To Find Yourself, Think for Yourself
I have decided to start with a quote from Socrates since it is such an amazing summary of the whole idea! We need to think about ourselves, our needs, desires, judgments, and decisions to get to know ourselves better.
Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Adler all tried to understand human nature and drives. I think the first two are much more familiar names for you! Alfred Adler, who is an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology, emphasized the wholeness and uniqueness of human beings.
He stated many needs and the inferiority feelings of people. However, Lou Bettner summarized Adler’s principles with 4 crucial Cs in her book called “Raising Kids Who Can: Become Responsible, Self-Reliant, Resilient, Contributing Adults and How to Us”. These four crucial C’s are the needs of the people to create more harmonious and responsible society. Thus, we cannot just talk about children here!
The first C is CONNECT. Every human being needs to feel belonging, needs to be accepted, and build valuable relationships with others. We need to feel connected to feel secure and safely explore the world! As a person, we need to feel visibility from the people around us.
The second C is CAPABLE. This C represent the skills that we achieved to reach our goals. We need to feel competent to be self- reliant and to take responsibility for our own behaviors.
The third C is COUNT. This part can be summarized as being significant. This can be confused with the first C, connect, but at this time we are looking at the quality of the relationships we have. We care about social equality and we are looking the ways to contribute to society.
The last C is COURAGE. This can be summarized as being resilient and willing to try. We need to be hopeful thus, we can put ourselves out there to take risks. If someone has the courage, s/he has “courage to be imperfect”. Thus, this person can learn from failures or mistakes.
Why these four C’s are important?
We need to be aware of these four crucial C’s to understand ourselves in a better way. These are our needs as human beings. So, if there is something wrong going on with ourselves and/ or our environment, we can check these C’s and try to get to know about what is really going on.
According to Adler, people who have inferiority feelings, people who are feeling less than others, are the people who are not connected with their environment, who feel that they are not capable and not significant, who do not have courage to try. Thus, these people try to be “more” than others, they need to be more successful, more beautiful or more smart to achieve these four C’s.
If you can be aware of these four C’s, you can find more adaptive ways to overcome your challenges. Furthermore, you should achieve these four C’s by both helping yourself and helping others. Try to put these in your life and realize how missing C’s affect your life.
Reference
B.L. Bettner and A. Lew (1989, 2005), Raising Kids Who Can, Newton Centre, MA: Connexions Press.
