CHAPTER 1: WHO WAS I?
There are numerous ways to identify who we are. But who we are is not about the circumstances of your life or what you do for a living or the roles we play or what are beliefs or affiliations are. Those are the false identities we tend to cling to. You open yourself to more possibility - and more of who you truly are! One thing about my identity is my name. We are all given a name at birth or before or maybe even later on.
CHAPTER 2: WHO AM I NOW?
The best way to know where am I now is by looking into my strengths and weaknesses. I have analyzed, evaluated, and looked deep inside myself to determine the weaknesses and strengths of my true character. Positive attitude and patience are the two important strengths that I have built in me. These two characteristics have contributed to my career, my learning and almost everything in my personal life. On the other hand, the two aspects of myself that I need to improve are my organization skills and my public speaking skills.
Having positive attitude is vital. This leads to a motivated learning team, a comfortable working environment, and a happy personal life. It is hard to find a scenario in which a person with positive attitude and full of compliments to be scolded. No negative or bad attitudes make my personal life great. I socialized with my family with happy and respectful thoughts which motivate them to share their happiness with me and others. My attitude keeps people around me in a good mood. This personal characteristic of mine allows me to manage the tense situations during my study sessions, especially when I have to answer assignment questions and submit them before the due date. Being positively motivated, I encourage others to be compliant and respectful. Positive attitude will be beneficial in my learning team because it will promote teamwork and friendship. I think a happy and friendly team will be more productive than a team that always argues and disagrees.
My second strength is patience. We will feel comfortable when we speak to someone who is patient. People with patience do not interrupt others, instead they listen and try to be helpful. In my personal life, I have an autistic nephew who needs people with a lot of patience. Being bossy, angry, and snappy will only make me hard to handle him. I have to talk slowly and repeat my words several times so that he will understand me. In my study environment, it is also imperative that I have patience. I have to deal with tough and difficult assignment questions. Each question has its own degree of difficulties. Thus, I need to conquer each of the questions with my best answer and support it with reasonable evidence. I have to patiently search for the articles on the respective topics and provide my best answer to ensure that I get good results in my study. In addition, patience is a must when participating in a team environment. When many people get together in a team, things often progress very fast. However, sometimes things get sloppy or get misunderstood. With patience, I can maintain consistency and accurateness within an organization.
Having described my strengths, I must now turn to reveal my weaknesses. I must say that I am not a superhuman or a perfect person. My weaknesses often frustrate and challenge me, but my positive attitude forces me to correct my weaknesses and win over them. My first weakness, I must admit, is public speaking. I get very nervous. The sign is my hands get clammy and begins to sweat. I mumble my words when I start to speak in front of large group of people. This problem neither gives a huge impact in my personal life nor affects my on-line learning team, but it does affect my daily duties at college. I speak with others in college, especially with my friends, regarding general knowledge and current issues. I am told that my nervousness does not show, but before and during every speech I feel my hands shake and my feet get clammy. Over the years, I have fought this battle of public speaking by doing many things.
My second blind spot that I must admit is my lack of organization skill. I organize my assignment papers by tossing them on my study desk. Thus, I will avoid looking at them. It is hard for me to find my belongings especially in my study room because of my unorganized attitudes. When the assignment season arrives, it will be a disaster for me. I often lose my important notes and my framework papers. These matters have made me spend twice the actual time needed to accomplish my task. I lose valuable times for this reason, whereas I could have used those precious times together with my family. Besides that, this will seriously affect my learning team. Before it gets much more severe, I have to improve my deportment and be a better organized person. I will not frighten up myself when I see papers containing college assignments. What I need to help me overcome my problem are a desk together with filing cabinets and a day planner calendar. The fears of obtaining a bad result in my diploma level made me realize that organization skill is crucial to succeed in life, especially in my study.
I believe that, the time I set my goal there will be the obstacles to stop me achieving it. The most common barrier to reaching my potential is my mind-set, that is, what and how I think about myself and what I wish to achieve. I limit myself by the negative thoughts that I think and I may say. If I think and believe that I cannot accomplish something, then that will come true and I will fail. However, when I think that I can accomplish a task, or overcome a situation and I put in the effort, my future will turn bright. I will only succeed when I start to take control and action to change my destiny towards the goal rather than leave it to fate. Some people said that they have done some work and failed in their first trial. Thus they have not continued working on it anymore. This is just an irrelevant excuse. The solution for this is to reset our mind-set to believe in ourselves and achieve our goal in any way possible.
Having failed in the past, does not mean that I will fail again and again for the rest of my life. I should think of things that happened in past in terms of what I can learn from them; seeing all the pass experience as feedback rather than as failure. The failure in my past will make me more matured. The past will be beneficial as I can learn from my mistakes. The only thing I can do about my past is to learn from it because the past is over and I cannot change them. Thinking negatively can really stop me from reaching my potential. Negative influences are always around us. Mass media such as radio and idiot box may pass some inappropriate message that can predispose our mind-set. Sometimes I do get negative feedback from family members and friends who are trapped in a negative mind-set. They believe that they are helping me by "being realistic" but it is not helping at all. The best solution is that I should make myself surrounded by positive minded people, people who work hard to achieve their goals. Having positive support is vital. On the other hand, another obstacle that stops me from reaching my potential from being successful is inadequate of plan. Too many people including myself walk through their life simply by taking what is handed to them. The decision made by others will be the decision for themselves. I seldom make my duty plan for the weeks or months ahead. It is so essential that I take some time to start setting up my goals. During the process I can find out how to accomplish those aims, and make suitable timeline for me to have it done. This vital process is often neglected. To set goals starts with listing out what am I going to accomplish. They are those people who set their goal just to "float" along without any attention to better their situation. There is also people who have goals but they are unfamiliar with the correct way and proper plan to make their goal come true. I think I can be categorized under this type of person.
CHAPTER 3: WHO WOULD LIKE TO BE?
Where am I going? This is the question that I ask myself almost daily. I’m not sure whether I will ever figure this out, or if I’ll just make it by. I hope to eventually make up my mind, but I don’t know I truly don’t know the answer to the questions above, but I do know that I will make it by on my abilities. I might not be the most apparent choice for some things, and I may rise above everyone else in other cases. But, overall, I will have to compete with everyone else in the world to make it by. People who are raised to expect everything will be provided for them are going to be sadly disappointed. The world doesn’t work that way. Those who work for what they have will have a much fuller and meaningful life than those who sit back and have a good time. I plan to make the most of my life, but I don’t know how to start, so how do I start. Responsibility is a key factor in life. How I handle responsibility is not how I want to.
To address the first question, I don’t know where I’m going in life, but I know that the will be ups and downs. I also know that I am responsible for keeping myself in line. I also need to learn that I’m not responsible for the actions of others. They can make their own decisions. I am going to make the most of my life and not worry about others. My life will be full and eventful. Hopefully this will be true, and not just an idea. Every college student, and even individuals currently in their career paths struggle with the decision of what to do in life. There are some people that, for as long as they remember, they’ve wanted to be a teacher or a doctor or work on Wall Street. I, however, am not one of those people. I often find myself wondering where I actually want to be in five, ten or even twenty years down the road. Every time I’m sure I’ve figured it out, something comes along and makes me question my purpose all over again.
Here are the things I know for sure. I want to do work I am passionate about, I want to wake up every day and not grudgingly sigh about having to go to my job. I want to do something that I will excel at because it’s something I love and something that utilizes my strengths. And of course, my main goal is to be happy, to be satisfied with my life choices. These all sound delightful, but how am I going to ensure I achieve these goals? I guess there is no guarantee that the path I choose will supply me with definite happiness. Maybe the time will come where I’ll come to the conclusion that there is one thing I absolutely 100 percent want to pursue, who knows. Lots of things play into these decisions, whether it be a small comment made by a friend that makes me stop and think about myself and the effect I have on others or my reflective nature which causes me to analyze every detail of my life, and in turn, overthink every decision I’ve ever made, each day is filled with more encounters that make me question where I am going in life.
I often times envy those people that seem to have it all figured out, but at the same time exploring my options and going through the journey of not knowing what I want but knowing that I will one day find what I want is a blessing in disguise. I have time to figure it out and the time to switch lanes in life never ends. If, at fifty years old, I choose to pursue another career and go down another path, that’s okay. My fate is not sealed after receiving my degrees in my twenties, the options are always endless and they are always available.
CHAPTER 4: HOW COULD I BECOME WHAT I WANT TO BE?
Every day we make choices — some big, some small. Those choices add up to who we are today, and who we will likely be tomorrow. Whether it’s what you’re having for lunch or what you say to a frustrating colleague, you have (literally) hundreds of chances every day to define who you are. Without that conscious direction, your identity is left to forces, patterns and stimuli beyond your control. The job you stumbled into, the personal history of loss or disappointment, even the apartment or the neighborhood or the movies you watch — these will all, by default, determine who you are, if you don’t consciously decide to choose them for yourself. The phenomenon of waking up one day to discover that you’re living a life you don’t truly love is a real one. It happens when you don’t actively decide who you want to be. Without a captain at the wheel, a ship will just capitulate to the sea. So will your life. If you want to become a better person, a more fulfilled person, you need to take action.
The “trick,” if we can call it that, is to be aware of every choice you make, and use it to build yourself into the man you want to become. Because some of our decisions can move us toward who we want to be, while other decisions can move us away from that person. The good news is, when you view every decision as a building block, you know the next decision about who you want to be is just around the corner. We are creating ourselves at every step. It can be intimidating to realize that every decision contributes to the man you want to be. If you want to become a better person, though, you must constantly bear this in mind. I understand being daunted at first. But there’s something very powerful about radically taking responsibility for your life. When you accept that only you can make decisions to become a better person and build yourself into the kind of man you want to be, you give yourself an enormous amount of power.
Compare this mindset with the default one, in which you view yourself as largely created by external forces. That worldview can be easier — at least it can feel easier — but it’s also far less secure, fun and empowering. Our real power as individuals comes in how we choose to react to those forces. If you lose a job you love, for example, you have a few options. You can choose to stew about it for a week — that can feel very satisfying, natural and easy. Or you can acknowledge the loss and choose to throw your negative energy into finding an even better job. Or you can sit with the feeling as you go on a five-mile run, contemplating your next move. Either way, your choice is determining the person you are now.
And we’re not just talking about chasing big dreams. This isn’t about turning around from a loss and then, say, deciding to run for Congress. This is about recognizing that however you respond to your life situation — big or small — you are determining the quality of your life tomorrow. Wallow in self-pity, or go for that run. Stew in the disappointment, or take a risk by applying for the job you’ve wanted all along. The possibilities are only limited by our own imagination. “Reasonable” is a lot more ambitious than you think. Becoming the person, you want to be begins with deciding who that is. You can start right now. Here’s how. At the end of this exercise, you’ll have a list of goals you’d like to achieve, along with a more profound understanding of why these goals actually speak to you.
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
Having failed in the past, does not mean that I will fail again and again for the rest of my life. I should think of things that happened in past in terms of what I can learn from them; seeing all the pass experience as feedback rather than as failure. The failure in my past will make me more matured. The past will be beneficial as I can learn from my mistakes. The only thing I can do about my past is to learn from it because the past is over and I cannot change them.
Finally, remember that this journey is ongoing. It never truly ends. If how you spend today determines your tomorrow, then tomorrow determines who you’ll be the following day — and that person might experience real personal growth and change, often in profound and dramatic ways. That’s terrific, and it only reinforces the ideas in this article. So don’t avoid or lose sight of your own evolution. The point of analyzing your role models, setting goals and developing an action plan isn’t to fight your way to completion. There’s no “end game” in your personal development. The idea that you grow up to a point and then stop is a myth. What we’re talking about here is an open-loop, always-evolving journey toward becoming a happy, healthy, effective person.
