4 Ways To Strengthen Personal Identity

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How strong is your personal identity or your appreciation of your inner qualities? This is a critical question we ought to be able to answer with confidence and strength. As life changes or throws us a curveball, appreciation of our inner qualities can help navigate us through difficulty and uncertainty. That’s why such self-understanding is so important. Let’s pick apart the question in order to gain a deeper awareness of ourselves.

How strong is your personal identity or your appreciation of your inner qualities? Well, ask yourself this—before your job, your income, your spouse or fiancé, your kids—would you still be able to appreciate yourself for who you really are? Do you fully embrace the fact that you are kind, loving, honest, helpful, funny and/or other trait(s)?

If you find your overall appreciation wavering day in and day out (not your temporary mood), you might need to reflect on values that you truly care about and hold onto these. To name a few values, there is humility, honesty, and dependability. Strong values often form the basis of your greatest inner qualities. Now you name the values you hold dear to you.

Alternatively, you might need to be reminded of your greatest inner qualities. Listening to friends, family and other acquaintances who might casually describe the impact you have on others can help. If you think they may be biased, think again. They are the ones who know your worth.

For parents, getting kids to engage in activities that help channel and build positive inner qualities is a great way to build confidence early on. For example, if you want your kids to gain and appreciate self-discipline as an inner quality, you can encourage them to start exercising. Possibly join a sport. Joining a sport with a friend from school can help them even learn how to build social networks outside of school. Being able to socialize effectively is an innate quality that can help develop better quality relationships for life. Ultimately, participating in rewarding activities will help kids develop self-esteem, appreciate and likely engage their inner qualities for the rest of their lives.

As adults, if we affix a job, a relationship, or an income to our personal identity, we fall short of truly valuing ourselves. The greater part of society tells us to value monetary goods such as a house or car—or materialistic goods such as a fancy dress—or aesthetics such as our looks—and forget about personal values. The more we grow up, the more we might feel we need these ‘goods’ to satisfy our egos. Try and keep yourself in tune with your inner qualities by building from the inside out. Not from the outside in.

Finally, we can learn about ourselves from life experience. For example, we might fail an exam or lose a job. In this case, doing better on the next exam or finding a new job will help us appreciate our strength to rise from difficulty and applaud personal effort. Our appreciation of our innate qualities over time can be strengthened through success or difficulty.

Altogether, there are at least four ways (described above) to strengthen appreciation of your inner qualities:

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1) Reflection

2) Reminders from friends, family or other audience (i.e. seeing our positive impact on others)

3) Engaging in Rewarding Activities

4) Life Experience

Overall, the greater our appreciation of our qualities, the greater our confidence to truly face life. Temporary sadness or other difficult emotions will arise, but your foundation will be the strongest it can be to go through these emotions.

This article has been published originally on The Huffington Post Contributor’s platform and on Gratitude Circle’s website.

Source/Credit for Photo Above: https://newdaynewyou.files.wordpress.com