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
20 ways to identify at-risk students and children
SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING SELF-HARM
Not all at-risk students are at-risk of self-harm or suicide but there are connections and similarities.
And one in five students DO harm themselves.
This is especially true with regard to those suffering from depression and anxiety.
If you or a child of yours is depressed or anxious, be vigilant.
If you need assistance, I may be able to help.
Contact me: daleyfrank0@gmail.com I’ll respond promptly.
WHAT QUALIFIES AS “AT-RISK?”
Before we can help a person in danger, we have to know who they are.
“At-risk” students are generally considered to be those who are in danger of failing or dropping out of school. There are signs to indicate that they are not just in “a phase.”
HOW MANY STUDENTS ARE AT-RISK?
In some places in North America, almost 50% of students fail or drop out at one point or other. Of those who get to college (or university) 30% more change programs and when they do they usually go to another institution.
WHAT KIND OF SCHOOLS ARE THEY IN?
Almost any kind: certainly high school, college and university. Even grade school children are at risk if they show indications such as the ones below.
HOW CAN YOU TELL WHO IS AT-RISK?
Parents sometimes find it difficult to discern serious trouble from normal teen-age behavior.
No surprise there.
But there are many ways you can determine if a student is at-risk academically or otherwise.
THE FIRST THREE WAYS to discover those at-risk
Clearly those with diagnosed emotional, psychological or mental disabilities (ADD, ADHD, autism, etc.) are likely to be at-risk.
So those are the first three ways to tell.
But what of those kids who have not been diagnosed?
Thousands of children with problems are undiagnosed, and even those who are often don’t get the help they require. But aside from those obvious circumstances, how else can parents (and the rest of us) tell?
IF THEY…
4. have failed a semester or a whole year.
5. have been struggling in school for years.
6. have low or dropping grades.
7. have lost interest in school.
8. do not like their current program.
9. have some emotional or psychological problem.
10. have weak academic skills and won’t acknowledge it.
11. do not know how to be a successful student.
OR THEY…
12. “hate” school.
13. are cutting or otherwise harming themselves
14. are suffering from depression.
15. are suffering from anxiety
16. think they are not smart enough for college or university.
17. want to work instead of going to school because they feel so bad.
18. want to change schools or programs but not be able to tell their parents about how they feel because they do not want to disappoint them.
19. can’t speak to their parents about any of this but you can see there is something wrong.
Then they are at risk.
20. if she is sad or unhappy.
IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM
There are many other ways that young people can indicate they are in trouble academically–we’ll get to them in this series– but right now we have to be able to tell who is in danger before we can help him or her.
PARENTS NEED GUIDELINES
Parents need some guidelines. Often a parent who mentions something will get jumped on by the kid: you are interfering or babying or “It’s none of your business” or, “I’m fine!” Or, “leave me alone!”
But, you can’t solve a problem without identifying it.
IF YOUR CHILD IS SHOWING ANY OF THE SIGNS IN THE LISTS ABOVE, THEN SHE OR HE IS AT-RISK.
DO THEY KNOW THEY HAVE A PROBLEM?
Sure, they know. And so do you.
They are having trouble in school and that leads to problems with parents, peers and themselves. They are disappointed in themselves. They are also confused and frightened.
However, knowing you have a problem doesn’t mean you can identify it, let alone solve it. That’s what I can help them do.
LEAVING SCHOOL CAN BE A GOOD IDEA BUT NOT USUALLY
Leaving school and going to work is a good idea--under certain circumstances–but I’m not referring to people or situations like that right now.(We will get to it.) I’m talking about young people who would benefit from school, who are smart, who should be in (some kind of) school, but are drifting away, losing interest, getting frustrated and depressed.
- If you are a student, you know who you are.
- If you are a parent or guardian of someone like this, you know it. This is a serious problem.
I can help you if you are a student or a parent.
Visit Dropout to Dean’s List.
For faster action, Email me for a FREE information and strategy session.
daleyfrank0@gmail.com
-Frank
P.S. If you have known about this problem for some time–or at least suspected something–then isn’t it time you did something about it?
It doesn’t have to end this way. This is either your life or your child’s.
Let me help you.
A FREE half-hour strategy session is an email away.
daleyfrank0@gmail.com
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
20 Personal Questions! An Introduction To You
If you want to know yourself better, here are 20 questions you can ask yourself.
They are representative, not exhaustive.
There are many more questions but this is a blog post!
Learn your strengths and weakness in all areas but focus on your strengths.
YOUR GIFTS AND TALENTS
Your gifts, attributes, loves, talents, and strengths are evident in early childhood. They may not have been recognized appropriately but they were evident to observant people. If your gifts and talents have been missed, they are dormant. They are still there, but you have to identify them before you can do anything with them. Abilities and talents are like muscles, they atrophy if they are not used.
Did your abilities get developed or do they still need to be? Your gifts and talents are a given. You have them when you are born. Whether they develop or not is a function of the family, society, education, and training that allows you to develop skills and abilities in the areas of your talents and gifts. The inherent ability is there to play the flute but you have to study it and practice in order to develop that talent. Everyone is creative but if that creativity is squashed and not nourished, it will atrophy.
Millions of people take up sports and the arts when they retire. Things they always wanted to do but never could because of life’s limitations. Some of these things could have been life works but not if they were never acknowledged or trained.
Creativity also gets thwarted because people don’t recognize it outside the customary boundaries. Everyone acknowledges that the arts are creative but most people don’t recognize or other fields as being creative.
BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE CREATIVE TOO
You rarely hear of businessmen being praised for being creative yet good business people must be creative all the time in order to survive, never mind thrive. Years ago intelligence meant simply IQ (intelligence quotient) and it meant intellectual ability only, that is, essentially traditional ‘school smarts.’ But there are many more kinds of intelligence.
Psychologist Gardner, in his book Multiple Intelligences, has identified nine types ranging from musical and logical-mathematical to spatial and interpersonal. Refer to his work on the net and see where more of your unidentified or unrecognized talents lie.
People are usually much better at saying what they are not good at than what they are good at. I’m asking you to be excellent at recognizing what you are good at! It’s also sometimes easier to figure out what you are not than what you are. And it may be easier to determine what you don’t want than what you do. It might even be that you don’t know what you are until you know what you are not. It might be that you won’t know what you want until you know what you don’t want.
This is helpful only to a limited degree.
If, for example, I ask you what countries you do not want to visit and you name 10 or 20 you still have not learned anything much about which countries you would like to visit. Still, it can be a useful exercise.
You might say you don’t want to visit a country with a cold climate which suggests you prefer warm or temperate ones. It narrows the field somewhat.
We can come at the problem of determining what we want and are good at by asking and answering questions from both the positive and the negative sides.
Please be free, creative, and truthful in this exercise.
There are only 19 questions but the information you get will be extremely helpful to you. And you will immediately see what other kinds of questions will present themeless to you
I can help you with that.
Be specific in all your answers. Let’s start at the beginning, in childhood.
We’ll take sports and the arts to start.
1.What did you love to do?
2.What games did you like to play?
3. Did you like playing with friends?
4. Playing alone?
5. Did you like sports or not?
6. Were you good at them or not?
7. Which sports did you play?
8. Which ones did you play well?
9. Which ones did you love even though you may not have excelled at them?
10. Why did you like them?
11. Did you like Reading?
12 What arts did you like and explore?
13. Art? (Painting, drawing sculpting)?
14. Acting?
15. Dancing?
16. Other arts?
17. Were you good at them or not?
18. Which ones did you love even though you may not have excelled at them?
19. Why did you like them?
20. What question would you ask of yourself?
These questions are the tip of the iceberg.
To find out more about yourself and your talents, gifts and abilities and how you can develop them and use them in your life, come to Self-Knowledge College.
It’s the beginning of your education of your real self.
I’ll have a course soon called Secrets of Success Through Self-Knowledge.
If you would like to be on the advance information list, just email me daleyfrank0@gmail.com
You’ll learn more than you ever thought possible about you!
-Frank