What Happens When Someone Has a Loose Sense Of Self? What Shapes Our Identity?
Answers From Quora…
A question from Quora answered by Zach Jones, Lighthouse Associate Elect
Why did I feel compelled to answer this question?
There’s a question I have always dreaded at interviews, and that’s – ‘tell me about yourself’.
It’s seemingly so simple, and it ought to be so, but when I have been asked this in the past, my mind has gone blank! I know ‘about’ myself, my name, the things I do in my spare time, but If I were asked to talk about my sense of self, my identity, what matters most to me in the world I would have sat in the interview chair hoping the ground would swallow me up!
This is a big motivation behind wanting to answer this question that was asked on Quora about what happens when we have a loose sense of self and what shapes our identity. I realise that growing up I learned a lot of ‘stuff’ at school and home, but so little about myself, what I stand for and what matters to me as an individual, rather than a number on an exam results list or a HR report of company accounts.
Key Extracts – What Happens When Someone Has a Loose Sense Of Self? What Shapes Our Identity?
“When I was at school, I was often told about things that would be ‘good for my CV’, whether it was interests or qualifications that I ‘needed’ to have, but it was all based on some ideal of what it means to be a ‘good’ student, a good friend, a good son, it was all who I was supposed to be, but I just thought that this is the way that things are because it is what everyone around me was doing.”
“There are no lessons at school about finding your sense of self, let alone rooting yourself strongly in your identity, nor was this a conversation that I learned at home, and as a result, my identity was that I had no real identity…I was a social chameleon, agreeing with those around me and taking on their beliefs and identity in the name of acceptance.”
“My biggest realisation through this time is that because I had not build a strong sense of self that was rooted in what I value as an individual, what matters most to me, the consequences of this is that I allowed those around me in my life, both physically and through ‘ideals’ and expectations I saw online to shape my identity…And so I had many different identities where I would behave differently with different people, which means that I lacked my own sense of self and the identity I can build through this.”
Full Quora Article
Click here to read this article and other answers on Quora
I have attached a video below from my mentor Paul Waugh, from Lighthouse international, which looks more deeply into why we have a loose sense of self and through this understanding how this impacts our identity. The reason why I wanted to include this video is because it demonstrates what I have been sharing around the power of asking ourselves bigger questions to learn more about ourselves on a deeper level, through revealing what we don’t currently understand. This is what I experienced when being asked the question of what I value most and why, as it encouraged me to expand my horizons and dig deeper into myself, what I stand for and what I want to stand for in a way that I had not experienced before.
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