind-killer. It will have you second-guessing every move you make if you let it. Typically, cynics are very fearful while optimists feel fear but do not let it control them. Fear will have you constantly going over the scenarios of what you should do to get started on your goal, but never actually taking the first step. Your fears and insecurities were likely imprinted on you since childhood. There are ways to get these qualities under control, but it takes work.

With this explanation, you now have a better understanding of your unique dual nature. You can use this knowledge to fix components of your spirit and persona that you feel need the most work. This gives you power as you no longer need to struggle to find out where to begin in your journey of self-discovery and self-improvement. For example, if your charisma is lacking, you may need to enhance your Love and Will faculties of the spirit to become who you want to be. With self-improvement, you never really “get there” but rather you are always in a state of “becoming”. This exercise of identifying who you are is important because you cannot map the path to become who you want to be if you do not know who you currently are.