NEW YEAR PLANNING  !  
Create your own life timeline. 

Write down all of your major goals that you feel you have achieved and want to achieve. In turn, write down the events in your life that have already happened and that have shaped or affected you. When life brings problems or misfortunes it shapes our belief system and makes us think differently, but it also makes us us. These things you list are organically you, not a simple reflection of society.

This isn’t an exercise in wallowing. It’s about clarification and identification of issues. These issues might be keeping you from reaching your present potential and letting your true self blossom.

Spend a little time clarifying the past in your timeline. A timeline is an incredibly objective method for marking down past occurrences in your life that you consider to be major. You can look at them as formation blocks and as changing experiences along your timeline without imbuing them with too much emotion (as would occur within a diary account). As if writing a résumé, keep it simple, real, and condensed to the major effects or lessons learned from each past incident.

When analyzing negative past experiences, focus on what you learned from them. Everyone has these blips in their timeline, but exaggerating or ignoring them won’t help you. Instead, recognize that these experiences shaped you.

  
Image titled Find Yourself Step 1

Create your own life timeline. Write down all of your major goals that you feel you have achieved and want to achieve. In turn, write down the events in your life that have already happened and that have shaped or affected you. When life brings problems or misfortunes it shapes our belief system and makes us think differently, but it also makes us us. These things you list are organically you, not a simple reflection of society.

This isn’t an exercise in wallowing. It’s about clarification and identification of issues. These issues might be keeping you from reaching your present potential and letting your true self blossom.

Spend a little time clarifying the past in your timeline. A timeline is an incredibly objective method for marking down past occurrences in your life that you consider to be major. You can look at them as formation blocks and as changing experiences along your timeline without imbuing them with too much emotion (as would occur within a diary account). As if writing a résumé, keep it simple, real, and condensed to the major effects or lessons learned from each past incident.

When analyzing negative past experiences, focus on what you learned from them. Everyone has these blips in their timeline, but exaggerating or ignoring them won’t help you. Instead, recognize that these experiences shaped you.

 
Image titled Find Yourself Step 2

Distinguish your thoughts from the thoughts of others. For most people (it’s more common than you may think) life is pretty easy to go through while on autopilot; we practically get handed a road map for how reality “works.” Go to school, get a job, get married, think this, that, and the other, and boom — hope you had a good time. And that’s all well and good — it gets the job done certainly — but it doesn’t allow room for you. So sit down with yourself. At the end of the timeline, come up with a few beliefs of yours that aren’t based on logic, but are based on what you’ve been told. We all have them. Now, what do you actually think?
Society has a very covert way of handing us the “misfits”, condemning the “losers”, idolizing the “beautiful”, alienating the “strange.” But here’s a heads up: These describing words have no basis in reality. How do you feel about the world around you? Think about what you believe to be good and bad — not what anyone else has told you.

Feel free to think more concretely. Do you actually agree with your parents’ political or religious affiliations? Is having a career really the most important thing to you? Do thick, black glasses really make you feel “cooler?” If the answer is no, great! There’s absolutely zero problems with not molding yourself to pre-existing norms. Now all you have to do is unlearn and then relearn. Only this time, relearn based on your gut.

  
 Image titled Find Yourself Step 3

Start relying on yourself. Confidence and reliance are at the heart of finding yourself. If you don’t have a solid sense of self-worth, you’ll listen to what others have to say all the time and to be swayed by their insistence on what is appropriate. Learn to believe in yourself and trust your own feelings. Then, you’ll come up with a structure to base your new sense of self on. Remember, be patient with yourself and confident in your abilities. Everything will come with time.
If you have been victimized in the past, confront these issues. They’re not going to go away on their own. They might be coloring your approach to daily life, causing you to live up to other people’s expectations instead of your own.

Start trusting your own judgment and decision-making processes, mistakes and all. We all make mistakes, but through mistakes we find ourselves growing, learning, and reaching our real selves.

Start taking responsibility for budgeting, household matters, and planning about the future. People who lack a sense of self tend to disregard the “details” of life with a carefree attitude, believing that things will all sort themselves out. But things don’t always sort themselves out. Taking responsibility pulls you back from the precipice and lets you be self-reliant and self-determined, no longer carried along by the waves of fate.

  
Prepare to begin again with a clean slate. Develop your own moral conduct and practice sticking to it. Start by overcoming bad habits.

Stop smoking, over-eating, and abusive drinking. These are examples of lapses or habits that will prevent you from functioning at your peak. They also let you “off the hook” by sidestepping the analysis of why you use these crutches instead of finding better ways to brighten your life.

This step may take some major rehabilitation for some individuals but putting it into the too-hard basket won’t make it go away. Remember, you can’t drive your life forward if you are always gazing through your rear-view mirror!

  
Organize your world. You may find that having all your other affairs in order will help expedite the process to grabbing a firm hold on your identity. So clean your room. Do your homework. Resolve that fight with that friend. Getting everything else out of the way will clear up the path to “me” time.

We all have excuses for why we’re not growing in the direction we want to be growing — it could be money, school, a job, a relationship, you name it, someone’s used it. If you’re a busy bee, take strides to clear your schedule so you can sit down and tackle this thing head on. If it’s always priority #2, it’ll never get done.  

  
Immerse yourself in solitude. Give yourself some time and space to get away from the expectations, the conversations, the noise, the media, and the pressure. Take some time each day to go for a long walk and think. Plant yourself on a park bench and look. Take a long, thoughtful road trip. Whatever you do, move away from anything that distracts you from contemplating your life and where you want it to go. In solitude, you should feel independent and self-sufficient, not lonely, needy or afraid.

Every person needs time alone, whether they’re introverted or extroverted, single or in a relationship, young or old. Solitude is time for rejuvenation and self-talk, for utter peace and for realizing that purposeful “loneliness” is not a bad place to be but rather, a liberating part of your overall existence.

If you are a creative person, you may find that alone-time will help stoke your creativity. While it’s nice to collaborate with other people sometimes, it’s hard to be truly creative when you’re always surrounded by other people. Step back and tap into your creativity. 
Seek out a passion. When you believe in something or see beauty in something, you should do it no matter what anyone else thinks. If you have found something that is worthy of your best efforts, sacrifice, and tears, then you have found the most important pursuit of your life. Often, that pursuit can lead you to something ultimately fulfilling.
The key here is to realize that it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be preventing child hunger or it could be painting. There is no scale when it comes to passion. You either feel it or you don’t; none is better than any other. When you find something that zaps you out of bed in the morning, cling onto it. You’ll only bloom from there.  

Find a mentor. Though ultimately soul-searching can only be done by you and it’s only you that determines what you need, having a mentor will be an incredible resource when you hit those unavoidable bumps in the road. Seek out someone you trust who has a definite sense of self. How did they do it?
Let them know the process you’re starting to undertake. Stress that you know it’s your journey, but would love to use their strength as a guide. Take a look at them as objectively as you can. What seems to ground them, making them who they are? How did they find that? How do they stay true to themselves?

A support system is key to any self-improvement tactic. Not a lot of people will understand what you’re going through and will brush off your broaching the topic as a flash-in-the-pan moodiness. Use this mentor as a sounding board, too, for what you come up against. The outlet will surely come in handy.
Sort out your career path. If you’re meandering all over the place looking for the right “fit”, chances are that you’re not happy inside. You could be using the job-changing as an excuse for not fully realizing your true potential. Find yourself by really taking an interest in what you love to do. If money weren’t an issue, what would you spend your days doing? What way can you monetize this activity/skill?
Spend some time free-associating. Think about what you like and don’t like; think beyond those things to other ideas that simply pop into your mind while you’re associating. Keep a record of these things. Then, come back to the career question and look at the free associations. What type of career seems to gel most with the things that excited, moved, and really energized you from the free-association exercise? As Alain de Botton says, this exercise is about looking for “beeps of joy” amid the cacophony of must-do’s, shoulds, and expectations.

Bear in mind, however, that work may not be where your “calling” is. If that’s the case, you’ll need to work out a work-life balance that lets you pursue your “true self” more outside of the workplace, even if this means more hours and less income. It is all possible, especially if it’s in the pursuit of finding and sustaining your true sense of self.