I've been tweeting lately about making lists of strengths and weaknesses and this is, of course, in an attempt to find out who you are and, more importantly, liking yourself, warts and all. Here's the beginning of the chapter in 'Emotional Intelligence: Journey to the Centre of Your Self', which shows how to discover more about what makes you tick:
SWOON
‘People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul’
Jung
They really will. We once had a client who started to go to a therapist to get to grips with some problems she had. She’d been going for weeks and getting nowhere and then, suddenly, they seemed to make a breakthrough and the therapist felt that the next session would uncover a particularly nasty scar, which was preventing her from moving on. Do you know, it took that woman 15 years to go back to another therapist and she made all sorts of outlandish excuses as to why she couldn’t continue. You see she was afraid that round the next corner would be the pain she couldn’t face, so she walked the other way and carried the pain with her for years afterwards. Jung was spot on. Or, to bring us a little more up to date, there was a popular record in the 1970s called ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’, which is about a woman who covers up her emotional pain by rich living but has never taken a good, hard look at her inner self. Let’s try that now.
Just for a moment, think about WHO YOU ARE. The usual tendency is to recite a list of positive, or negative (depending on your frame of mind) attributes to create a ‘you’ template and often the list of negatives is far longer than the list of positives. But how well do you actually know yourself and how many seeming contradictions are there in your personality? For example, you may think of yourself as a timid person, who suddenly finds herself furiously berating someone for being cruel to an animal or you may think of yourself as the strong, silent type, who unexpectedly weeps buckets at a sad film. Do you see yourself as others see you? Who are YOU?
If asked to describe a friend, people will often say that the other person is a salesman or policeman. But that’s not actually true, is it? That’s not what the person is but more accurately what they do, and this is an important distinction. If we fail to make it, we get lost in the identity of our labels – lawyer, accountant, cleaner, politician, husband, housewife, editor, consultant and even student and child. All of these are just describing words and probably only describe aspects of our personality anyway. Think of the Krays. It has always been said, often in the same breath, that they were vicious gangsters, who disfigured people for showing disrespect, but unfailingly loved and protected their old Mum. These facets of our personality may represent a portion of how we express ourselves in our world, but ultimately not who we truly are. No wonder we can feel dissatisfied with our lives; as Francesca Cassini puts it so poetically, ‘our labels of identity create our own imprisonment’.
Quick exercise – labelling
Imagine you are sitting on a windswept beach somewhere you love. Make it your favourite time of the year. The tide is coming in and the sound of the surf on the shore fills the air. What word would you use to describe the ocean? Powerful? Majestic? Awesome? Frightening? Bleak? Wild? Uninviting? Cold? Cruel? Then again you may see the sunlight glint off the cresting waves, and you may love surfing, so the descriptive words may become Exciting, Breathtaking, Challenging, Inviting, Creative or even Empowering. And we can choose many other descriptions, such as Deep, Passionate, Energetic, Romantic…… You choose your descriptions. Whatever you call it, it’s the same sea…… A rose is a rose is a rose.
Now, focus within and see yourself as the ocean. Imagine your mind like a powerful beam of light, arcing round a lighthouse. As your light sweeps the ocean, focus on one facet of your personality within it, choose a word to describe that bit of you. Then choose another and another. You may begin with descriptions of your body, then your mind, your emotions, your intellect, your education, or your history. Each part is only part of the whole and yet the whole is you – good, bad and neutral, brilliant, dull and colourless. None of us is made up wholly of good or bad; we’re just all an amalgam of various parts, all shades of so many different colours.
As the ocean encompasses all possibilities and potential, so do we; it simply depends on where we choose to focus our attention.
And, as a last thought, we keep using ‘facets’ of your personality. What else has facets? Yes, precious gems, and that’s how you started out in this journey of life, as a pure, perfect, precious gem of a person and you could be again.
You may have wondered why this section is entitled SWOON. SWOON will help you become more self-aware. Just as we did with the lighthouse, we are now going to imagine ourselves as a product – we’ll call it a YOU – and, remember, it should be a brilliant, shining gemstone. And for this exercise, we have to sell our YOU to the hardest market to crack – ourselves. Like any good marketers, we firstly need to do an analysis on the product, only instead of SWOT or PEST, we are going to SWOON – we are talking about emotions after all!
Get some A4 paper and, displaying it in landscape format, draw up the following grid:
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Strengths |
Weaknesses |
Opportunities |
Obstacles |
Needs |
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Kind |
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Loyal |
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Funny |
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Intelligent |
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And this is only the start.....
