This is a question we first ask ourselves when we are standing on children’s legs. We get different characteristics ascribed to how we are: rather loud, rather quiet, creative, rebellious, good in math or languages – different qualities that distinguish us from others.
When we get older, especially in adolescence, this is a central task to deal with, to answer the question: Who am I? What makes me who I am? Where do I want to go? What am I good at? What are things I like to do? What are things I don’t like to do? Which values are important to me?
The answers we find are not the same as when we were children and change later in life too. This is because we experience different things in life: Relationships, challenges we face – and this in turn shapes our image of who we are.
In the past, people thought that a person is the way he or she was born. Later we realized that our image of who we are changes. It changes throughout our whole life. We are life-long learners and our brain can be trained like a muscle. And with that, of course, we discovered the possibility that we can actively help shape our self-image. By helping to shape what experiences we have in life. By choosing, for example, what kind of relationships we enter into, what kind of challenges we face or don’t face. Through this, we have different experiences.
Example: dancing.
I have said all my life that I’m too tensed and therefore I can’t dance. As a result, I never even tried. With my belief or conviction that I can’t dance, I made the decision that I don’t want to dance, because I did’t want to blame myself. With this decision I took away the possibility to have the experience that I can dance. That means I didn’t challenge myself there. Until the time I decided that I still wanted to try it, even though I felt I couldn’t. And with that decision, I in turn gave myself the opportunity to experience that I actually can do it anyway. Even though at first I had the feeling I couldn’t. And through this experience I realized that I can actually do it quite well. In other words, the conviction that I can’t dance changed because I challenged myself and tried something new (that couldn’t really be dangerous to me), and then made the experience that I can actually do what I was afraid of before.
Our experiences, or rather our choices, form the foundation of our image of who we are. We are not the situations we experienced before. But more important are the decisions we make now. Often it can also be very important to think about where we want to go and that we also look at our potentials and strengths.
Who am I? I am a creator.
