Who Are You?

I’m talking this week about 7 important questions.  The first one, and possibly the MOST important, is, “who are you?”

Identity

The obvious answers to the question are about identity.  Think about the things that might be on your ID card, Driver’s License, or Passport: your name, where you’re from, when and where you were born.  These are important, but they’re just scratching the surface of who you are.

Identifying Characteristics

Another layer to this question is about identifying characteristics.  Are you male or female?  Black or white?  Tall or short?  What language do you speak?  What kind of work do you do?  These are all parts of who you are, and they are getting deeper, but there are still many more deeper layers to explore before you know–or I know–who you are.

Personality

Understanding your personality starts to take us deeper.  “I was always the class clown,” or, “whenever me and my friends get together, I’m always the ring-leader,” are both insights that help you understand who you are in a social context.  Your preferences (likes and dislikes) also tell us about your personality.  Do you love Mozart and despise pizza?  There must be some deep reasons behind that.

Self-Conception

Some of the most important work around knowing yourself is here on the question of self-conception.  How do you conceive of yourself?  How do you see yourself and your role in life here on earth in relation to existence, the universe, the entire human race, and all of human history?  What are you here to do?  Maybe it’s to be an artist, maybe it’s to be a janitor.  There’s no judgment here.  What’s important is that you are able to conceive of and state out loud who you are.

Motivations & Intentions

This gets to the real core question behind, “who are you?”, and that is, “what are you about?”  What are your values?  What drives you?  The answers to these questions are just as important to who you are as a name or a body is.  Understand your own motivations and intentions and be ready to re-state them to yourself or others at any moment.  This will keep you on a straight track to your purpose.