Embracing and allowing your uniqueness to shine has some major benefits, beyond just being memorable. Once you know yourself, you can more easily communicate your needs, simply because they are more fully-formed. You are acknowledging them regularly. Decision-making becomes easier because the hesitation to choose based on your community’s reaction is removed. In line with this thinking, you feel less guilt or regret as a result of those choices. You have a clearer vision of who you are, your goals, and the daily progress you are making toward them.
If embracing uniqueness is so beneficial to us, why is it so hard to do? Research shows that humans derive some pleasure from fitting in. Conformity sometimes serves as an emotional proxy for one of our most basic human desires—belonging. When we think we belong somewhere, we feel connectedness to a group through a common goal and experience. We are happiest when we feel we truly belong, and find communities that embrace as we are.
However, at times, we convince ourselves that changing who we really are to fit into a community that may not be right for us will give us the same feeling as belonging. We make ourselves blend in, and we do it at any cost. Adapting our behaviors is a double-edged sword. We may feel like we belong, but we will also carry a constant fear that we are not deserving of this acceptance. It’s that nagging fear that if someone knew the real us—they wouldn’t like us. When we conform, we are doing so for short-term gains at the cost of our long-term happiness.
Embracing our individuality starts with self-awareness, or conscious knowledge of our own character, feelings, motives, and desires. To successfully be self-aware, we must not only better understand how we see ourselves, but also take in how others perceive us. Who we are becomes a delicate mix of these two perspectives.
Getting to Know Yourself
Over the course of my life, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve endured horrors that I hope no one else ever experiences. I’ve rebuilt myself. I’ve conquered fears. I’ve adapted my emotions of anger and frustration into ones of understanding and patience. I’ve done hundreds of things people have told me I will never be able to do. Every day, I look in the mirror and I see this. It kills me that so many other people don’t do the same. They see their faults and problems. They see their ugliness and pain. They see someone else’s definition of who they are, because they haven’t made time to define themselves.
Finding myself and my place in this world was a journey—and a hard one at that. I don’t want you to think any of this will be easy. You will have to fight yourself to find yourself. Every time you hesitate or doubt something you wanted to try based on what you think you are allowed to experience, you have to force yourself to try and do it anyways. Gradually, it becomes habit. The fear drops away and a fresh confidence can grow in its place. Soon those things that terrified you, that once felt out of your reach, become things that make you feel powerful. Eventually, you see yourself in actions rather than in words. You see beauty in who you are, and not in the words strangers might use to describe you.
Discovering who you are is a process. You have to make time and emotional space to dig under all the layers of “what you should be” to discover who you could be. Slowly, you begin to understand what you want in life, what causes you to do the things you do, and what your emotions are trying to tell you. Begin with a journal to track your feelings. Set goals you want to achieve, so that when you are faced with life decisions you can always check in and make the right choices for your future self. Lastly, make time every day to get away from the noise of the world to just think about who you are, where you are going, and what you have accomplished so far.
Tasha Eurich, author of Insight, studied a group of individuals who were proven to be successfully self-aware. Her research resulted in some interesting results. Often when a situation goes awry we ask ourselves, “Why?” Why didn’t I get this job? Why didn’t I get asked to prom? Why do I feel alone? The word “why” focuses our attention on assessing past decisions and events. Through this process, we expect to discover a reason for our current situation. However, our minds are fickle beasts, our memory isn’t perfect, and much of the information we use to make decisions lives in the messy basement of our brains (our subconscious).
When we ask ourselves “why,” we are forcing ourselves to rehash a situation that has already passed and that we likely have a skewed perspective on, looking to discover a detail we can’t change and hoping this knowledge will make us happier in the future. If this sounds unrealistic, it’s because it is. This type of introspection can make us stressed-out. It can depress us. Even worse, it delays our ability to solve problems. We literally become trapped in our own self-analysis of our history. We can’t move forward.
I remember having dinner with a friend where we discussed our pasts. We both had similar disadvantages and challenges as kids. My dinner partner, once recognizing we had a similar history, asked me how I had managed to become successful despite it all. As we continued to discuss each event and dissect how my choices had netted me in increasingly better positions, I began to notice a pattern.
Every time a major incident happened, I always asked myself what I could do to make it better. With each setback I developed some new learning about myself that would motivate my next action in life. After years of working hard to always find ways to be better and overcome my rebellious past, I developed the unwavering belief that the best thing I could learn from today was what I needed to do tomorrow to improve. In fact, for the last ten years I have been asking myself that same question nearly every day. What can I do tomorrow, this month, this year to make tomorrow better than today?
Interestingly enough, Eurich’s research found that those who receive the most value from self-awareness are those who analyze their lives using the word “what.” By phrasing questions when self-analyzing using “what,” we are asking ourselves to critically think about our values, needs, and wants and establish what we need to do to make them a reality. This makes us better able to handle tough situations, because we’re always focused on taking a future action and less likely to get bogged down by whatever terrible, no-good, rotten past events and mistakes we might make along the journey. We’re letting them go instead of constantly digging through garbage (bad events), hoping to a find a nugget of gold (an amazing insight or life direction).
Activities to Increase Your Self-Awareness
1.Keep a journal of your emotions and feelings and look for patterns in your behavior.
2.Set goals to help center your growth and development around an objective.
3.Choose “what” versus “why” when applying critical introspection.
How Other People See You
When I took my very first corporate job, I had trouble transitioning from “cool co-ed Anna” to formal, full suit-wearing “Ms. O’Brien.” I treated my cubicle much like one would treat their fifth-grade locker: I covered the walls in Teen Beat posters of JTT. Yes, this was ten years after JTT’s star had peaked. I painted my nails at my desk, put googly eyes on the office plants, and listened to my music out loud for all to hear. I even went so far as to come in one weekend and give my cube a Trading Spaces (does anyone remember that show?) makeover, complete with hanging lanterns and a tapestry pinned up like wallpaper. I thought I was being whimsical and funny. What I was doing was committing career suicide.
I remember when HR called me into the office to talk about these cubicle antics. I had anticipated good news—maybe even a promotion. I had made so much effort to liven up our humdrum office floor, and I expected them to be grateful. I was wrong. The office found me annoying, distracting, and unfocused. Gulp. They didn’t love me, they hated me. I was distraught. I needed to start looking for a new job. I was a failure. They were going to fire me any day.
I spent the next