Discovering Yourself & Your Ideal Future
If I were to ask you ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up?’ what would you say?
You might shrug and say that you are grown up already, or that you haven’t been asked that since you were a child. But the truth is that neither of these statements answers the question. They’re excuses! As long as we are living, we are always ‘growing up’ as a person.
Perhaps we are less encouraged to think about who we want to be, but there is always room for any person to be better, to dream bigger and achieve more. That’s what becoming your ideal self is all about. Aiming to be the best that you can be.
Discovering Yourself
Whether you’re someone just starting out in the world or aiming to improve your current position in it, having knowledge about whom you would most like to be is a very important step in discovering yourself and developing as a person. It gives us direction. Too many people simply accept that we are who we are forever. That we must live where we do because we were born there, that our weaknesses are our nature.
What they don’t see is how important it is to consider ourselves as a work in progress! A shade of the potential you could be! Whether you’re eight or eighty-eight, for your life to develop, so must you. No-one reached their goals without a stretch. So, to get to where you want to be, keep stretching because really, there is no limit as to what you can do.
Maslow
“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” — Abraham Maslow
Maslow‘s individual differences theory is taught in most good self-development classes and courses. The theory describes the steps in which we take through-out our lifetime to become fully fulfilled as a person.
How to Discover Your Ideal Self
The person we’d like to be can be reflected in all areas of our personality; particularly what we dream about, so it’s important that you let yourself dream and let your mind tell you what you want and who you want to be. One of the best ways to discover your ideal self is by looking at your role models.
Role models are the people that inspire and motivate you to achieve your goals. The people who you aspire to be like. It could be that they became well known in a field that’s close to your own heart, or maybe even just that they’re the kind of person you’d feel happy to be described as yourself. Your role model can be anyone from Steve Jobs to your Mum. They don’t have to be someone who’s changed the world, just your world!
By discovering and learning more about our role models, we can often learn about the ways in which we can achieve our own life goals too. So it’s important that we don’t neglect the people we’d like to be like and draw inspiration from the paths and behaviours they took to get where we want to be!
To help me in discovering my ideal self sometimes, I keep a list of the people who have inspired me to write and a collection of quotes for motivation. As an aspiring author, most of mine are from writer’s I admire but there were a few quotes in there from friends and family too. Doing this will help you to understand exactly which path you are going on.
And by looking at why these people feature on your list is a great insight into what you want from the future. It’s also something great to look at in times when you feel un-motivated or un-inspired by the day. I always look at my list before I start working on something; it’s almost like a fuel for the soul.
How To Feature on Somebody Else’s List Someday…
According to Maslow, only 10% of us reach our full potential in life, or become fully satisfied with who we are.
So how do we make that 10%?
Simple. By taking steps. There’s no point in knowing what success means to you if you’re not going to take steps to get there, by not keeping the promises you made yourself. You are a human being with the potential to be anyone and achieve anything as a person. You may want to develop a little; you may want to develop a lot.
Either way, after assessing where you want to go, what you want to achieve and how you want to be described when you are gone; do it! But remember you are not your job, not your qualifications, not your financial balance! Success means different things to different people.
To you it could mean making your family proud, to another it could mean changing the world. As long as you’re taking steps to fulfil your potential, to reach your ideal-self and the tip of Maslows triangle then you are heading in the right direction.
Next Section: Planning & Improving
Wrote by Aimee Hall