When was the last time you asked yourself this question: Am I becoming who I want to be?
Well, what’s the answer? Are you becoming who you want to be? Too often life after college becomes a function of trying to achieve goals. Whether it’s career goals or education goals or personal goals, it seems that we fall into the psychology of thinking that everything in life is about achieving goals, personal and professional.
Every once in a while, however, we ought to be introspective and ponder about who we are becoming in the midst of our constant reach for goals. It’s important to look ourselves in the mirror and ask questions about our character, our persona, and about who we are at the center of our being, and who we want to become.
When we are younger, we’re often asked “what” we want to become. In our early adulthood, the rhetoric doesn’t change. This focus on what we “do” for a living seems to dominate how we see ourselves. And then of course it is almost taken for granted that we are on the search to create a life for ourselves that includes a spouse, and maybe other personal goals that we set that apparently make up “who” we are. These are all wonderful things – career, love and relationships, wanting to achieve things personally and otherwise. Still, I can’t help but feel that in the midst of it all, we forget how important it is to decide to be the person we want to be as well.
What do I mean?
I mean we need to look at our character, our values, and choices, and decide if we’re being a person we like; a person we want to be. I think that failing to be introspective in this way allows us to easily become a function of the world, the society, the culture, without us having any say in who we want to become. Because like it or not, the world, the society, and the culture are going to affect you but if you don’t participate in defining your being, how do you even know who you are, much less who you want to be?
Your twenties is an opportune time to really take advantage of how impressionable and resilient you are and to take the time to get to know yourself – what you like about yourself and what you don’t, and indeed make the choice to make a change to be the person that you say you want to be. Of course you can do this at any stage of life but I do believe it gets harder as we get older.
What are some of the things you want to change? Who do you want to become?
I can give you a page from my laundry list. For starters, I would like to become a better listener. I’ve been told I’m not half-bad but at it but I know I am not nearly as good as I can be. Additionally, I would like to talk less; I talk way too damn much. I would like to be more organized in planning for “tomorrow” and at the same time, I would like to be more intentional about living for today. As I said, I am not there yet but I’ll keep working on it because those are things that I want to become.
It would be very easy to go through the motions of life, never really asking important questions because it takes time and thinking and effort. But for my last cliché of the day, I would say it matters because Socrates cautioned that, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” So I invite you to think about this question and to share your thoughts if you feel inclined: Are you becoming who you want to be?
Tagged as: character, gen y, twenty somethings, young professionals