Today, you shall commence on a voyage — resurrecting your curiosity for self-discovery. When you reach the end, remember it’s not really the end, just the beginning of a new voyage.
What’s in Store for Your Voyage Ahead?
- Prepare: With wisdom and insight across diverse fields, you’ll become prepared to plunge into the depths of your psyche.
- Prioritise: Rediscovering what it means to be an individual beyond the comfort of a group identity; reclaiming your uniqueness; gathering acceptance through 5 key points.
- Pay Attention: Tools for self-reflection and analysing your results; observing your successes and challenges; celebrating when you get punched (metaphorically).
- Practice: How to make decisions using different approaches; prompts and personal routines for flourishing; the importance of creating an encouraging (inner) environment.
- Patience: Why you must keep going while you are breathing; be aware of your delusional tendencies; meditate when things are easy and tough.
1. Preparing Your Psyche
To rediscover our unique identities and, therefore, values we can choose to live by each day, we can look towards various thinkers to help guide us.
Psychology can help us understand our motivations and how our daily behaviours work.
Let’s start with the classic Hierarchy of Needs by Maslow (1943). He suggests a layered complexion to our human nature. We manifest deeper fulfilment as we accumulate each segment of the pyramid. Eventually, you may reach transcendence.
However, you will never reach transcendence without first acquiring all other steps beforehand. This is useful for us because it can teach us where we need to put more of our efforts in the long term.
- Physiological
- Safety
- Belonging, Love, Community
- Esteem
- Self-actualisation / Transcendence
Going through and assessing each stage of Maslow’s hierarchy can be extremely valuable for determining where you are in your current life. Perhaps you feel as though you’re not financially stable at all.
However, you intensely reflect on each stage and realise that you truthfully stand in an abundance of safety, but are overlooking your sense of belonging and community.
We are interconnected with all that is around us. Our environments heavily dictate our self-concepts, influencing our thoughts, feelings and actions. A self-concept consists of self-worth, self-image, and ideal-self.
The highest goal, self-actualisation, is the same idea as transcendence. According to Carl Rogers, we can aim for this through sufficient congruence; see below for a visual description.
💡 Psychology Reflective Task
- Assess which stage you are at in the hierarchy of needs. How are you able to move beyond that stage to advance your spirit higher? Are you able to cultivate a set of daily behaviours that allow you to fulfill your specific needs?
- Draw circles of your ideal self and perceived self. In the overlapping section, list qualities that you feel are congruent between the 2. In the non-overlapping areas, explore areas of ideal change.
To understand the foundations for your ideal self, you need to know how you see yourself right now. We can understand this better through sociological understanding.
Symbolic interactionism emphasises symbols within social interactions, such as gestures or clothing. We can change how we present ourselves to someone based on the context of these symbols and how we interpret others’ reactions.
Ethnomethodology seeks to understand our use in creating societies and social orders rather than vice versa.
The founder of this methodology, Garfinkel, intentionally breached his experiments, disrupting the social norms such as ignoring common courtesies or standing too close to someone in a conversation. He would study the reactions demonstrating that social order is continuous, renegotiated, and reinforced by us.
A network diagram that maps out the various types of social interactions and the platforms that facilitate these connections.We are not limited or confined by societal customs because we can define and redefine them as they constantly shift. This puts the power back in our own hands, becoming more concrete in our individual identities.
On the other side of the coin, social interactions with other people are fantastic for exposing us to new ideas and concepts which we may not otherwise be aware.
It is easy to get comfortable in the bubble of our inner circles and core beliefs which may reaffirm what we already know, rather than learning something unknown.
💡 Sociology Reflective Task
- Do you own your current values?
- Have you accepted them without scrutiny?
- Over the next week, create a map of all of your social interactions, groups, and communities. Reflect on how each group of people influences your identity and values.
Now, we move to the deeper reasons of meaning and purpose in recreating and redefining our identities.
I recently encountered a new philosophical theory — ethical individualism.
It appealed to me because of it’s emphasis on autonomy, rationality, intuition, and personal values. It places high value on the ability of people making their own choices based on building intuition through learning, experiences, which develops a pre-reflective feeling of rightness and wrongness.
Aristotle’s virtue ethics describes the development of a good person/character comes from accumulating virtues through habitual practice.
He also draws on the concept of “Eudaimonia”, otherwise known as flourishing in positive psychology. This is the complete highest good of fulfilling your potential and purpose.
Nietzsche also challenges intrinsic values and argues to create your own values as an expression of individual will.
Reexamining your values that encourage personal power and freedom, instead of denying your individuality by following others’ values gives you autonomy and empowerment to make choices that align with you.
💡 Philosophy Reflective Task
- I challenge you to write one societal value you disagree with. Envision a new personal value to counter to replace it. Reflect on how this value might change your life in a month, several months, and years.
- Keep a journal to note down decisions you make based on your intuition of innate feelings of right and wrong, without outside influence. At the end of the week, analyse your decisions to see how they align with your personal values and identity.
You must be bold and courageous in the questioning and denying of your old value system.
Thank you for reading the first part of my mini-series on rediscovering and redefining your identity and values to suit your needs.
Next Sunday (25th Feb), we will look at group identity and how it can cause your potential to fall, as well as declaring your independence with confidence.
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— with warmth, Bee
