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Finding Your Inner Self

Have you ever thought about who you are? What you stand for?

I’m not talking about your roles or your social identities. You can be a friend,
brother/sister, employee, boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife, father/mother, and
son/daughter all at the same time, but these are just an aspect of you. They don’t
represent who you fundamentally are on the inside. Your inner self is who you really are
on the inside.

To know your inner self is to know your purpose, your values, your vision, your goals,
your motivations, and your beliefs. Not what you have been told by others, but what
you have discovered for yourself. Knowing your inner self requires a high level of
introspection and self-awareness. If you have clarity of at least half of what is listed
above, you probably have quite a high level of self-awareness. At the same time, the
process of self-discovery never ends — it’s a life-long journey.

You Are More than Your Identities

Trying to uncover your inner self can be a tricky process. For one, you hold multiple
identities in your life, each with their own set of socially defined values and
expectations. They may not fully conform with who you are on the inside.

For example, let’s say you are an employee of an automobile company. As an


employee, your mission should be congruent with whatever your company’s mission is,
say to improve the quality of people’s lives through automobile manufacturing. Your
goals should also be in line with the company’s, say to increase the company’s sales by
20% in one year and expand its regional presence.

However, as a person you have other dreams and goals which differ from your
company’s. Perhaps you really love volleyball. Your ideal vision is to be an
internationally acclaimed volleyball player and to become a highly sought-after volleyball
coach, training national teams. That’s very different from what you’re expected as an
automobile employee. This applies to your other identities too. For every identity, you
are expected to have a set of purpose/values/vision/goals/beliefs which may not be
exactly the same as your inner self’s.

Because everyone is unique, your inner self can’t be boxed in by any single identity or
label. I’m a coach to my coachees, a daughter to my parents, a sister to my brother, a
friend to my friends, a blogger to my readers, and a trainer to my workshop attendees,
but I’m more than just that. These are just roles and titles. None of the roles by
themselves accurately pin-point who I am. The inner me is someone who cannot be
defined or labeled by any one label.

A good analogy to use would be the sunflower. Your inner self is like the disk of the
sunflower (the center part where petals are attached to). Your identities are like the
petals around your inner self. While the petals are extensions of the head, they are not
the head. Similarly, your identities are extensions of yourself, but they do not represent
who you are wholly.

Importance of Finding Your Inner Self

If you have never given much thought to who you are on the inside, it is likely that you
have become defined by your identities. It is common for people to see themselves as a
certain role, such as a friend, partner, employee, or son/daughter. Some spend their
whole lives building themselves around such identities. Take those identities away, and
they get lost, because they have little awareness of who they are on the inside. These
people are not able to articulate his/her own vision, goals, and beliefs beyond what’s
imposed by their identities.

For example, someone who is entrenched in his identity as a son sees his entire
existence as a son. He will act in accordance with what’s best for his parents. He will
spend a lot of time with his parents, do things for them, and forsake other things in his
life if it’s needed to make his parents happy. When it comes to making important
decisions, such as pertaining to his career or life partner, he makes sure that his
parents approve before he takes any action. His parents are the central focus of his life.

However, his real self is more than just being a son to his parents. If or rather when his
parents exit from his life, he will be in a state of total loss. His life will start spiraling out
of control since the anchor he has been building his life on is gone. It’s like when the
disk of the sunflower disappears, all the petals will scatter away since there is nothing to
hold them together. When you become overly attached to any one of your identities, you
run into the risk of an identity crisis when that particular role is removed.

Here I’m not saying that being a good son is bad or being a good parent is bad. That’s
not true at all. What I’m saying is that we need to know who we are on the inside, while
being committed to our roles and understanding that these are extensions of who we
are.

That’s why it’s important to find your inner self. You are the owner of your life. If you are
not connected with who you really are, you are probably just living your life for others.
Pursuing others’ goals and living up to others’ expectations, rather than what you really
want. To know your inner self is the first step of living a conscious life of your creation.

Knowing Your Inner Self Comes From Self-Awareness

As mentioned at the beginning, knowing your inner self comes from being self-aware.
Even if you do not have full clarity of your inner self, it is likely that certain aspects of
your inner self are already exhibited on a day-to-day basis through how you act. For
example, if you find yourself often extolling the importance of filial piety, responsibility is
likely one of your values. If you feel a compelling need to always be there for your
friends, reliability is probably an important value to you.
It is perfectly okay if you don’t know your inner self. Discovering and unraveling it is a
life-long process. If I use myself as an example, the 10-year-old Celes definitely wasn’t
as self-aware as the 25-year-old Celes or 35-year-old Celes. When I was in primary and
secondary school, I didn’t really know who I was or what I stood for. I don’t think
anybody at that age does actually. Everyone was just focused on doing what they were
told. There wasn’t much introspection or self-awareness going on. We were never really
made to think about who we were, what we thought, or who we wanted to be. While we
had our own personalities, they were hazy at best.

Come think of it, I think the reason why the self-awareness was so low amongst all the
kids is because conformance is highly valued in the schools (or should I say, Asian
societies). Back then, to have an opinion was seen as being defiant. Our role as a
student was to process and execute instructions, not to question. If you had thoughts
different from what was told, you would be frowned upon or shut down. That’s why we
never so much as to think about what we wanted. We were more like robots doing what
was told, or sleepwalkers as I refer to on this blog.

When I went into Junior College and subsequently University, I became more self-
aware. A lot of it came about from having increased liberty, for example getting to
choose my own modules and class curriculum. Having more onus in decision making
triggered me to do more thinking — about what I wanted to do and what I wanted for my
future. Of course, I was doing many activities on the side which helped me grow in other
ways — for example, one of my hobbies then was web design so I was managing
a large network of sites. I was also taking part in various extra-curricular activities and
giving private tuition to several students.

Subsequently as I worked in my previous company and subsequently quit to embrace


my passion, I grew to learn about myself more. Every day is a learning journey in
discovering who I am and what I stand for. The more I uncover about myself, the more I
am able to live in a conscious manner.

What’s Beneath Your Identities?

Let’s try an exercise to discover your inner self. Start off by mentally removing all the
different identities that you have been layered with throughout your life. This means stop
thinking about yourself as a brother, a colleague, a friend, a partner, or whatever identity
you commonly associate yourself with. Think about you as just yourself.

With a pen and paper, start writing whatever comes to mind as you read the questions
below.

 What is your life purpose? What purpose do you see yourself standing for? (If
you don’t know your purpose, check out my 7-part series on Discovering Your
Real Purpose)
 What are your visions for yourself, independent of anyone else? What goals and
dreams do you have for yourself for the next 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, or even 10
years?
 What are YOUR motivations in life? What gets you going, day after day? What
will you fight for? What do you feel passionately about?
 What are your values? What qualities are important to you?
 What are your beliefs about the world?

If this is the first time you are doing such an exercise, you will probably get into a bit of a
jam. Some of your answers may come from one of your social identities. If you are very
family-centric, you may find your answers wholly centered around caring for your family.
It’s totally fine to have such an answer, but at the same time it should not be your only
answer, because you are more than your family. Start thinking beyond your family.
What is your vision for yourself, outside of family? What are your personal motivations
in life?

Don’t worry if you have difficulty writing the answers. Even if you are drawing up a
blank, there is a real you that lies beneath your social identities, waiting to be
uncovered.

Here are some steps that I have found useful in uncovering my inner self:

 Continuously learning and growing


 Digging into my blind spots
 Putting myself in unknown contexts to spike my learning curve
 Constant introspection
 Looking beyond what I’m told to discover what I want for myself
 Listening to my gut feeling

By doing this exercise, you have triggered the search process for the real you. You will
start to become more aware of your thoughts and actions. Soon, you will get an
impression of your inner self, separate from your social identities. Eventually, you will
reach a stage where you have strong clarity of who you are as a person.

Aligning with Your Inner Self

As you uncover more of your inner self, you may find that some of your real life
identities do not match your inner self. There’s a conflict between who you are and who
you are expected to be. If so, that’s fine. It’s a first step to discover who you are. The
next step is to live in alignment with your inner self, as best as you can, within the
context of the situation. At the same time, start to make long term plans to ultimately live
in alignment with your true self.

For example, when I was working in my ex-company, my inner self was passionate
about helping others to grow via conscious living. However, my identity as an employee
of a consumer goods company required me to manage skincare brands and come up
with ideas to maximize their skincare business. That meant coming up with business
and marketing strategies to get consumers to buy skincare products. In my opinion, the
beauty industry today is largely a low consciousness one as it tends to assume a fixed
beauty ideal and push the idea that some natural aspects of human appearance are
ugly (freckles, wrinkles, laugh lines, loose skin), so it wasn’t in line with my inner self.
There was a conflict between my identity as an employee and my inner self.

What I did was then to live in alignment with my inner self as best as I could while
working as the employee, while kicking off my plans to pursue my passion in the long
term. Since I couldn’t do anything to change the nature of the company, I focused on
what I could effect — establishing strong relationships with my colleagues and raising
their consciousness through every interaction and meeting. Eventually, the opening
came for me to make the leap in 2008. This marked the biggest step where I closed in
the gap with my inner self. The rest, as they say, is history.

Every action you take should move you toward your inner self. If you have identities that
do not match your inner self, there are two possible steps you can take. First, try to find
the common ground between those identities and your inner self. This may involve
shaping the identities to fit who you are. If this doesn’t work, the other (more drastic)
option will be to remove or change the identity altogether — for example when I left my
previous company, I effectively removed my identity as an employee in the company; or
when I shed naysayers and energy vampires from my life, I was effectively removing my
role as a friend to them (and them to me).

Constantly doing these two steps has helped me become more congruent with my true
self. Today, I’m at a place where my external identities are well matched with who I am
on the inside. While there’s definitely still room for improvement, they are quite
congruent with one another. And these didn’t happen by chance. They came about as a
result of conscious effort.

Focus on finding your inner self, then start to live in alignment with it. That’s when you
start to live a conscious life.

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