Do you feel like you’re wandering through life with no sense of direction? Are you wondering how to find yourself?
Whether you feel lost yourself in a relationship, a career, a bad habit, or simply feel lost in life in general, you are not alone. All of us feel lost at some point in our lives. And we need time to explore ourselves.
Just because you don’t have a purpose in life doesn’t mean that you’re a failure or that you are incapable of finding your true self through the good and the bad. It just means that you are moving through a messy and beautiful process of transformation.
Put Yourself First
In February of 2017, my entire life was turned upside down. Literally.
A bad motorcycle accident left me with a brain injury. I had “lost” myself 10 years earlier when I fractured my back in a car accident. Doctors told me that I had a traumatic brain injury (TBI)—a disruption in the normal function of the brain that can be caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head, or a penetrating head injury. They didn’t know if I would be able to walk again.
But I survived, rehabilitated myself, and kept moving forward with my life. I guess you could say that my “bounce-back-ability” was strong.
Unfortunately, I didn’t do the deep inner work to heal the post-traumatic stress that the accident caused.
The thing about trauma is that it likes to store itself in your body. If you don’t deal with it, it comes back to slap you in the face when you experience an emotion or event that triggers the pain you once felt.
For years, I had tried my best to create distance from the emotions, thoughts, and bodily symptoms that I experienced from my first accident. I wanted to avoid my emotional pain at all costs, so I threw myself back into work and life.
What I didn’t realize is that ignoring bad memories actually makes them worse. Research shows that sometimes when we experience trauma, all of our energy and mental resources turn toward stuffing the memories down into the basement of our awareness. We attempt to avoid reminders and “move on” with life.
I had survived, and I thought that was enough for me. However, this proved to be wrong. Ultimately, I realized that I had to lose myself in order to find myself again.
How did I do it? Through movement, which became my medicine and my therapy.
Because trauma is stored in the body, releasing it must involve the body. By connecting with my body intelligence, I have become more mindful of what my mind, body, and soul need on a daily basis.
I’ve learned how to become a master of my emotions (which is still a work in progress), and even more importantly, I listen to what I need and protect my boundaries.
Losing myself allowed me to get back in touch with my body and come home to myself. I believe that all of us have the power to transform our mess into our message. It starts with embracing vulnerability and having the courage to show up and be seen, even when you have no control over the outcome.
Life is lived in the mess. If you aren’t in the arena, getting your butt kicked from time to time and figuring out how to find myself, you’re not living.
What It Means to Find Yourself
Finding yourself is an unselfish process that is at the heart of everything you do in your life. To become the best version of yourself to the world around you, you need to start by knowing who you are, what you value, and what you need to offer.
It is a personal journey that every individual should take. It involves breaking down the layers that don’t serve you in your life and don’t reflect who you truly are. Apart from that, it also involves a huge act of building up to recognize who you want to become and focusing on fulfilling your destiny.
You need to be open to recognizing your personal power and also be vulnerable to your experience. It is not something that you should avoid or fear. Instead, you should seek it out with the passion and curiosity that you would have toward a new friend.
4 Easy Ways to Find Yourself
More than a million people across the world think that finding themselves is a self-centered goal. However, it’s one of the most unselfish processes that will help you become a better person.
Finding yourself is not difficult as long you know what you need to do and take action. Most people across the world tend to procrastinate when it comes to finding themselves. Yet, this is one of the key determinants of the quality of their lives.
You need to start by making sense of your past. To understand yourself and how you behave the way you do, you need to know your unique story. Being willing to explore your past is one of the best paths to take if you want to understand yourself and the person you want to be.
The attitude and environment that you grew up in greatly affect how you think and behave as an adult.
Early life experiences determine how you see and defend yourself. For instance, being raised by a harsh parent could be making you feel guarded. And this will stop you from trying new challenges as you’ll fear being ridiculed by others.
To break away from this behavioral pattern, you should always be ready to look for self-destructive or self-limiting tendencies.
Another easy way to find yourself is by silencing your critical inner voice and negative thoughts. This destructive process can be a judgmental attitude that tells you how you are not the ideal person to succeed or you don’t deserve the good things in life.
When you recognize and face this huge enemy, you’ll learn how to find your true self and know your abilities and strengths.
If you want to discover who you truly are, you have to be okay with getting lost. Here are 4 simple steps that you can use to heal your inner world and find yourself when you feel lost in life.
1. Unplug to Connect to Yourself
In a society where we are constantly engaged with multiple forms of technology such as social media, it’s easy to feel disconnected from yourself.
Modern technology allows us to connect to anyone in the world whenever we want. It has become a tool through which we can obtain endless amounts of knowledge in a second. Unfortunately, it has also caused us to become more disconnected from ourselves, one another, and life in general.
Computer and communication technology gives us “virtual” reality which means “almost like or very similar to, but not quite the same as.” In this way, technology has become an escape from the realities of life for a long time.
Have you ever done a digital detox for one day, one week, or even one month? Do you feel anxious thinking about it?
Unplugging isn’t just about disconnecting from the digital world. Rather, it’s about spending time on your mental health and focusing on what is important to YOU
I encourage you to make it a daily practice of switching off mentally and emotionally from all forms of technology, even if it’s just for one hour. Remove all distractions and pay attention to your environment and others.
This will help you find the quietness that feels good to you and allows you to go inward in a way that nourishes your mind, body, and soul.
2. Take Big Risks
Get real with yourself: are you playing it too safe right now? Any time that I’ve stayed within the boundaries of my comfort zone for too long, I find myself feeling bored and uninspired.
The biggest reason that so many people are unhappy is that they choose mediocrity over risk. They go with the safe and practical route because they don’t want to shake the boat.
The status quo is a much safer option. In fact, by nature, we seek it out. This idea is supported by advances in brain imaging technology which now verifies that we are wired to be risk-averse.
Unfortunately, playing it safe gets you nowhere. In my experience, this is the quickest way to feel lost in life, and it’s not the way to learn how to find yourself.
If life were always predictable, you would never change. Hence, you would never grow.
Change is the only constant in life. If you aren’t willing to ride the change train, you will get left behind. Being uncomfortable is the only way that we learn who we are and who we are not. That’s how we become the best versions of ourselves.
There will always be someone who doesn’t agree with your path in life. No matter what you do or say, there will be opinions and judgments. It’s up to you whether or not you get plugged into them.
People get into trouble when they start allowing other people to dictate the direction of their lives. If you want to learn how to find yourself, don’t let anybody tell you that the things you desire in life are too extravagant or unreachable. Staying true to who you are involves staying in your own lane and defining your own self-worth.
In the words of the late great, Steve Jobs:
“Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
When we begin to suppress our dreams, we take the first step into being comfortable with less than what we really want in life.
Don’t be afraid to take a risk and dream big. The only person that is holding you back is you, so get out of your own way.
Even the most successful in this world were ridiculed for their lofty goals and dreams. Did that stop them? No, and it’s not going to stop you either.
4. Challenge Your Internal Narrative
If you want to change your life and create a healthy relationship with yourself, you’ve got to start challenging your internal narrative. If you are constantly saying, “I’m lost” or “I’m unfixable,” that is exactly what you will continue attracting into your life.
Your inner talk correlates with your brain’s “default mode network” (DMN). The DMN is the root of your ceaseless “story of me.” It’s the part of you that’s always worrying about what might happen and what others might be thinking.
When you feel lost in life, it can be easy to get stuck in a mindset where you allow yourself to be comfortable with things that don’t make you fulfilled. If you fall into the trap of identifying as “lost” for too long, you might find yourself accepting this reality.
What does your inner voice sound like? If it’s negative, the good news is that you can reprogram disempowering belief systems that have kept you stuck in one place as you learn how to find yourself.
I encourage you to recite daily affirmations to remind yourself that your position in life is not permanent. With regards to reducing negative thoughts, affirmations have been shown to help with the tendency to linger on negative experiences for too long.
When you are able to replace negative internal messages with more positive ones, you can create a more empowering narrative about who you are and what you can accomplish.
Try to repeat the following phrase after you wake up tomorrow morning:
“I am not lost. I am on a journey of transformation.”
If this doesn’t resonate with you, make up your own affirmation and repeat it throughout the day whenever you feel lost.
It can be quite difficult to comprehend how your journey will look like. However, you can try figuring out how you want it to feel. How do you want to feel regularly?
You need to identify all the positive emotions that you want to feel and because they’ll help in guiding you to achieve your goal. Having such a goal in mind will motivate you during the days when you don’t feel like working towards your objective. Keep on keeping on because every day, you are closer to reaching your goals and dreams.
Final Thoughts
No matter how hard life gets, remember that losing yourself doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It means re-evaluating what is important to you.
It’s an opportunity to start a new chapter in your epic life and create whatever you want. Spending time alone and doing what you love is one of the best ways to understand yourself. As Henry David Thoreau said:
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
