Six Reasons for Lack of Self-Knowledge #4
Lack of Self-Knowledge: Reason #4
If you do not know yourself, three bad things will happen to you.
- You will not be in the right line of work.
- You will not be with the right person.
- You will not be happy.
The last one follows from the first three.
You will make wrong decisions in the main areas of life (career and mate selection in particular) and you will continue to make those poor decisions until you die unless and until you again self-knowledge.
That’s harsh, but it is demonstrably true.
You know this intuitively, I’m just reminding you.
Join me at Self-Knowledge College for a FREE conversation.
I can help you know get to know yourself and be more successful in your personal and professional life.
Email me: daleyfrank0@gmail.com
You won’t regret it.
Frank
Six Reasons for Lack of Self-Knowledge #3
Lack of Self-Knowledge: Reason #3
#3 They think they are not smart enough
- whether you are a night-owl or an early riser;
- what your favorite foods are;
- what you favorite kinds of movies and books are, etc.
Six Reasons for Lack of Self-Knowledge #2
Lack of Self-Knowledge: Reason #2
#2 They think it’s too difficult
It’s not.
Yes, it takes work, but it is also exciting because it focuses on the most important person on the planet—YOU!
JOBS, CAREER, WORK
We’re talking jobs here, careers, work.
Imagine you are back in school.
HOW DO YOU CHOOSE YOUR LIFE’S WORK?
Grab a piece of chalk.
Go to the front of the room.
Turn your back to the job wall.
Over your shoulder, throw a piece of chalk at that wall.
Wherever it strikes a brick, that’s your job for life.
You can’t aim it or have second tries.
Throw, hit, accept.
That’s it.
Do you like that idea?
A THROW OF THE DICE OR WORSE?
You don’t know yourself well enough to select a college program or a job that suits your abilities, talents and gifts, so you choose at random.
Because you do not KNOW your talents, gifts, and abilities. Or you go into a job because your father did it. Or because your friends are going into it. Or because it’s the ‘next big thing’. Or because it’s trendy.
BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW ANY BETTER?
There are circumstances that prevent us from doing what we were meant to do. Or even trained to do.
They don’t have a choice. That choice was taken from them by war or some other catastrophe.
YOU HAVE A CHOICE, BUT IT REQUIRES SELF-EXAMINATION
We just have to understand that there IS a choice, and we need the information to make it responsibly, carefully and successfully.
It isn’t difficult to “get” it if we know the consequences of NOT getting it.
Six Reasons for Lack of Self-Knowledge #1
Lack of Self-Knowledge: Reason #1
Most people are reluctant to go on an interior journey of the “self.” They offer one or more of six objections. I’ll write about them for the next week.
See if any of them apply to you.
Be yourself! Good luck with that! Know yourself first.
Be Yourself. Good luck with that! Know Yourself First.
Many people in our society tell children to “be yourself.”
This is well-meaning advice but impossible to do and totally wasted advice if the child does not ‘know herself.’
It is said mostly to young girls and boys who admittedly, have a herd mentality about many things.
Being yourself is not high on the list.
Teenagers (and even younger children) want the same heavily advertised material thing. Think of clothes, movie stars, and running shoes.
Parents are trying to get them to be more independent, to think for themselves, but everybody wants to be part of the group.
Nobody wants to be different.
Being different usually translates as being alone or being a nerd and ultimately alone.
Nobody wants to be alone.
But you can’t be yourself if you are different and you conform.
JUST BE YOURSELF!
Parents say to their children, ‘Just be you, just be yourself.’
Note the word ‘just.’
We see this every day on TV. A parent has a child murdered and she says to a reporter, “I just want my child back.”
The request is touching but hopeless because she says she just wants what is ‘impossible.’
It isn’t ‘just”anything; it is everything.
‘Just’ implies a little thing, a morsel in the feast of what we want. But immediately we go for the ultimate: Bring my child back to life.
We know what parents mean when the give the advice “be yourself”–they mean:
- don’t copy everyone else
- don’t be a lemming (If Billy jumped off a bridge would you jump off one too?)
- don’t get carried away with peer group influence
- don’t be like everyone else
- don’t always conform
So the word ‘just’ in this application is not helpful.
Parents say as if it was an easy thing to do, as if when you look at all the difficult things you have to do, that being yourself is simple and easy.
The hope is that this recommendation will eliminate all the stress that accompanies being torn between being yourself and going with the crowd.
It’s supposed to solve all your problems.
Everyone knows that’s nonsense, but people continue to say it, probably because trying to think of something really effective to say to a teenager is too complicated or difficult. (Well, they’re right about that!)
Not that the idea is worthless.
The most important person in the world is you.
Not your mother.
Not your boyfriend.
Not your husband.
You!
To be yourself means first, you have to know yourself.
That comes first, but is ignored or skipped over in the advice columns.
At Self-Knowledge College and Dropout to Dean’s List, I help people get to know themselves better so they can be more successful in their personal, academic and professional lives–on their own terms.
If you, or someone you know, would benefit from learning more about themselves just email me.
We’ll set up a brief, FREE conversation that could prove advantageous.
frankdaley@rogers.com
Frank
How Writing Helps Self-Knowledge And Promotes Success
Why writing is important to my business success and your personal success through Self-knowledge.
WRITING 1: WORK AND YOU
My business is Self-Knowledge College.
My sister site is Dropout to Dean’s List (for at-risk students).
My work is helping people know themselves so they can make better decisions for themselves and find success on their own terms in their personal and professional lives.
It involves teaching people to know themselves and self-knowledge by itself isn’t going to attract many people on it’s own.
It’s not “sexy” enough.
It doesn’t provide an immediate, downloadable result for $100, much less $47.
OBJECTIONS TO OUR WORK
People have a lot of psychological, emotional and mental objections (most of them unconscious) to the idea of learning more about themselves.
- First, they think they already know themselves pretty well since they know what movies, sports and food they prefer.
- And they know what their most productive time of day is—whether, for example, they are early birds or night owls.
- Then, if they think of self-knowledge at all, they often dismiss it because they think it is too difficult, takes too long to achieve, is only for gurus on mountains in diapers, (or geniuses or Phds).
- If those don’t apply, they are fearful of learning about themselves because they think they won’t like everything they learn (they won’t—but they already have suspicions at the very least about those things). They don’t realize, yet, that they will also learn so many more many wonderful things about themselves that they also don’t know. Yet!
HOW AM I DOING?
How am I doing? I’m not sure. I have written in many forms professionally with good results but writing to you is more difficult. There isn’t a lot of feedback so far so it’s difficult to know whether I’m reaching you or not. This is an attempt to explain why writing is important for my work of helping you and important for you in your work of knowing yourself better.
WRITING 2: THE BEST WAY TO REACH YOU
I was going to say that writing is not the only way to reach you—there are such things as podcast, videos, teleseminars, webinars, speaking from the stage etc., but all of them involve writing as a first step.
I have used none of these yet, except public speaking—although I intend to—but when I do, I’ll l have to write scripts, outlines, drafts of posts, courses or books, notes for Voice/over videos, scripts for on-camera videos etc.
All of them involve writing.
WRITING 3: OBSTACLES TO CONNECTION
Writing—words— are the best way to reach people because apparently something happened in their childhoods that prevented other methods of reaching them from taking effect.
What are some of these?
Poor parenting is one (often unavoidable given the problems of growing up having children–while still being children in many ways themselves) and having to take responsibility for raising them while struggling with their own education, work and lack of self-awareness.
A lack of someone, somehow, using words (and yes, non-verbal displays of affection) to reach the child and tell them of their many gifts, talents and abilities. This lack of words has led to people not appreciating themselves, not knowing themselves and therefore not loving themselves. That a part is crucial because if you don’t know yourself, you can’t love yourself—you can’t love what you don’t know.
Many people in North America are immigrants with little formal education in their own languages much less familiarity with English. Writing—basic, simple, transformative language— is necessary to reach these citizens.
WHAT I BELIEVE
My thesis is that if you don’t know yourself three bad things will happen to you in life:
- You will not be in the right line of work
- You will not be with the right person and
- You will not be happy
You won’t be happy because of the first two.
Fighting our way through life, as we all must, requires some education, either formal or informal and each of these require language. I need language—writing—to reach people on a deep level.
Our lives are filled with superficialities, meretricious attempts to distract us from our life purpose.
And what if we can’t even define our purpose?
You need language too, in order to probe yourself, rigorously investigate yourself, to determine your authentic self. Since most of us are adults—even my at-risk students are adults—we need some way to be alerted to the notion that learning more about who we are and what we want in life is monumentally important.
Important, and while not easy—it does require work to get to know yourself—it is also amazingly interesting and rewarding. Who is more interesting, more important, not in an entitled way, but in a profound way—than you are?
Nobody.
But you can’t help anyone else unless and until you are secure and confident in yourself, in your emotional, psychological and spiritual self. Nor can you help yourself much because you don’t know who you are and what you want or what questions to ask and answer and what directions or paths to take.
WRITING 4: COMMUNICATION
Words, writing, in some form or another (film scripts, TV shows, movies, slide shows–are all based on writing), is the best way to communicate, to reach people, to suggest, to seduce, to persuade to convince them they that they are important and worthy and can be better.
We all want be better, to improve ourselves, but we put obstacles in our own way, we self-sabotage for myriad reasons.
Words—writing and reading— can eventually cut through the bafflegab of life.
When you know yourself you become a jet-propelled activist on behalf of yourself.
You can’t help but get better when you know yourself.
It is not possible to fail at self-knowledge if you stick with it.
It’ll take some time (and granted, you’ll never know everything about yourself because you are too complicated and life is too short) but it is easily possible to learn something new about yourself every day.
TAKE MY COURSE ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Join me in private or group work using my book, Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? The way to know yourself and get what you want.
But first you must begin. And you begin by reading and listening to my words, through writing and speaking to you.
WRITING 5: SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Self-knowledge needs words to go deep in your job of self-detection.
It doesn’t matter if you are formally well educated or not—life has taught you many things.
I can teach you to harness those things, sort them out and prepare a system to follow things about you—or at least I can lead you to discover them.
One of the best ways to learn about yourself is to write about yourself.
That’s one of the things I will help you do if we work together.
If I say Self-Knowledge, that’s because that’s what the core, the essence of you is.
But we don’t constantly speak of Self-Knowledge in the abstract.
We use the right words to examine the presenting problems that are keeping you awake at night or causing you stress during the day.
I try to use simple, direct, clear language in my writing to examine things such as problems with time management, procrastination, goal-setting, the ability choose a college program or career path or even choosing a life partner.
We all know that one can be a life-destroyer.
IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOURSELF, YOU CAN’T LOVE YOURSELF
If you don’t know yourself you can’t love yourself because you can’t love something or somebody you don’t know.
It gets worse.
If you don’t love yourself, you can’t accept love from anyone else. Something inside you will subconsciously push that person away because you KNOW you are loveable.
This stuff doesn’t go away until and unless you address it. I have to use language, words, writing, to reach you and convince you things can be better in your personal and professional life.
You have to use them to be a gold detective of your inner self.
If you read and respond to my words.
The words, the writing, are important to me but they are also important to you if you need my assistance in gaining Self-Knowledge.
Or even if you don’t.
Join me at Self-Knowledge College.
For a FREE consultation, a strategy session, just email me at daleyfrank0@gmail.com
or call me at 905-584-0617.
If you could do it yourself, you would have done it by now.
WRITING 6: YOU
Write to me as I do to you.
I’m with you in this.
-Frank
Contact Info:
daleyfrank0@gmail.com
905-584-0617
4 Steps to Self-Awareness…Free for 3 days!
My book,
How to Know Yourself: 4 Steps to Self-Awareness
… is free on Amazon until August 3rd!
There are four steps to self-awareness which leads to self-knowledge.
They are asked here i the form of questions.
1. What do you want? A detailed rigorous process of exactly what you want at this time. It can change but vagueness does not help. For example, if you say you want to be happy what does that mean?
Ask 50 people and they will all gove different answers.
We want to know what would make YOU happy.
Actually, YOU want to know, don’t you?
2. What do you you need (Not the same thing at all. You might need a car but you don’t need a Maserati!)
What you need doesn’t become clear until later when you take into consideration what your spouse or children want and need too.
3. What are you willing to do get (what you want and need)?
4. (I’ll tell you that inside the book!)
Pick it up when it’s free!
You won’t regret it.
Frank
Is that all there is? No, but you have to dig to get more.
People who are disillusioned with life ask, Is that all there is?
No, but you have to dig to get more.
HOW WOULD WE SPEND LIFE IF WE KNEW OURSELVES BETTER?
IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO DO THAT.
IS THAT ALL THERE IS?
That line became familiar from the Leiber and Stoller song, Is that all there is? sung by Peggy Lee in 1969.
You can watch her sing it HERE.
Do you sometimes ask yourself, Is that all there is?
The lyrics of this song are written from the point of view of a person who is disillusioned with events in life that are supposedly unique experiences.
The singer tells of witnessing her family’s house on fire when she was a little girl, seeing the circus, and falling in love for the first time.
After each memory she expresses her disappointment in the experience. She suggests that we “break out the booze and have a ball – if that’s all there is”, instead of worrying about life.
She explains that she’ll never kill herself because she knows that death will be a disappointment as well.
YIKES!
THE SOPRANOS’ DAVID CHASE AND THE QUESTION
The Sopranos’ creator, David Chase, was interviewed about the ambiguous ending of his TV series.
He got philosophical about it.
“I think death very seldom comes to people the way the think it’s going to. And the spiritual question would be: “Is that all there is?”
Which is the question we all have to ask ourselves.
Well, all right, we DON’T have to ask it but not asking results in a complete waste of our lives.
How is it going?
If you would like to know yourself better, so that you could make better decisions about yourself, FOR yourself, email me at: daleyfrank0@gmail.com and we’ll schedule a FREE strategy session.
Register —FREE–at Self-Knowledge College for much more info about YOU!
-Frank
Do you find self? Create self? And what’s the point?
FIND SELF OR CREATE IT?
MANY EXPERTS ADVISE US TO “FIND OURSELVES.”
WHY? What’s the point?
The point is you make better choices in life, better decisions about yourself because you know who you are and what you want.
DO WE FIND SELF OR CREATE IT?
There seems to be confusion, though, about whether we find ourselves (the self having already been created) or whether we create ourselves –from whatever is inside us and whatever we add throughout life.
Both philosopher, Thomas Szasz, and writer, George Bernard Shaw, say
“The self is not something one finds: it is something one creates.”
What?
S#*!
Many wise guys coming to opposite conclusions?
If they can’t agree –what chance do WE have of figuring this stuff out?
No wonder people never get to know themselves, I can hear you saying.
The experts can’t even get it straight!
“Find yourself” say some.
“No, You don’t find yourself, you create yourself,” say others.
That sounds like a contradiction. But it isn’t.
We CAN talk about finding our true selves if we use the term FINDING to mean we go deep inside ourselves to discover our natural gifts.
The ones that have the capacity to be identified and nurtured.
When you find your gifts (that is, RECOGNIZE them)…(and I can teach you how to do this later) …you then CREATE your SELF from them.
Your abilities, talents and gifts will tell you what your self is.
You can discover them now even if you don’t already know what they are.
Then you USE them to CREATE your SELF.
We are all unique in our human make-up, in our essence, even if we do not see it.
Other people will see it though.
Other people DID see it.
Your friends, teachers, relatives saw it in you when you were little.
- Maybe those people did not nurture those things that make you unique.
- Maybe they were preoccupied with their own problems.
- Maybe they weren’t good at noticing these things.
- Maybe they weren’t smart enough
- Maybe they were jealous.
Who the hell knows?
And now, who cares.
Well, actually WE both care. You and I.
We’re not going to be victims and mope around about it.
You probably (at least partially) recognized your true gifts too but maybe you weren’t paying attention either.
Why do you think you start wanting to do weird stuff when you get to be 30 or 35 or 40?
- Stuff you’ve never done before–like playing a musical instrument or learning a language or reading about math?
- Or picking up something that you vaguely remember liking to do when you were a kid.
- Or starting to do something that intrigued the hell out of you when you were younger but somehow never had the time or the courage to try then?
We CAN go into this deeply (and if you stay with me we will).
And you’ll HAVE to do some deep work to some degree, even if it’s just to figure out how the hell you missed all the obvious signs that indicated you were an amazing creature.
- Even if somebody did point these gifts out to you but you ignored their observations.
- Even if you have failed to recognize your gifts.
- Or abandoned them.
- Or traded them for what you thought was shiny gain, or easy opportunity.
- Or wrong-headed self-sacrifice.
(There’s a lot of THAT going on out there!)
The potential is still there.
So “finding yourself” or “creating yourself.”
Call it whatever you like.
If you want to be happy, you still have to do it.
If you are not a subscriber, you can begin by getting my eBook,
FOUR QUESTIONS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
It’s FREE
You can also get a free consultation with me on any problem that might be driving you nuts.
If you have a problem with time management, personal goals, choosing a career path, the inability to choose a life partner (maybe you consistently date the wrong people) or any other troublesome area, you can help solve it with self-knowledge and I can teach you how to do that.
For a 20 minute– FREE— introduction, please email me: daleyfrank0@gmail.com.
I’ll be with you.
In the meantime, sign up to Self-Knowledge College for much more information about YOU!
-Frank
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