Our Self – Mirror of our Core Needs
Coco Chanel said, “Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.” But who are you? Sometimes we ask ourselves that. And sometimes we completely forget in all our daily hustle and bustle – while trying to be perfect wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, friends and lovers. A little more space for us, makes us aware of our self again …
We come into this world with quite a learning program ahead of us. Not only do our bodies grow and learn to move upright in this world, our consciousness also forms and develops. It is shaped by our experiences that we evaluate and from these insights we construct our reality. Our image of ourselves is formed from our experiences, from feedback we receive – on our behavior, our interactions with others, our thoughts we share and also on our appearance.
We are social beings and need to interact with others. We all want to be seen, heard, and loved, and we develop our own strategies for getting attention, validation, and closeness based on our personal histories. Sometimes we lose sight of our own core needs in the process. We achieve a lot because we have grown up in a society where performance counts. We strive for perfection – in one way or another – because we see perfection as our solution to finally feeling that we are “enough” and “right.” We define our self by the reflection in the other.
So many expectations are felt to be placed on us and we try to fulfill them assiduously – as mothers, daughters, sisters, colleagues, neighbors, friends, lovers. So sometimes our lives feel very other-directed and in trying to survive the wild daily grind, there is often no time to ask what expectations we actually have of ourselves and our lives.
If you were to write down one thing that is really important to you, what would it be? What are your very own core needs? What is it that makes you tick? We have many ideas, desires and dreams, but what would be the one indispensable thing you wouldn’t want to be without? When we take time to ask this question, we get to what drives us and what we long for.
Just as we learn to walk, we learn who we are. We bring with us all the necessary skills to get to know ourselves and become aware of who we are. Often we just don’t take enough space for it. If you were to do a retrospective of your path so far, where are you right now? What is already there and good? What do you want more of?
Coaching – looking inward
Coaching is an opportunity to pause, to find space and time for looking inward, and to ask yourself the question you haven’t asked yourself for far too long.
Growing is a wild, intense adventure and expresses life’s longing for itself. We will never be “finished” or “perfect”, but always beautiful in our uniqueness.