If you’re here, chances are you’ve asked google “how to find myself”.
Welcome, you are in the right place. As a career and life coach, I can help you sort that out.
I am a bit different from other career coaches. I don’t redo your resume (though I partner with talented folks who do this full time ), and I don’t obsess over keywords on your LinkedIn profile. I’m not in the details of your career search because quite frankly the details don’t matter unless you’ve got the broad strokes right.
So what does this mean, exactly?
It means, why obsess over the details of a kitchen in a home you want to buy if it’s on the wrong street, the wrong town, the wrong COUNTRY?
So many of us are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak, not realizing that the life you’re redecorating is absolutely NOT the life you want to have.
I take great pride in being a career AND life coach — most folks come to me to discuss their career and recognize that in order for us to reveal the right career moves, we need to spend time clarifying the type of life you want to have. The life is what you focus on, the career is a subset of that life.
In order to find yourself, define the life you want to have first. The career is a part of your life, not the other way around.
How to Find Myself Again
This question is EVERYTHING. It’s not about finding yourself, it’s about finding yourself AGAIN. You are there; you’ve always been there. Like Michelangelo revealing the sculpture already within the marble, we’re chiseling the unnecessary parts away from your life, only keeping that which is essentially you.
So premise 1: You are there. You’ve strayed from yourself, but believe me brothers and sisters, you are there. So we’re not trying to find you, we’re trying to reveal you, ie. you’re figuring out how to find yourself AGAIN.
Drive back. Drive back to kindergarten, first grade and second grade. Drive back to who you were before commercials etched your brain into wanting certain things. Drive back to your early inclinations. I, for one, never played with dolls — I wanted a typewriter. And look ma, here I am now, typing these words to connect with future clients.
When I look back at my life, I see all kinds of foreshadowing that reveals my current career. I wanted to be a student peer counselor in high school. I liked theater, and performing — all of this goes into my current business. I loved making money as a kid; entrepreneurial work would be great to me. The puzzle pieces fit.
So tell me about you — what did you do as a kid? What did you love doing? Did you paint and draw or were you running the finest lemonade stand on the block? Did you organize neighborhood kids into team sports, or did you prefer to read for hours. Who were you, when all you were doing was being yourself. If the goal is “to find myself”, first remember who you were, who you’ve always been.
How To Find Myself By Learning More About Me
After you take this trip down memory lane, ask your friends. Ask your parents, your aunts and uncles. Look at old pictures. My cousins made a little group called “The Holidayers” who performed theater every holiday when we came together. It’s no surprise that several of us went into communications and media.
Keep digging. Talk to your friends from kindergarten. Put yourself back in those classrooms, boy scout troops and soccer clubs. What you rejected is just as important as what you chose to do. Find out more about yourself by remembering, recalling, discussing and re-living.
And then, the Internet is FULL of self-assessments. Myers-Briggs has always been a classic personality test; it tells you who you are, not necessarily what you like to do. Princeton Review provides this career quiz, and UK-based Psychologies offers this “True Passion” test. Let’s not be a snob about it — look at Cosmo or any other publication that provides quizzes.
After all, the quiz isn’t the authority on you, YOU are the authority on you. The quiz is just a thought starter; it helps you think through lots of different questions to reveal some themes about yourself. If you think the quiz is wrong, take another. And remember, YOU are answering the questions, so you’re putting the data into the analysis. If you keep taking quizzes that point to the same interests and you just disagree — you’re the one providing the data. Stop arguing with yourself and start looking more deeply into your passion for anthropology. Sure it’s not the practical accountant job you thought you wanted, but dammit Indiana Jones, it’s time to start this adventure!
You are different from everyone else. You are unique. No one is like you. I’m not saying that like a Hallmark card, I’m saying that because I see at least twenty people for coaching sessions each week and no one is like another. Everyone is passionate about something, you have your thing and we can find it.
How To Find Myself and Increase My Motivation
Finding motivation for yourself, believe it or not, is actually the easiest part. Once you tap into those old passions, and connect with those who love you and know you longer than anyone, you will remember the motivation you had for those passions back in the day. At that point the motivation often takes care of itself.
You’ll find yourself saying “oh yeah, I remember I loved that ____ so much!” You’ll rewatch the movie, find the book, dig out the old story. The passions are all there, they’re dormant. And maybe through technology, it’s not about making movies on film, you can pull our your iphone, teach yourself some editing software and BOOM you’re back in business.
The trick here is to give yourself enough time and space to do that thing again. To play, to reengage with the very things that gave your life meaning in the past.
You want to try to pull yourself into flow state, which means (in part) having enough time to get lost in this interest. Feel passion, and pursue your interest for hours to see where it takes you. You can’t cram finding yourself into 15 minute increments, you need the interest, the space to pursue it, a gap between your skill set and the ability to develop more skills and master them (think: learning to play an instrument).
Simply put, you need the time and space to pursue and develop this interest.
You can to give yourself the gift of time to answer the “how to find myself” question, and learn who you are again.
Yes You Can!
People are often asking “how can I find myself?” “how can I find motivation for myself”, “how can I be happy?”, “how can I find motivation?” In truth, these questions all dance around the same truth — we’ve become distanced from our core, ourselves and our interests.
How does this distancing happen? I’ll save that for another day. For now, let’s just solve it. Let’s get you closer to identifying who you are and what you like to do.
And remember, we aren’t inventing anything new, we’re just revealing what is already there.
Please reach out if you’d like to set up an introductory meeting; I’d love to help you find yourself and live a life filled with happiness, contentment and passion.
