Stages of Understanding: Your Self-Discovery Pathway
Your Style Type invites you to chart and journey your own unique pathway. Type offers a safe and stimulating lifelong pathway of self-discovery and growth.
Your Style Type gives you a way of understanding yourself, and others that is free of judgment, but often full of insights and observations (such is the nature of Type).
There is no Type that is better or preferred to any other Type. Each is unique, and beautiful, and valid.
Your Style Type is the one that’s right for you – that best represents how you take in information, make decisions, are energized, and how you approach the world. It is no better or worse than any other Style Type. It is just your Type, and you get to decide what it means to you and how you express it.
Which is where we are going to go now – deeper into self-awareness territory. Remember the Exploration Strategies from the beginning of this Module. Refer to them now if you need before we get going as all those strategies apply strongly as we step into this next phase of our journey into exploring your gifts.
Charting Your Unique Self-Discovery Pathway
Self-discovery is all about self-awareness. So what is self-awareness? It is defined as “the state or condition of being aware; having knowledge; consciousness of one’s own character”. It is about forming a picture of who you are that is clear and accurate, it is about understanding your personality including insights about your strengths and blind spots.
When you are self-aware:
You understand what you are experiencing
When you have a degree of self-awareness, you understand something of what you are thinking and feeling. You have an understanding of what you are perceiving, the information you are taking in. You also have some insights into why: why you think and feel the way you do, why you approach life the way you do, why certain things (people, activities, places) light you up and make your soul sing… and others drag you down and bring a dark cloud.
You have some insight into how others perceive and experience you
When you have some self-awareness, you have some notion of what it’s like for others when they ‘bump into you’. As your self-awareness grows, you appreciate even more what other’s experience when they interact and are in relationship with you.
And when you are self-aware:
You develop and maintain a healthy relationship with yourself
When you have some self-awareness, you have a relationship with yourself, and there’s some objectivity about what kind of a person you are (although total objectivity is not the goal, nor is it possible). You have some awareness of not only your observable behaviors, decisions, and actions, but your inner world, too: your inner thoughts and feelings, your values and beliefs.
You recognize that self-awareness is an ongoing process
You never really ‘arrive’ at being fully self-aware, although it is possible to develop a high level of self-awareness. As humans, we are dynamic, alive beings and our awareness of who we are develops over time, and as we invest more effort and energy into the process of self-discovery. As we engage in more behaviors and practices that foster our self-awareness, our self-awareness grows.
Becoming More Self-Aware
There are innumerable ways to become more self-aware. Everyday life offers us many simple ways to learn more about how others experience us – everything from how we interact with the supermarket sales assistant to having a challenging conversation with a member of our family, can be an opportunity for self-discovery.
In this next, and final, section of Module 4, we’re going to invite you to participate in a range of activities to increase your self-awareness. You can undertake them all, or only some of them, in any order that you wish.
Remember each is an invitation to learn something about yourself, which only comes from taking action. You won’t learn anything about yourself by simply reading the activities – you have to do them to uncover the gold.
Onto your Self-Awareness explorations in the Module 4 PDF Page 50.
Fashion as Feedback – Playshop
What we wear signals something, and something significant, to the world around us and also to ourselves. Our clothes are messengers, telling us who we are (at least in part) and telling the world who we believe ourselves to be, and who we really are.
In The Language of Clothes, author Alison Lurie claims that clothes talk. She says that they make up a vocabulary and this vocabulary speaks as loudly as the spoken word.
And according to Hebdige in Subculture, punk clothing is the equivalent of swearing, making the case, again, that clothing speaks volumes. Whether we want it to or not, whether we are influencing or in charge of the message or not, communication is happening – and our clothing is the message and the messenger.
So it’s interesting to consider the feedback your clothing is sending – to yourself, and to the rest of the world.
If we assume your clothing is speaking, the question becomes: what’s it saying?
